The Grey Man

by S. R. Crockett

Thus dryshod we marched out of the cave of Sawny Bean, and, as I am a true man, not so much as a dog barked at us. But when we emerged into the grey of a stormy morning and reached the cliff's edge, we heard inland the wild voices of the gang yelling down the wind, as though the furies of fear were still pursuing them and tearing at their vitals. What they expected I know not, but I conceive that they must have taken the Dominie's pipes for whatever particular devil they happened to believe in, come to take them quick to their own place. Which, after all, could not be much worse than the den in which we had seen them at their disport. Nor could all the torturing fiends of lowest hell have been their marrows in devilish cruelty.

CHAPTER XLII

ANE LOCHABER AIX GIED HIM HIS PAIKS

So once more the world was before us, and strangely peaceful it seemed, as if somehow or other we had died in stress and riot and been born again into an uncanny quiet. There remained for us now only the bringing to pass of righteous judgments upon the wicked ones who had compassed and plotted all this terrible tale of evils—these murders without end, these hellish cruelties and death-breeding deceits. For the vengeance must not fall alone on the crazed outlaw and his brood, since the chief criminals were those that were greater and wiser than Sawny Bean and his merciless crew.

It was, as I say, the breaking of a stormy morrow when we faced up the brae, sword in hand, finding none to withstand us, for all had fled before the music of the wild Highland drones. Then in the sustaining quiet I asked the Dominie by what inspiration he had thought of such a mad thing as thus blasting upon the war-pipes.

'Oh it just came to me!' said he, lightly. And with that he wiped his chanter and set the drones under his arm, letting them hang down as though they had been the legs of a lamb which a herd has found on the hill.

But our troubles were not yet over, for we had to pass through many miles of Bargany country ere we could reach our own folk. I proposed to turn landwards, for that, as the crow flies, is the shortest road. But the Dominie denied me, saying that since those cruel monsters of the were-wolfs band had fled that way, the closer we kept to the coast, the safer we should be.

We made, therefore, only such a detour as would enable us to escape the town of Girvan, which was a strength of our foes, and passing by Killochan, a pleasant and friendly tower, well set in a wooded valley with a view of our old strength of Ailsa, we hastened as fast as we could march with the women in our company to Culzean.

Now near by Killochan there was a school and a schoolmaster, the name of him John Guid. He had been for a long season a friend and crony of our Dominie Mure. To him we resorted, or rather the Dominie went alone to seek him, while I abode with Marjorie and Nell. It was over in the afternoon when he came back, and what was our joy to hear behind him the trampling of a pair of hardy ponies, for with the weariness of her terrible quest and the stress of the night in the Cave of Death, Marjorie looked dismally near to her end. And, indeed, I am not sure that Nell was greatly better.

Marjorie had passed some part of the long march in telling us in bits and snatches the tale of her sufferings, her flight and capture, and how by evil and hateful hands she had been flung into the water from off the Heuch of Benerard.