“You see that great rugged hole in the wall, half-way up the front of the castle?” he said, pointing to it. “The hole looks almost like a window, but it is a breach made by the cannon known as Mons Meg, now to be seen at Edinburgh Castle. The piece of artillery was made by a blacksmith and his sons at Buchan, and was used by the king in his operations against Threave. The charge consisted of a peck of gunpowder and a granite ball the weight of a Carsphairn cow. The first discharge produced a panic among the inmates of the castle, and the second shot went through the walls and carried away the right hand of the Countess, the celebrated Fair Maid of Galloway, as she sat at table in the banqueting hall about to raise a wine cup to her lips. The garrison quickly surrendered, and the blacksmith was granted the forfeited lands of Mollance and Barncrosh.”
“Curious?” I remarked. “Only a legend, I suppose?”
“Not at all—a historical fact. As late as 1841 Mr Gordon of Greenlaw, tenant of this island, discovered an immense granite ball which, on examination, was found to be a bullet, in all respects the same as those belonging to Mons Meg, while a massive gold ring inscribed ‘Margaret de Douglas’ was discovered by a workman employed to clear out some rubbish when the castle was repaired as a barrack for French prisoners. This was the actual ring supposed to have been on the hand of the Fair Maid of Galloway when it was blown away at the siege.”
Such discovery caused hope to arise within us. I exchanged glances with Wyman, and saw that he considered this additional evidence that treasure might be hidden beneath that turf on which we were lounging.
Presently we all rose to rejoin the party, and again Walter and I managed to separate ourselves from the rest and strolled around the small marshy island.
It was ten minutes past three, and the sun, still shining brightly, cast a long, straight, sharply defined shadow in the direction of the broad river and the high land of Greenlaw. The great square tower was higher on the eastern angle than the western, therefore from its position to the sun the eastern angle threw a longer shadow, which, together, we followed through the grass-grown ditch which was once the fosse and up the bank, then, counting forty-three paces, we halted at a spot covered with nettles or grass.
“The starting point for measurements must be somewhere here. Fifty-six paces with the face toward Bengairn,” I remarked. “I’m no astronomer; but I suppose that, on the date mentioned, the shadow will be more to eastward or to westward. We will, at any rate, mark this spot,” and, finding a piece of broken hurdle, used some time or other to pen in cattle which had grazed on the island, I stuck it deeply in the ground just at the farthermost point of the great oblong shadow across the grass.