"'Tis a lesson to you," said Wat, didactically; "ye will thank me for it one day when ye lie down to die a clean-straw death instead of dancing your last on a gallows, with the lads crying your dying speech beneath your very feet as ye dangle over the Grass-market."
How he won through with bare life Wat never knew; nor yet with what decent householders he had negotiated exchange of horses without their consent. For long years afterwards, whenever Wat was a little feverish, scraps of conversations used to return to him, and forgotten incidents flashed clear upon him, which he knew must have happened during these terrible last days ere, with the homing instinct of a wounded animal chased desperately by the hunters, he reached the little gray tower of Lochinvar set lonely in the midst of its moorland loch. Sometimes on the Edinburgh street in after-years he stumbled unexpectedly on a face he recognized. A countryman newly come into market would set his hands on his hips and stare earnestly up at him. Then Wat would say to himself, "There goes a creditor of mine; I wonder if I gave him a better horse than I took, or if he wants to claim the balance now."
But who in the great lord of Parliament could spy out the white-faced, desperate lad—half-hero, half-highwayman—whose supple sword flashed like the waving of a willow wand, and whose cocked pistol was in his fingers at the faintest hint of opposition?
It was evening of a great, solemn, serene September day when Wat reached the edges of the loch, upon the little island in the midst of which stood the ancestral tower of his forebears. There was no smoke going up from its chimneys. The water slept black from the very margin, deeply stained with peat. The midges danced and balanced; the moor-birds cried; the old owl hooted from the gables; the retired stars twinkled reticently above, just as they had done in Wat's youth. A strange fancy came over him. He had come home from market at Dumfries. Presently his father would cry down to him from his chamber what was the price of sheep on the Plainstones that day, and if that behindhand rascal, Andrew Sim of Gordieston, had paid his rent yet. His mother—
Ah! but wait; he had no father! He had seen his father's head over the port of Edinburgh, and something, he could not remember what, happened after that. Had he not buried his mother in the green kirkyard of Dalry? What, then, had he come home for? There was some one he loved in danger—some one with eyes deep as the depths of the still and gloomy waters that encircled Lochinvar.
Ah, now he remembered—the heart, Kate's heart of gold! It was safe in his bosom. Ten days' grace when he left his cousin Will! But had he ridden five days or fifty? Sometimes it seemed but one day, and sometimes an eternity, since he rode away from Jack Scarlett at the ford above Dunkeld.
What was that noise? An enemy? Wat clutched his sword instinctively. No, nothing more than his poor horse, the last incarnation of his cousin Will's charger, with which he had left the stables of Dunkeld.
The poor beast had tried to drink of the peaty brew of the loch, but what with the fatigue and the rough riding, it had fallen forward, with its nose in the shallows, and now lay breathing out its last in rattling gasps.
Wat stooped and patted the flaccid neck as the spasms relaxed and it rolled to the side.
"Poor thing—poor thing—ye are well away. Maybe there is a heaven for horses also, where the spirit of the beast may find the green eternal pastures, where the rein does not curb and the saddle leather never galls."