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By three o’clock next afternoon Ewen Cameron was riding fast to Maryburgh to fetch a doctor. Little Keith was really ill, and it was with a sickening pang at his own heart that Ardroy had tried to comfort the now extremely penitent Donald, whom he had found weeping bitterly because Keithie, flushed and panting, had refused the offer of some expiatory treasure or other, had indeed beaten him off pettishly when he attempted to put it into the hot little hand.

Ardroy had to try to comfort himself, too, as he went along Loch Lochy banks, where the incomparable tints of the Northern autumn were lighting their first fires in beech and bracken. Children had fever so easily; it might signify nothing, old Marsali had said. For himself, he had so little experience that he did not know; but Alison, he could see, was terribly anxious. He wished that his aunt, Miss Margaret Cameron, who had brought him up, and still lived with them, were not away visiting; she could have borne Alison company on this dark day. He wished that he himself could have stayed at home and sent a gillie for the doctor, but even one who spoke English might get involved in some difficulty with the military at Fort William, and the message never be delivered. It was safer to go himself.

There was also last night’s unfortunate business with his brother-in-law to perturb him. High-spirited and impulsive as he was, Hector might repent and come back in a day or two, if only for his sister’s sake. Ewen devoutly hoped that he would. For that same sister’s sake he would forgive the young man his wounding words. It was worse to reflect that Hector had evidently mixed himself up in some way with this mad, reprehensible plot against the Elector. And he had averred that Archibald Cameron, of all men, had come or was coming to Scotland on the same enterprise.

Ewen involuntarily tightened his reins. That he did not believe. His respect and affection for Archibald Cameron were scarcely less than those he had borne his elder brother Lochiel himself. Archie had probably come over again to confer with Cluny Macpherson about that accursed Loch Arkaig gold, very likely in order to take some of it back to France with him—a risky business, as always, but a perfectly justifiable one. It was true, as Ewen had told Hector, that Archie purposely avoided coming to Ardroy, though it lay not far from the shores of Loch Arkaig, yet if Doctor Cameron really were in Scotland again Ewen hoped that they should meet somehow. He had not seen his cousin for nearly three years.

On the other hand, if Archie had come over to work in any way for the Cause in the Highlands, there was certainly a good deal of ferment here at present, and a proportionately good chance of fishing in troubled waters. There were ceaseless annoyances of one kind or another; there were the evictions of Jacobite tenants in favour of Whig . . . above all, there was this black business of the Appin murder trial soon to open at Inveraray, the Campbell stronghold, which everyone knew would end in the condemnation of an innocent man by the Campbell jury because the victim of the outrage had been a Campbell. Yes, it might be fruitful soil, but who was to organise a new rising; still more, who was to lead it? There was only one man whom the broken, often jealous clans would follow, and he was far away . . . and some whispered that he was broken too.

Although he was not well mounted (for a good horse was a luxury which he could not afford himself nowadays) Ardroy, thus occupied in mind, found himself crossing the Spean, almost before he realised it, on that bridge of General Wade’s erection which had been the scene of the first Jacobite exploit in the Rising, and of his own daring escape in the summer of ’46. But he hardly gave a thought to either to-day. And, in order to examine one of his horse’s legs, he pulled up at the change-house on the farther side without reflecting that it was the very spot where, six years ago, he had been made to halt, a prisoner with his feet tied together under a sorrel’s belly.

While he was feeling the leg, suspecting incipient lameness, the keeper of the change-house came out; not a Cameron now, but a Campbell protégé, yet a decent fellow enough. Though on the winning side, he too was debarred from the use of the tartan—which was some consolation to a man on the losing.

“Good day to you, Ardroy,” he said, recognising the stooping rider. “You’ll be for Maryburgh the day? Has the horse gone lame on you, then?”

“Hardly that yet,” answered Ewen, “but I fear me there’s a strain or something of the sort. Yes, I am going to Maryburgh, to fetch Doctor Kincaid. Can I do aught for you there, MacNichol?”

“Dhé! ye’ll not find the doctor at Maryburgh,” observed the other. “He’s away up Loch Treig side the day.”

“Loch Treig!” exclaimed Ewen, dismayed. “How do you know that, man?—and are you very sure of it?”

MacNichol was very sure. His own wife was ill; the doctor had visited her that same morning, and instead of returning to Maryburgh had departed along the south bank of the Spean—the only practicable way—for a lonely farm on Loch Treig. It was of no use waiting at the change-house for his return, since he would naturally go back to Maryburgh along the shorter road by Corriechoille and Lianachan. There was nothing then to be done but ride after him. MacNichol did not know how far along Loch Treig was the farm to which the doctor had gone, but he did know that the latter had said its occupant was very ill, and that he might be obliged to spend the night there.

