“You fool, do you think to bandy words with me? You will speak or by heaven you will die the death of a traitor.”
“I need not fear to follow where so many of my brave comrades have shown the way,” I answered steadily.
“Bah! You deal in heroics. Believe me, this is no time for theatricals. Out with it. When did you last see Charles Stuart?”
“I can find no honourable answer to that question, sir.”
“Then your blood be on your own head, fool. You die to-morrow morning by the cord.”
“As God wills; perhaps to-morrow, perhaps not for fifty years.”
While I was being led out another prisoner passed in on his way to judgment. The man was Captain Roy Macdonald.
“I’m wae to see you here, lad, and me the cause of it by sending you,” he said, smiling sadly.
“How came they to take you?” I asked.
“I was surprised on the beach just after Murdoch left,” he told me in the Gaelic so that the English troopers might not understand. “All should be well with the yellow haired laddie now that the warning has been given. Are you for Carlisle, Kenneth?”