Читать книгу D. K. Broster Collection - D. K. Broster - Страница 90

Archie shook his head with a little smile which said that resistance would be of no use; that their only hope lay in keeping perfectly quiet. But Ewen would not take the weapon back.

The men outside could be heard fumbling over the door for the means of opening it, which, naturally, they could not find.

“Curse it, there’s no way to open this door!” Kicks and blows were bestowed upon it. “Come out of it, rebel!”

“If ye’re in there!” added the other voice with a snigger.

“There ain’t no means of knowing that till we get the door open,” said the first voice.

“If there was a lock we could blow it open, but there ain’t none.”

“Do you stay and watch the place, then, and I’ll be off and fetch the captain; he ain’t far off now.”

“And while you’re doing that the rebel will burst out and murder me and be off! Maybe, too, there’s more than this Doctor Cameron in there!”

“You’re a good-plucked one, ain’t you!” observed the first voice scornfully. “You go for Captain Craven then; and I’ll warrant no one comes out of this hut without getting something from this that’ll stop his going far!” By the sound, he smacked the butt of his musket.

“Good! I’ll not be long, then, I promise you.” The speaker could be heard to run off, and the man who remained, either to keep up his courage or to advertise his presence, began to whistle.

Ewen and his cousin looked into each other’s eyes, fearing even to whisper, and each read the same answer to the same question. If they attempted to break out and run for it before the captain and the main body came up, it was beyond question that, since they could not suddenly throw open the door, but must first pull down their barricade, at the cost of time and noise, the man outside, forewarned by their movements, could shoot one or both as they dashed out. Moreover, wounded or unwounded, they would undoubtedly be in worse case in the open, the alarm once given by a shot, than if they remained perfectly silent, ‘as close as weasels’, in their hiding-place. There was always a chance that the officer, when he came, would pooh-pooh the idea of anyone’s being inside the deserted-looking little structure and would not have the door broken open . . . even, perhaps, a chance that he would not bring his men here at all.

But it was a hard thing to do, to sit there and wait to be surrounded.

It was too hard for Ewen. After four or five minutes he put his lips to Archie’s ear. “I am going to open the door and rush out on him,” he breathed. “I have another pistol. He will probably chase me, and then you can get away.” He had brought off that same manœuvre so successfully once—why not again?

But Archie clutched his arm firmly. “No, you shall not do it! And in any case . . . I think it is too late!” For the musician outside had ceased in the middle of a bar, and next instant was to be heard shouting, “This way, sir—in the clearing here!”

Then there was the tramp of a good many feet, coming at the double. Oh, what did it matter in that moment to Ewen if the Cause were once more sinking in a bog of false hopes! For the safety of the man beside him, whom he loved, he would have bartered any levies that ever were to sail from Prussia or Sweden. But the issue was not in his hands . . .

“Why were we so crazy as to come in here!” he murmured under his breath. “O God, that I had never seen this hut!”

Archibald Cameron had loosed his arm. He still held the pistol, but in a manner which suggested that he did not mean to use it. From the orders which they could hear being given the hut was now surrounded. The door was then pushed at hard from without, but as before, when it had been attempted, it would not budge an inch.

“Did you hear any sound within while you kept watch, Hayter?” asked the officer’s voice.

“No, sir, I can’t say that I did.”

“Yet the door is evidently made fast from within. It is difficult to see how that can be unless someone is still inside. There is no window or other opening, is there, out of which a man could have got after fastening the door?”

“No, sir,” was shouted, apparently from the back of the hut.

“Forbye the hole there’ll be in the thatch for letting out the reek, sir,” suggested another voice, and a Scottish voice at that.

“But a man would hardly get out that way,” answered the officer. “No, there’s nothing for it but to break in the door.”

Two or three musket butts were vigorously applied with this intention, but in another moment the officer’s voice was heard ordering the men to stop, and in the silence which ensued could be heard saying, “Aye, an excellent notion! Then we shall know for certain, and save time and trouble. One of you give him a back.”

The two motionless men on the bench inside looked dumbly at each other. What was going to happen now? A scrambling sound was heard against the log wall of the hut, and Archie pointed mutely upwards. They were sending a man to climb up and look in through the hole left for the smoke.

Ewen ground his teeth. They had neither of them thought of that simple possibility. The game was up, then; they could do nothing against such a survey. His cousin, however, possibly from previous experience in ‘skulking’, advised in dumb show one precaution: pulling Ewen’s sleeve to attract his attention, he bowed his head until it rested on his folded arms, thrusting his hands at the same moment out of sight. For a moment Ewen thought that the object of this posture was to escape actual identification, not very probable anyhow in the semi-darkness; then he realised that its purpose was that the lighter hue of their faces and hands should not be discernible to the observer. For a second or two he dallied with an idea which promised him a grim satisfaction—that of firing upwards at the blur of a face which would shortly, he supposed, peer in at that fatal aperture in the thatch. But to do that would merely be to advertise their presence. So he followed Archibald Cameron’s example, and they sat there, rigid and huddled upon themselves, trusting that in the bad light they would, after all, be invisible. And if so, then, to judge from the officer’s words, the latter would be convinced of the emptiness of the hut and would draw off the party without breaking in the door. O God, if it might be so, if it might be so!

The scrambling sound had reached the thatch now. Half of Ewen’s mind was praying for Archie’s life, the other wrestling with a perverse inclination to glance up. And, queerly mingled with that impulse, came a memory of his childish interpretation of the text, ‘Thou, God, seest me’, when he used to picture a gigantic Eye looking down through his bedroom ceiling. . . . Eternities of waiting seemed to spread out, and then, abruptly, to collapse like a shut fan with the jubilant shout from above: “He’s there, Captain, and there’s two of them! I can see them plain!”

