Near the Tolbooth Sir Robert awaited us, sitting his horse motionless like a man cut out of stone. A sharp word of command, and we reined our horses in, wheeling and forming a line in front of the Tolbooth door. There we waited.
By and by we heard the tramp of horses, and Colonel Winram at the head of his company rode down the other side of the street and halted opposite to us. Winram and Lag dismounted, giving their horses into the charge of their orderlies, and walked together to the Tolbooth door. They knocked loudly, and after a mighty clatter of keys and shooting of bolts the black door swung back, and they passed in. We waited long, but still there was no sign of their return. My neighbour on the right, whose horse was champing its bit and tossing its head in irritation, whispered: "They maun ha'e been reprievit."
"Thank God for that," I said, out of my heart.
But it was not to be. With a loud creak, as though it were in pain, the door swung open, and there came forth, splendid in his robes of office, Sheriff Graham. Followed him, Provost Coltran, Grier of Lag, and Colonel Winram. Behind them, each led by a gaoler, came two women. Foremost was Margaret Lauchlison, bent with age, and leaning on a stick, her thin grey hair falling over her withered cheeks. She did not raise her eyes to look at us, but I saw that her lips were moving silently, and a great pity surged up in my breast and gripped me by the throat. Some four paces behind her came Margaret Wilson, and as she passed out of the darkness of the door she raised her face to the sky and took a long breath of the clean morning air. She was straight as a willow-wand, with a colour in her cheeks like red May-blossom, and a brave look in her blue eyes. Her brown hair glinted in the sunlight, and she walked with a steady step between the ranks of horsemen like a queen going to her coronal. She looked curiously at the troopers as she passed us. I watched her coming, and, suddenly, her big child-like eyes met mine, and for very shame I hung my head.
Some twenty yards from the Tolbooth door, beside the Town Cross, the little procession halted, and the town-crier, after jangling his cracked bell, mounted the lower step at the base of the cross and read from a big parchment:
"God save the King! Whereas Margaret Lauchlison, widow of John Mulligan, wright in Drumjargon, and Margaret Wilson, daughter of Gilbert Wilson, farmer in Penninghame, were indicted on April 13th, in the year of grace 1685 before Sheriff Graham, Sir Robert Grierson of Lag, Colonel Winram, and Captain Strachan, as being guilty of the Rebellion of Bothwell Brig, Aird's Moss, twenty field Conventicles, and twenty house Conventicles, the Assize did sit, and after witnesses heard did bring them in guilty, and the judges sentenced them to be tied to palisadoes fixed in the sand, within the floodmark of the sea, and there to stand till the flood overflows them. The whilk sentence, being in accordance with the law of this Kingdom, is decreed to be carried out this day, the 11th of May in the year of grace 1685. God Save the King."
When he ceased there was silence for a space, and then Grier of Lag, his sword scraping the gravel as he moved, walked up to the older prisoner, and shouted:
"Margaret Lauchlison, will ye recant?"
She raised her head, looked him in the eyes with such a fire in hers that his gaze fell before it, and in a steady voice replied:
"Goodness and mercy ha'e followed me a' the days o' my life, and I'm no' gaun back on my Lord in the hour o' my death,"--and she bowed her head again, as though there was nothing more to be said, but her lips kept moving silently.