Ewen’s heart sank lower and lower. It would be getting dusk by the time that he had covered the twelve or fourteen miles to the nearer end of that desolate loch. Suppose he somehow missed the doctor, or suppose the latter either could not or would not start back for Ardroy so late? Yet at least it would be better than nothing to have speech with him, and to learn what was the proper treatment for that little coughing, shivering, bright-cheeked thing at home.

So he went by Spean side where it hurried in its gorges, where it swirled in wide pools; by the dangerous ford at Inch, past the falls where it hurled itself to a destruction which it never met; he rode between it and the long heights of Beinn Chlianaig and finally turned south with the lessening river itself. And after a while there opened before him a narrow, steel-coloured trough of loneliness and menace imprisoned between unfriendly heights—Loch Treig. On its eastern side Cnoc Dearg reared himself starkly; on the other Stob Choire an Easain Mhóir, even loftier, shut it in—kinsmen of Ben Nevis both. The track went low by the shore under Cnoc Dearg, for there was no place for it on his steep flanks.

As there was no habitation anywhere within sight, Ewen concluded that the farm to which Doctor Kincaid had gone was probably at Loch Treig head, at the farther end of the lake, where the mountains relaxed their grip—another five or six miles. He went on. The livid surface of the water by which he rode was not ruffled to-day by any wind; a heavy, sinister silence lay upon it, as on the dark, brooding heights which hemmed it about. One was shut in between them with that malevolent water. It hardly seemed surprising that after a mile and a half of its company Ewen’s horse definitely went lame; the strain which he feared had developed—and no wonder. But he could not spare the time to lead him; he must push on at all costs.

The halting beast had carried him but a little way farther before he was aware of distant sounds like—yes, they were snatches of song. And soon he saw coming towards him through the September dusk the indistinct figure of a man walking with the uncertain gait of one who has been looking upon the wine-cup. And Ewen, thinking, ‘That poor fool will either spend the night by the roadside or fall into the loch’, pulled up his horse to a walk, for the drunkard was staggering first to one side of the narrow road and then to the other, and he feared to knock him down.

As he did so he recognised the air which the reveller was singing. . . . But the words which belonged to that tune were neither Gaelic, Scots nor English, so how should they be sung here, by one of the loneliest lochs in the Highlands?

“Aux nouvell’s que j’apporte

Vos beaux yeux vont pleurer . . .”

What was a Frenchman doing here, singing ‘Malbrouck’?

“Quittez vos habits roses,”

sang the voice, coming nearer:

“Mironton, mironton, mirontaine,

Quittez vos habits roses,

Et vos satins brochés.”

Cnoc Dearg tossed the words mockingly to the other warder of Loch Treig, and Ewen jumped off his horse. It was not perhaps, after all, a Frenchman born who was singing that song in so lamentable and ragged a fashion along this lonely track to nowhere.

The lurching figure was already nearly up to him, and now the singer seemed to become aware of the man and the horse in his path, for he stopped in the middle of the refrain.

“Laissez-moi passer, s’il vous plaît,” he muttered indistinctly, and tried to steady himself. He was hatless, and wore a green roquelaure.

Ewen dropped his horse’s bridle and seized him by the arm.

“Hector! What in the name of the Good Being are you doing here in this state?”

Out of a very white face Hector Grant’s eyes stared at him totally without recognition. “Let me pass, if you pl—please,” he said again, but in English this time.

“You are not fit to be abroad,” said Ewen in disgust. The revelation that Hector could ever be as drunk as this came as a shock; he had always thought him a temperate youth, if excitable . . . but it was true that he had seen nothing of him for the past two years. “Where have you been—what, in God’s name, have you been doing?”

The young officer of the régiment d’Albanie did indeed cut a sorry figure. His waistcoat hung open, his powdered hair was disordered and streaked with wet, there was mud on his breeches as well as on his boots.

“Answer me!” said Ewen sternly, giving him a little shake. “I am in haste.”

“So am I,” replied Hector, still more thickly. “Let me pass, I say, whoever you are. Let me pass, or I’ll make you!”

“Don’t you even know me?” demanded his brother-in-law indignantly.

“No, and have no wish to . . . O God, my head!” And, Ardroy having removed his grasp, the reveller reeled backwards against the horse, putting both hands to his brow.