By the sound, the speaker slid down with the words from his post, and, almost simultaneously too, came another blow on the door, and the ritual command, “Open in the King’s name!”

The cousins both lifted their heads now, and Archie, hopeful to the last, laid a finger on his lips. The order was repeated; then, as if uncontrollably, blows began to rain on the door.

“Come out and surrender yourselves!” called the officer’s voice sternly, and another shouted, “Use that log there, ye fools—’tis heavier than the butts!” and yet another cried excitedly, “What if we was to fire the thatch, sir?”

And at that, quite suddenly, the battle madness of the Highlands, the mire chatha, came upon Ewen Cameron, and he went berserk. This was to be a trapped beast, an otter at bay . . . an otter, any beast shows fight then! Did the redcoats anticipate coming in unhindered to take them, or that they, Highlanders both, would tamely suffer themselves to be burnt out? He sprang up. Archie had got up too, and was holding out his hand to him and saying, through the hail of blows upon wood which almost drowned his words, “My dearest lad, I hope they’ll let you go free!”

From his kinsman’s next action this seemed unlikely in the extreme. Thrusting the second pistol at Doctor Cameron with “Take this too—I’ll need both hands!” Ewen seized the great rusty axe from the corner and flung himself against the barricaded portal just as one of the up-ended logs which wedged it slipped and fell, dislodged by the blows under which the door was quivering, and set against it the living prop of his own shoulder.

“Ewen, Ewen,” besought his companion in great distress, “ ’tis useless—worse than useless! My time has come!” But Ardroy did not even seem to hear him, leaning with all the might of his strong body against the door, his right hand gripping the axe, his left arm outspread across the wood trying to get a hold on the logs of the wall beyond the hinges.

Suddenly a crackling above showed that the suggestion just made had been carried out, and the roof-thatch fired, probably by a brand flung upwards. The thatch, however, was damp and burnt sullenly; yet in a moment or two some eddies of smoke, caught by the wind, drifted in through the aperture. Then the flame caught, perhaps, a drier patch, and a sudden thick wave of smoke, acrid and stifling, drove downwards in the gloom as though looking for the fugitives. But already the door was beginning to splinter in several places. The assailants seemed to guess that it was buttressed now with the body of one of the besieged. “Stand away from that door, you within there,” shouted the officer, “or I fire!”

“Fire, then, and be damned to you!” said Ewen under his breath. “Get back, Archie, get back!”

But, instead of a bullet, there came stabbing through one of the newly made little breaches in the door, like a snake, a tongue of steel, bayonet or sword. It caught Ewen just behind and below the shoulder pressed against the door; a trifle more to one side and it might have gone through the armpit into the lung. As it was, it slid along his shoulder blade. Involuntarily Ardroy sprang away from the door, as involuntarily dropping the axe and clapping his right hand to the seat of the hot, searing pain.

“Are you hurt?” exclaimed his cousin. “O Ewen, for God’s sake——”

“They are not going to take you as easily as they think!” said Ewen between his teeth; and, with the blood running down his back under his shirt, he pounced on the fallen axe again. The door shivered all over, and by the time he had recovered his weapon he saw that it was giving, and that nothing could save it. He pushed Archie, still imploring him to desist, roughly away. “Keep out of sight, for God’s sake!” he whispered hoarsely, and, gripping the axe with both hands, stood back a little the better to swing it, and also to avoid having the door collapse upon him.

In another moment it fell inwards with a bang and a noise of rending hinges, and there was revealed, as in a frame, the group of scarlet-clad figures with their eager faces, the glitter of weapons, the tree-trunks beyond. And to those soldiers who had rushed to the dark entrance Cameron of Ardroy also was visible, against the gloom and smoke within, towering with the axe ready, his eyes shining with a light more daunting even than the weapon he held. They hesitated and drew back.

The officer whipped out his sword and came forward.

“Put down that axe, you madman, and surrender Archibald Cameron to the law!”

“Archibald Cameron is not here!” shouted back Ewen. “But you come in at your peril!”

None the less, whether he trusted in his own superior quickness with his slighter weapon, or thought that the rebel would not dare to use his, Captain Craven advanced. And neither of these hypotheses would have saved him . . . though he was saved (luckily for Ewen). For the Highlander in his transport had forgotten the small proportions of the place in which he stood, and his own height and reach of arm. The smashing two-handed blow which he aimed at the Englishman never touched him; with a thud which shook the doorway the axe buried itself in the lintel above it; and as Ewen with a curse tried to wrench it out, the haft, old and rotten, came away in his hand, leaving the head imbedded above the doorway, and himself weaponless.

As he saw the axe sweeping down towards him the young officer had naturally sprung back, and now, before Ewen had time to recover himself, the sergeant rushed past his superior and seized Ardroy round the body, trying to drag him out. As they struggled with each other—all danger from the axe being now over—another man slipped in, got behind the pair, and raised his clubbed musket. Archie sprang at the invader and grabbed at his arm, and though he only half-caught it, his act did diminish the fierce impact of the blow, and probably saved Ewen from having his head split open. As it was, the musket butt felled him instantly; his knees gave, and with a stifled cry he toppled over in the sergeant’s hold, his weight bringing the soldier down with him.

But the redcoat got up again at once, while Ewen, with blood upon his hair, lay face downwards across the fallen door, the useless axe shaft still clutched in one hand; and it was over his motionless body that Archibald Cameron was brought out of his last refuge.