[CHAPTER XXXI]
BESS LANDSBOROUGH'S CATECHISM
As he went his unshod feet sometimes rasped on the sharp edges of slaty rocks, and anon trod with a pleasantly tickling sensation on the shaggy bull's-fell of the inland heather. Wat drew his breath instinctively shorter and more anxiously, not so much from any increased consciousness of danger as because he knew that at last he trod the isle whereon his love lay asleep, all unconscious of his living presence so near her.
Climbing steadily, he surmounted the steep slope, and came to the angle of the castle wall. Here Wat peered stealthily round. A fire of peat, nearly extinct, smoked sulkily in front of an arched doorway which led underneath the masonry, and stretched out with his bare feet towards it, and barring all passage into the vault, lay a gigantic Highlander with a naked claymore by his side. It was Alister McAlister on guard over his prisoner.
Wat drew back. "Surely," he thought, "it cannot be in this morose dungeon that they have shut my love?"
At the thought he grasped the dagger which was his sole weapon, and glanced at the prostrate form of the unconscious sentinel, with the tangled locks thrown back from the broad brow.
"Never yet did Wat Gordon slay a sleeping man," he muttered, somewhat irresolutely, and took a backward step to consider the matter. But at that instant a thick plaid was thrown over his head and he was pulled violently to the ground. Limber Wat twisted like an eel and struck at his assailant with his dagger. But a hand clasped his arm and a voice whispered in his ear, "Down with your blade, man. I am a friend. If ye love Kate McGhie, you endanger both her life and yours by the least noise."
The plaid was unwound from about his head, and in the dim light Wat could see that he stood beside the door of a cabin, so low as hardly to be distinguishable from the bowlders upon the moor, being as shapelessly primitive and turf-overgrown as they. Beside him crouched a woman of middle age, apparently tall and well-featured.
"Wheest, laddie," she whispered, "hae ye the heart o' gowd that the lassie left for ye wi' that daft hempie, Mehitabel Smith?"
Wat slipped the love-token from under his shirt and let the woman touch it. It was chill and damp with the crossing of the salt strait.
"Aye, lad, surely ye are the true lover, and Bess Landsborough is no' the woman to wrang ye," said the wife of Alister. "But mind ye, there are mony dangers yet to encounter. Your friend that was casten oot o' your bit boatie among the Bores o' the Suck is safe-warded yonder in the tower, and that is my man Alister that ye swithered whether to put your gully-knife intil or no."