"Water?"
"As you see!" And he swept his arm largely round the circle of the Wild. "We shall make a filter with a little granite sand (silver sand they call it). After passing it two or three times through this, the peat water will be fairly palatable. At least we shall need to put up with it!" And then Stair communicated to his fellow-prisoner his idea of the defence of the Bothy.
"We do not want to kill any of these men who have been ordered to come and starve us out," he said. "You have your house and your position. It is true that you have killed Lord Wargrove, but if he had not been a friend of the Regent and a confidant of Lyonesse, you might have walked the streets of London after a month or so, and no man would have dreamed of disquieting you. I am in a wholly different case. They are eager to see me hanged, and would not hesitate to make it high treason—"
"High treason only affects the person of the King," said Julian Wemyss; "not that that will help matters much, the Regent's judges being what they are."
"At any rate," said Stair, "killing a blue-jacket or an exciseman will do us no good, and I am for firing blanks except in the very last extremity—of course, if it is our life or that of another man, I think we owe it to ourselves to see that the funeral is the other fellow's!"
Stair Garland slept that night outside, wrapped in his plaid, with Whitefoot crouched in the corner of it. The watcher's back was against the door of the Bothy, the key of which was in his pocket. He was taking care that his ex-spy did not take it into his head to escape the ordeal of the morning.
At daybreak Stair rose to his feet and shook himself comprehensively. His limbs were stiff with the cold and damp. Whitefoot had been alert most of the night. He was unquiet and whined occasionally to himself, but very softly. The fires on the sand-dunes agitated him—perhaps also the unrest of his master, who with his own comfortable bed within a dozen yards, had chosen so incommodious a way of spending the night. Every few minutes Whitefoot aroused himself and paced stealthily round the little hut, his head in the air, sniffing the four winds for information. He tried the black lipping water with his paw and shook it dry again. That also he did not understand. However, he believed that Stair Garland did. The knowledge comforted him and sent him back to the nook of his master's plaid, where he nestled down without turning round, which was perhaps the most wonderful accomplishment of this wonderful dog.
Whether Eben McClure, ex-superintendent of recruitment and common informer, slept well or not during the first night of the investing of the Bothy of the Wild, is known only to himself. He at least pretended to pass an excellent night. The pretence was forced upon him by Stair Garland camping outside, his rifle ready to his hand, and the ceaseless patter of Whitefoot's alert sentry-go going round and round the hut.
By half-past five the day was beginning to come. Stair entered the Bothy, shook Eben by the shoulder and bade him prepare breakfast. Meals must now be taken as occasion served, and the whole business of their daily life would have to be reorganized. For they were now a city in a state of siege.