“Ay, there was. But he’s oot noo.”
“Where is he?”
“He’ll na’ get forward the night,” continued the man. “Ane of the horse is lame. He cursin’, ma lord, an’ nae wonder—he can curse bonnie! Robieson’s got his wee laddie wi’ him, and he gar’d the loonie put his hands to his lugs. He’s an elder, ye see.”
The judge turned to his brother. It was not the first time that the ford in the Den of Balnillo had been the scene of disaster, for there was an unlucky hole in it, and the state of the roads made storm-bound and bedraggled visitors common apparitions in the lives of country gentlemen.
“If ye’ll come wi’ me, ma lord, ye’ll hear him,” said the labourer, to whom the profane victim of the ford was evidently an object of admiration.
Balnillo looked down at his silk stockings and buckled shoes.
“I should be telling the lasses to get a bed ready,” he remarked hurriedly, as he re-entered the house.
James was already throwing his leg across the fence, though it was scarcely the cursing which attracted him, for he had heard oaths to suit every taste in his time. He hurried across the grass after the labourer. The night was not very dark, and they made straight for the ford.
The Den of Balnillo ran from north to south, not a quarter of a mile from the house, and the long chain of miry hollows and cart-ruts which did duty for a high road from Perth to Aberdeen plunged through it at the point for which the men were heading. It was a steep ravine filled with trees and stones, through which the Balnillo burn flowed and fell and scrambled at different levels on its way to join the Basin of Montrose, as the great estuary of the river Esk was called. The ford lay just above one of the falls by which the water leaped downwards, and the dense darkness of the surrounding trees made it difficult for Captain Logie to see what was happening as he descended into the black well of the Den. He could distinguish a confusion of objects by the light of the lantern which his brother’s men had brought and set upon a stone; the ford itself reflected nothing, for it was churned up into a sea of mud, in which, as Logie approached, the outline of a good-sized carriage, lying upon its side, became visible.