Having conducted Quentin and Peter to the secret place where his friends were hidden, McCubine was asked anxiously, by the former, if he knew anything about the Wilsons.
“Ay, we ken this,” answered Gordon, “that although the auld folk have agreed to attend the curates for the sake o’ peace, the twa lassies have refused, and been driven out o’ hoose an’ hame. They maun hae been wanderin’ amang the hills noo for months—if they’re no catched by this time.”
Hearing this, Quentin sprang up.
“We maun rescue them, Peter,” he said.
“Ay,” returned the boy. “Jean Black will expect that for Aggie’s sake; she’s her bosom freend, ye ken.”
Refusing to delay for even half an hour, the two friends hurried away. They had scarcely left, and the six hunted men were still standing on the road where they had bidden them God-speed, when Bruce with his dragoons suddenly appeared—surprised and captured them all. With the brutal promptitude peculiar to that well-named “killing-time,” four of them were drawn up on the road and instantly shot, and buried where they fell, by Lochenkit Moor, where a monument now marks their resting place.
The two spared men, Gordon and McCubine, were then, without reason assigned, bound and carried away. Next day the party came to the Cluden Water, crossing which they followed the road which leads to Dumfries, until they reached the neighbourhood of Irongray. There is a field there with a mound in it, on which grows a clump of old oak-trees. Here the two friends were doomed without trial to die. It is said that the minister of Irongray at that time was suspected of favourable leanings toward the Covenanters, and that the proprietor of the neighbouring farm of Hallhill betrayed similar symptoms; hence the selection of the particular spot between the two places, in order to intimidate both the minister and the farmer. This may well have been the case, for history shows that a very strong and indomitable covenanting spirit prevailed among the parishioners of Irongray as well as among the people of the South and West of Scotland generally. Indeed Wodrow, the historian, says that the people of Irongray were the first to offer strenuous opposition to the settlement of the curates.
When Gordon and McCubine were standing under the fatal tree with the ropes round their necks, a sorrowing acquaintance asked the latter if he had any word to send to his wife.
“Yes,” answered the martyr; “tell her that I leave her and the two babes upon the Lord, and to his promise: ‘A father to the fatherless and a husband to the widow is the Lord in His holy habitation.’”
Hearing this, the man employed to act the part of executioner seemed touched, and asked forgiveness.