“You had best sit down for a moment,” counselled Ewen drily, and with an arm round him guided him to the side of the path. Hector must be pretty far gone if he really did not know him, for it was still quite light enough for recognition. The best way to sober him would be to take him to the nearest burn tumbling down across the track and dip his fuddled head into it. But Ewen stood looking down at him in mingled disgust and perplexity, for now Hector had laid that head upon his knees and was groaning aloud.

As he sat hunched there the back of that same head was presented to Ardroy’s unsympathetic gaze. Just above the black ribbon which tied Hector’s queue the powder appeared all smirched, and of a curious rusty colour. . . . Ewen uttered a sudden exclamation, stooped, touched the patch, and looked at his fingers. Next moment he was down by the supposed tippler’s side, his arm round him.

“Hector, have you had a blow on the head? How came you by it?” His voice was sharp with anxiety. “My God, how much are you hurt—who did it?” But Hector did not answer; instead, as he sat there, his knees suddenly gave, and he lurched forward and sideways on to his mentor.

Penitent, and to spare, for having misjudged him, Ewen straightened him out, laid him down in the heather and bog-myrtle which bordered the track, brought water from the burn in his hat, dashed it in the young man’s face, and turning his head on one side tried to examine the injury. He could not see much, only the hair matted with dried blood; it was even possibly the fact of its being gathered thus into a queue and tied with a stout ribbon which had saved him from more serious damage—perhaps, indeed, had saved his life. The wound, great or small, was certainly not bleeding now, so it must either have been inflicted some time ago, or have been slighter than its consequences seemed to indicate; and as Ewen bathed the recipient’s face he detected signs of reviving consciousness. After a moment, indeed, the young soldier gave a little sigh, and, still lying in Ardroy’s arms, began to murmur something incoherent about stopping someone at all costs; that he was losing time and must push on. He even made a feeble effort to rise, which Ewen easily frustrated.

“You cannot push on anywhere after a blow like that,” he said gently. (Had he not had a presentiment of something like this last night!) “I’ll make you as comfortable as I can with my cloak, and when I come back from my errand to the head of the loch I’m in hopes I’ll have a doctor with me, and he can—Don’t you know me now, Hector?”

For the prostrate man was saying thickly, “The doctor—do you mean Doctor Cameron? No, no, he must not be brought here—good God, he must not come this way now, any more than Lochdornie! Don’t you understand, that’s what I am trying to do—to stop Lochdornie . . . now that damned spy has taken my papers!”

“What’s that?” asked Ewen sharply. “You were carrying papers, and they have been taken from you?”

Hector wrested himself a little away. “Who are you?” he asked suspiciously, looking up at him with the strangest eyes. “Another Government agent? Papers . . . no, I have no papers! I have but come to Scotland to visit my sister, and she’s married to a gentleman of these parts. . . . Oh, you may be easy—he’ll have naught to do now with him they name the young Pretender, so how should I be carrying treasonable papers?”

Ewen bit his lip hard. The half-stunned brain was remembering yesterday night at Ardroy. But how could he be angry with a speaker in this plight? Moreover, there was something extremely disquieting behind his utterances; he must be patient—but quick too, for precious time was slipping by, and he might somehow miss Doctor Kincaid in the oncoming darkness. If Hector would only recognise him, instead of staring at him in that hostile manner, with one hand plucking at the wet heather in which he lay!

“Hector, don’t you really know me?” he asked again, almost pleadingly. “It’s Ewen—Ewen Cameron of Ardroy, Alison’s husband!”

His sister’s name seemed, luckily, to act as a magnet to Hector’s scattered wits. They fastened on it. “Alison—Alison’s husband?” Suspicion turned to perplexity; he stared afresh. “You’re uncommonly like . . . why, it is Ardroy!” he exclaimed after a moment’s further scrutiny.

“Yes,” said Ewen, greatly relieved, “it is Ardroy, and thankful to have come upon you. Now tell me what’s wrong, and why you talk of stopping MacPhair of Lochdornie?”

Relief was on Hector’s strained face too. He passed his hand once or twice over his eyes and became almost miraculously coherent. “I was on my way to Ben Alder, to Cluny Macpherson . . . I fell in with a man as I went along the Spean . . . he must have been a Government spy. I could not shake him off. I had even to come out of my way with him—like this—lest he should guess where I was making for. . . . I stooped at last to drink of a burn, and I do not remember any more. . . . When I knew what had happened I found that he had taken everything . . . and if Lochdornie makes for Badenoch or Lochaber now he’ll be captured, for there was news of him in a letter I had on me—though it was mostly in cipher—and the redcoats will be on the alert. . . . He must be warned, for he is on his way hither—he must be warned at once, or all is lost!” Hector groaned, put a hand over his eyes again, and this time kept it there.

