They came to the outlying peat knoll, where an extra supply of fuel had been left under shelter during the previous autumn. Quite half of it still remained, and the "fause-hoose," or cavernous pit left from the digging out of the peats, afforded the best of cover. From it Stair would be able to follow the spy with his rifle all the way to the posts of the Preventive men which had been established on the rising ground above the edge of the Wild. A portable semaphore stiffly flapped its arms as they looked, no doubt signalling their coming to other and more distant posts.
"There," said Stair, "they are all ready for you. Come outside and let us get our bit of a trial over. There is your handkerchief. As soon as you hear the bullets whistle, you can drop. Then turn about and crawl back to me."
"It does not seem to you somewhat cruel—this test?" said Eben McClure, looking wistfully at Stair. It was his only sign of weakness, and there are few who would have shown so little.
"No," said Stair, sternly, "when I think of those lads beaten insensible in the military prisons of your dépôts or bleeding at the triangles—they gave Craig Easton a thousand lashes and he had had eight hundred of them before he died—I think I am letting you off easy. I ought to shoot you myself where you stand. And don't let me think too much about it or I may do it even yet. I am giving you your chance to be an honest man!"
They went together out into the open. Before them a little zigzag of pathway angled intricately among the sullen floods of the morass. The sky was pleasantly shell-tinted overhead. There was the way he must go. Never had life appeared so sweet to the spy.
But he went through his part like a man in a dream. He struggled with Stair Garland, and though he did not hear himself he shouted fiercely as if for life. It was very real indeed. Then suddenly he broke loose and ran down the narrow towpath of dry land between the ink-black pools. He was still shouting. He had forgotten to wave the handkerchief. Then suddenly before him he saw the thorn at the angle of the big elbow.
He longed for the rattle of muskets—either from before or behind. It did not seem to matter much to him now which it was to be. He felt desperate and forlorn, hating everybody—Stair Garland most of all.
"Hist—Skip! Crackle!" came a volley from far away to the north, and Eben cast himself down behind a heather bush to draw breath. They had fired, and he was a proven man. He had faced death to certify his truth to the salt he was eating, and now nothing remained but to withdraw as carefully as might be. He crawled backward, now scuttling from one little rickle of peats left forlornly out on the moor to the next sodden whin bush, the prickles of which yirked him as he threw himself down. Stair kept his word, and from his peatstack delivered a lively fire upon the men in the shelters on the northern hillsides.
Eben was very white when he came back and dropped limp among the peat. Stair said nothing, but for the first time he held out his hand. The spy had become a clean man again, and the same would be known from among all the folk from Nith Brig to the heuchs of the Back Shore of Leswalt. His kin would own him openly. Stonykirk parish was again free to him. Eben knew that he had not paid too dearly for his rehabilitation, for whatever the dangers he had faced or might be called upon to face, they were as nothing to the hate and opprobrium of the whole body of one's own people.