"You cannot deceive a desperate man," he said, "nor yet lie to him. Well do I know that this is every bite you have in the world."
"Listen, Wat," said the free-lance. "I have found me a decent woman that has ta'en a liking to me, and she has ta'en me in. I'm weel provided for. Tak' them, laddie, tak' them. Ye will need them mair nor me."
Saying which Scarlett started promptly on the back track to the town, crying as he went: "God speed ye, laddie; I'll never set een on ye mair!"
So with a sob in his throat and a feeling as if he were riding on empty air, Wat Gordon turned the head of the officer's charger (by a strange and fitting chance it was his cousin Will's), and set his chest to the current of the river, at the place where the tracks on the shoaling gravel and the chuckling of the shallow river over its pebbles indicated a ford.
So our true hero, ill, fevered, desperate, in the stark grip with death, started on his almost impossible quest—without an idea or a plan save that he must ride into the blank midnight to save his love, or die for her.
[CHAPTER XLVIII]
THE MASTER COMES HOME
And what in all the annals of romantic adventure could be found more utterly hopeless than Wat Gordon's quest? He was doubly outlawed. For not only had James Stuart proclaimed him outlaw, but he had been out with the enemies of the Prince of Orange, now King William the Third of Great Britain and Ireland. He had fought at Killiekrankie and Dunkeld. He had ridden through all the north country at Dundee's bridle-rein. He was a fugitive from a military prison in the prince's own province of the Netherlands. He possessed but ten golden guineas in the world. His ancestral tower of Lochinvar was little better than a dismantled fortalice. And then as to his quest, he went to seek his love in her home, to rescue her from among her friends, and from the midst of the retainers of her father's estate, and those more numerous and reckless riders who had come with my lady the duchess from the Grenoch. Doubtless, also, my Lord of Barra would bring with him a great attendance of his friends. The chances against Lochinvar's success were infinite. Another man would have given up in despair, but in the mind of Wat Gordon there was only one thought: "She called me and I will go to her. Though I am traitor and outlaw alike to the king-over-the-water and the prince at Whitehall, proscribed alike by white rose and orange lily, I am yet all true to Kate and to love."
The desperate, unutterable details of that great mad journey can never be written down. For even Wat himself, in after-days, scarce remembered how, when one horse was wearied, he managed to exchange it for another and ride on—sometimes salving his conscience by leaving to the owner one of his dwindling golden guineas; or how he was attacked by footpads and escaped, having cut down one and frightened the other into delivering over (in trust, as it were, for King James) every stiver of his ill-gotten gains—poor crazed Wat meanwhile tossing his fevered head and wavering a pistol before the knave's astonished eyes as he bade him stand and deliver.