The Grey Man

by S. R. Crockett

For without a word of preamble, warning or speech-making, John Mure of Auchendrayne (he in the cloak of grey) cried out, 'Have at them! Slay them every one! 'Tis now too late for whimsies. It is our lives for theirs if we do not.'

So with that the two younger men-at-arms came on, couching their long lances and riding directly at us. I stuck my sword downward by the point, naked in the soft moss at my side, so that I should not have it to draw out of the sheath when it came to the pinch. And for the last time I looked at my pistol priming, and longed horribly for one of my lord's new hackbutts of the French pattern out of the armoury of Cassillis.

But wishing would not bring them or I had had a dozen, each with a good Culzean man behind it, with his finger on the touch. But yet you may depend that my imagination bodied them forth, standing there useless in the press, oiled and burnished, as I had seen them. And all the while the two villains came on.

Now, in a plain place we had had but little chance to stand against them, cumbered with the women as we were; but the peat hag I had chosen for our defence on the edge of the Red Moss favoured us. When, however, I had fired my pistol and made nothing of it, save only the clink of the bullet whizzing off the plate metal, they got time to ride round the main obstruction. Then it had gone hard with us indeed, but that the Dominie Mure, as the horses came forward, blew so sudden a snorting blast upon his pipes, that one of the steeds swerved and stumbled, almost throwing his rider to the ground. Then, ere he had time to recover, the Dominie was upon him with his sword, springing upward and striking like an angry etter-cap ever at the face, so that it took the horseman all his time to defend himself.

The other drave at me full tilt with his long spear, and though I leapt aside from the lance-thrust, I, with only my pistol and sword, had been no better than a dead man at the next turn. But Marjorie Kennedy, giving the bridle reins of both horses to her sister, seized the Dominie's Lochaber axe. She sprang behind the visored man, and, hooking the bent prong in his gorget collar behind, she pulled him down from his horse with a clash of armour. Then, after that, there remained nothing for me to do, but to set my sword to his throat and bid him yield himself.

By this time the frightened horse which had stumbled first became perfectly mad, and turning in spite of all that Thomas of Drummurchie could do, it galloped away with him, belly-to-earth, across the Red Moss.

Then the man in the grey cloak also put his horse to its speed, so soon as he saw how the matter was like to go. For he had kept at a distance and taken no part in the fighting. We were therefore left alone, victorious, without a wound, and with the man in the visor, our prisoner.

He seemed to be stunned with his fall, so Marjorie stooped and undid his laced steel-cap, shelling his head as one shells the husk of a nut from the kernel.

The man whom she revealed was James Mure the younger of Auchendrayne, her wedded husband.

We stood thus some time in wonderment what should be the upshot. Marjorie Kennedy (I cannot while I live call her by any other name) stood looking down at the man to whom in foulest treachery she had been given. Then after a while Nell touched my arm, and lo! on the Moss, there was yet another man on horseback coming towards us. I knew the beast. It was the same on which the Wolf of Drummurchie had ridden. But the man was other than the Wolf.