"No need," said his daughter, hastily. "Diarmid would not wish to draw you into his sons' quarrels and, I think, Stair's band ran a big cargo last night from the Burnfoot Bay. There were twenty preventive men there, they say. Yet they stood aside and let the pack horses go by like men in a dream!"
Adam grew a little paler. He did not like this open defiance of the forces of law and order.
"How was that?" he demanded, "where was the military?"
"There were two hundred lads, all masked and all armed, a hundred pack horses and another hundred to ride upon. What could twenty customs men do with the like of these? Stair Garland left enough good lads to herd them close under the cliff till the Good Intent had her anchor up and the caravan was out of all reach of danger."
This was by far the most serious news Adam Ferris had received for a long time, but there was worse still to come.
"Uncle Julian says I ought to tell you, father," Patsy began with quite unusual gravity, "that when the press-gang went to the Bothy of Blairmore to take the lads of Glenanmays, they found me. I could run much faster than Jean, so I got there first."
Her father grew grey under the olive of his skin. "The men were not insolent?" he asked, for he knew the manners and customs of his Majesty's press in lonely shielings.
"I only saw the officers—Captain Laurence and a naval lieutenant—besides that smooth rascal McClure from Stonykirk!"
Even then Patsy hardly dared tell her father how unconventionally she had been clad, but she plucked up heart and went through with it.
"I ran from the Maidens' Cove at the foot of the Mays glen along the sands, and through the heather. I had Uncle Julian's yellow sandals on my feet and I got there in time for the lads to scatter, though I had started after the boat had passed out of sight round the Black Point."