The Grey Man

by S. R. Crockett

'Boy, do you see yon?' he whispered.

I looked long and eagerly with my unaccustomed eyes, before I could see in the pale moonlight a dark train of horsemen that rode steadily northward. Their line wimpled like a serpent, being pricked out to our sight with little reeling twinkles of fire, which I took to be the moon shining on their armour and the points of their spears.

'See,' said my father, 'yonder goes our good Earl home with the spoil. Would that I were by his side! Why do I live so far among the hills, and out of the call of my chief when he casts his war pennon to the winds?'

We looked all round the castle, and seeing no one, we made shift to get about it and darn ourselves among the heather of the further hillside. But even as we passed the angle and reached a broken part of the wall, there came a trampling of iron-shod hoofs. And lo! a troop of horsemen rode up to the main castle gate, that which looks to the north-west. It was all we could do to clamber out of sight over the broken wall, my father lifting me in his arms. There we lay flat and silent behind a pile of stones, just where the breach had been made—over which we could look into the courtyard and see the splotched causeway and the bodies of the dead lying here and there athwart it in the ruddy light of burning.

Just as the foremost horseman came to the gate, which the riders of Cassillis had left wide open, the roof of red tile fell in with an awesome crash. The flames again sprang high and the sparks soared. Soon all the courtyard was aglow with the red, unsteady leme which the skies gave back, while the moon and stars paled and went out.

'Hist!' whispered my father, 'this is young Bargany himself who comes first.'

I looked eagerly from behind a stone and saw the noblest figure of a young man that ever I saw or shall see, riding on a black horse, sitting framed in the dark of the gateway, the flames making a crimson flicker about him. After a moment's pause he rode within the deserted close, and there sat his horse, looking up sternly and silently at the leaping flames and hearkening as it were to the crackling of the timbers as they burned.

Then another and yet another horseman came riding within, some of whom my father knew.

'See you, Launce, and remember,' he whispered; 'that loon there is Thomas Kennedy of Drummurchie, Bargany's brother. Observe his fangs of the wolf. He of all the crew is the wickedest and the worst.'

I looked forth and saw a gaunt, dark youth, with a short upper lip drawn up from teeth that shone white in the leaping flame which harvested the goodly gear of the house of Ardstinchar.