Ewen sat silent a moment. What a terrible misfortune! “You mentioned Archibald Cameron’s name just now,” he said uneasily. “What of his movements?”

“Doctor Cameron’s in Knoidart,” answered Hector. “He’ll not be coming this way yet, I understand. No, ’tis Lochdornie you must——” And there he stopped, removed his hand and said in a different tone, “But I am forgetting—you do not wish now to have aught to do with the Prince and his plans.”

“I never said that!” protested Ardroy. “I said . . . but no matter! I’ve given proofs enough of my loyalty, Hector!”

“Proofs? We have all given them!” returned the younger man impatiently. “Show me that I wronged you last night! You have a horse there—ride back without a moment’s delay to Glen Mallie and stop Lochdornie. I’ll give you directions.”

He looked up at his brother-in-law in a silence so dead, so devoid of any sound from the sullen water of the loch, that the very mountains seemed to be holding their breaths to listen.

“I cannot turn back now,” said Ardroy in a slow voice. “But when I have found the doctor——”

“Ah, never think of me!” cried Hector, misunderstanding. “I’ll do well enough here for the present. But to save Lochdornie you must turn back this instant! Surely some good angel sent you here, Ewen, to undo what I have done. Listen, you’ll find him——” he clutched at Ardroy, “somewhere in Glen Mallie, making towards Loch Arkaig. If he gets the length of the glen by dark it’s like he’ll spend the night in an old tumble-down croft there is on the side of Beinn Bhan—you’ll know it, I dare say, for I believe ’tis the only one there. You’ll be put to it to get there in time, I fear; yet you may meet him coming away. . . . But if once he crosses the Lochy . . .” He made a despairing gesture. “You’ll do it, Ewen?” And his unhappy eyes searched the face above him hungrily.

But Ewen turned his head aside. “I would go willingly, if . . . Do you know why I am on this road at all, Hector?” His voice grew hoarse. “My little son is very ill; I am riding after the only doctor for miles round—and he gone up Loch Treig I know not how far. How can I turn back to warn anyone until I have found him?”

“Then I must go,” said Hector wildly. “ ’Tis I have ruined Lochdornie’s plans. But I shall go so slow . . . and it is so far. . . . I shall never be in time.” He was struggling to his knees, only to be there for a second or two ere he relapsed into Ewen’s arms. “My head . . . I can’t stand . . . it swims so! O God, why did I carry that letter on me!” And he burst into tears.

Ewen let him weep, staring out over the darkening loch where some bird flew wailing like a lost spirit, and where against the desolate heights opposite he seemed to see Keithie’s flushed little face. Words spoken six years ago came back to him, when the speaker, himself in danger, was urging him to seek safety. ‘God knows, my dear Ewen, I hold that neither wife, children nor home should stand in a man’s way when duty and loyalty call him—and as you know, I have turned my back on all these.’ He could hear Archibald Cameron’s voice as if it were yesterday. Duty and loyalty—were they not calling now?

Hector had cast himself face downwards, and the scent of the bruised bog-myrtle came up strong and sweet. Ewen clenched his teeth; then he stooped and laid a hand on his shoulder.

“I will turn back,” he said almost inaudibly. “Perhaps the child is better now. . . . If anyone passes, call out; it may be the doctor—you need him.” His voice stuck in his throat, but he contrived to add, “And send him on to Ardroy.”

Hector raised his face and seized his brother-in-law’s arm in an almost convulsive grip. “You’ll go—you’ll go? God bless you, Ewen! And forgive me, forgive me! . . . Had I not been so hasty last night . . .”

“If Lochdornie be not in the croft I suppose I’ll come on him farther up the glen,” said Ewen shortly. There were no words to spare for anything save the hard choice he was making. He stripped off his cloak and wrapped it round Hector as well as Hector’s own; the night, fortunately, was not setting in cold, and when he passed Inverlair, as he returned, he would make shift to send someone to fetch the stranded wayfarer to shelter. Hector hardly seemed to hear him say this, for all his being was fixed on the question of Lochdornie and the warning, and he babbled gratitude and directions in a manner which suggested that his mind was drifting into mist once more.

But as Ewen pulled round his horse and threw himself into the saddle he could almost see Alison standing in the road to bar his return. How could he ever tell her what he had done! When he met her again he would perhaps be the murderer of his child and hers.

Soon his hoof-beats made a dwindling refrain by the dark water, and the warders of Loch Treig tossed the sound to each other as they had tossed Hector’s song. Sharp, sharp, sharp, said the echo, are the thorns of the White Rose, and the hearth where that flower has twined itself is never a safe one.