We stood perfectly passive; for, to have attempted resistance against more than a hundred men, armed with guns, fish-spears, iron-crows, spades, and bludgeons, would have been an act of utter insanity. Mr. Geddes, with his strong sonorous voice, answered the question about the superintendent in a manner the manly indifference of which compelled them to attend to him.
‘John Davies,’ he said, ‘will, I trust, soon be at Dumfries’—
‘To fetch down redcoats and dragoons against us, you canting old villain!’
A blow was, at the same time, levelled at my friend, which I parried by interposing the stick I had in my hand. I was instantly struck down, and have a faint recollection of hearing some crying, ‘Kill the young spy!’ and others, as I thought, interposing on my behalf. But a second blow on the head, received in the scuffle, soon deprived me of sense and consciousness, and threw me into it state of insensibility, from which I did not recover immediately. When I did come to myself, I was lying on the bed from which I had just risen before the fray, and my poor companion, the Newfoundland puppy, its courage entirely cowed by the tumult of the riot, had crept as close to me as it could, and lay trembling and whining, as if under the most dreadful terror. I doubted at first whether I had not dreamed of the tumult, until, as I attempted to rise, a feeling of pain and dizziness assured me that the injury I had sustained was but too real. I gathered together my senses listened—and heard at a distance the shouts of the rioters, busy, doubtless, in their work of devastation. I made a second effort to rise, or at least to turn myself, for I lay with my face to the wall of the cottage, but I found that my limbs were secured, and my motions effectually prevented—not indeed by cords, but by linen or cloth bandages swathed around my ankles, and securing my arms to my sides. Aware of my utterly captive condition, I groaned betwixt bodily pain and mental distress,
A voice by my bedside whispered, in a whining tone, ‘Whisht a-ye, hinnie—Whisht a-ye; haud your tongue, like a gude bairn—ye have cost us dear aneugh already. My hinnie’s clean gane now.’
Knowing, as I thought, the phraseology of the wife of the itinerant musician, I asked her where her husband was, and whether he had been hurt.
‘Broken,’ answered the dame, ‘all broken to pieces; fit for naught but to be made spunks of—the best blood that was in Scotland.’
‘Broken?—blood?—is your husband wounded; has there been bloodshed broken limbs?’
‘Broken limbs I wish,’ answered the beldam, ‘that my hinnie had broken the best bane in his body, before he had broken his fiddle, that was the best blood in Scotland—it was a Cremony, for aught that I ken.’
‘Pshaw—only his fiddle?’ said I.