Читать книгу The Raiders: Being Some Passages In The Life Of John Faa, Lord And Earl Of Little Egypt - Samuel R. Crockett - Страница 16

SEVEN

The Red Cock Crows at Craigdarroch

WHEN I GOT BACK again to the shore Silver Sand was already in the boat, Quharrie crouching in the bow.

I offered one of my pistols.

‘Leave thae nesty things at hame,’ he said, with unusual shortness of temper. ‘They’ll be gaun blaffin’ aff when there’s mair need to be as quiet as an ashleaf twirlin’ to the grund in a windless frost. Tak’ a durk, man, instead!’

He handed me a long, deadly-looking weapon in a leather case, the look of which I did not like at all; yet, for the sake of peace, I stuck it in my black belt with the brass buckle, alongside of the pistols in their cases.

Silver Sand took the oars. He did not stick his weapon – a dirk like mine – into his belt, but held it gripped between his knees as he rowed. His oars made no noise, neither on the rullocks nor yet when he drew them into the boat to ship them when I had got the little rag of a sail far forward to fill and draw. Then Silver Sand steered with an oar. He made direct for the Maxwells’ landing-place. The star before us at Craigdarroch grew larger and larger. Flames shot up far into the sky, so that the sea was lighted up for miles. Only under the shadow of the woods of Orraland, where the trees almost dipped their branches in the salt water at high tide, was there the safety of darkness.

So we kept far to the right, and skirted the shore almost under the trees. As we came close in, we lost the light wind which, a hundred yards from the cliff, seemed to slant upwards and leave the shore line breathlessly still, while from the burning onstead of Craigdarroch the flames and smoke were tossed westward in the strong breeze.

Situated as I was in the bow, I could not ask questions, and Silver Sand had not volunteered me any information; but I remembered that there was bad blood between the lads of Craigdarroch and the evil crew who went under the name of Captain Yawkins’ gang. It might well be that they were now taking their revenge on the house; and little as I cared, in the way of love, for May Maxwell, it made my blood run cold to think of her at the mercy of these sea scoundrels and hill gypsies, who thought no more of carrying away a lass from the Lowlands than of killing one of their neighbours’ sheep.

When at last we got into the shadow of the trees, and ran the boat safely ashore in the slushy sand of the little cove under the beeches by Orraland Gate, Silver Sand whispered in my ear that we must ‘keep wide’, which is a herd’s term for keeping some distance from the flock in order not to alarm them.

‘It’s likely,’ said he, ‘that ye may hae some wark wi’ your shootin’ airns. Keep them handy, an’ when ye hear me cryin’ like a hoolet, ye can rin in to me, but dinna fire gin ye can help it. The seven Maxwell lads are a’ awa’ ower at the Isle o’ Man, an’ thae vaigabones are dootless makkin’ the best o’t. It’s the lassie that I’m vexed for; the rest might snore up in reek for me’ – a thing which I wondered to hear him say.

Quharrie and Silver Sand sprang clear of the boat, and I followed, knapping my toe on a stone as I did so. I uttered a sharp exclamation.

‘My man, it’s as weel to tell ye sune as syne. In ten minutes as muckle noise as that will get ye sax inches o’ smugglers’ jock-teleg in the wame o’ ye. They’re no canny, thae boys, when onybody comes across them. There’s Dago thieves amang them, ootlandish jabberers wi’ the tongue, but gleg wi’ the knife as a souter wi’ his elshin.’

When we got up on the hillside clear of the woods, we could look down on the farmsteading of Craigdarroch. The ricks of corn which had been left unthrashed from last year’s harvest were in a blaze. Black figures of men ran hither and thither about the house and round the fires. We could see them disappearing into the office-houses with blazing peats and torches. The thatch of the barn was just beginning to show red. Narrow tongues of fire and great sweeps of smoke drove to leeward against the clear west. It was strange that there seemed no help coming from the other neighbouring farm-towns. We heard afterwards that the Black Smugglers had sent a man with a loaded gun to stand at the gate of each farm close, and keep all within doors at the peril of life.

‘It’s the auld man’s brass kist they’re after, I’se warrant,’ said Silver Sand; ‘and maybes the bit lass as weel.’

I had not the least conception what he meant by the ‘brass kist’, but it grieved me to see the bonny corn that had grown so golden on the braes anent the isle screeving up in fire to the heavens; and when he mentioned the lass my heart sank within me, only to kindle again like fire the moment after.

‘Yawkins threatened that he wad gar the Red Cock craw on Auld Man Maxwell’s rooftree afore the year was oot, an’ faith, he’s dune it. But the seven bauld brithers, sirce me, but they’ll be wild men when they come hame.’

We were now on a heathery eminence, dry above and wet beneath.

‘Here’s a hidie hole for ye, young Rathan,’ said Silver Sand, giving me even at that moment my laird’s title, which he did not do often. ‘Clap close and bide till Quharrie an’ me comes for ye!’

With that he pointed with his finger to his great wolf-hound, and away in opposite directions the two set at top speed, the man bending nearly as low as the dog. The east wind whipped the bent, and the crackling of the burning rafters and blazing stacks came most unpleasantly to my ears. I wondered at the time why there was no noise of men crying. That was, I knew afterwards, due to Captain Yawkins of Sluys, a very notable sailor, who forbade it. When he was hanged, some time afterwards, for piracy at Leith, there were seventeen warrants out against him for all manner of crimes, from trepanning a lass on the Isle of Gometra (somewhere in the Highlands), to bloody piracy on the high seas. When I was in Edinburgh last I saw him swing in chains on Leith sands, very well tarred, and the flesh dried flat to the bones with the bensilling wind off the Baltic lands. And he is more comfortable there than he had been in old Richard Maxwell’s hands that night.

This, at least, was his doing, and even then the cup of his iniquities was brimming perilously near the lip. Captain Yawkins would not much oftener seek the port of Sluys.

It behoved me, however, to lie low among the heather, and watch warily the tarry scullions that were making such a hash of the bien and comfortable homestead. Only about two hundred yards from where I lay in the sheuch of the moss-hagg, I could see, plain as black on white, a sailor man with a musket which he took over his shoulder as if he had been one of His Majesty’s red soldiers – as indeed he was, but deserted and waiting for the tow-rope or the ounce of lead which, in good sooth, and in the fitting time of an all-wise Providence, he received in due course.

The place where I lay was on the edge of the wild country which stretches along the shore, very close in all round Galloway, save only about the estuaries of the rivers. From it the moors run back, in broken moss-hagg and scattered boulder-stone, to the Screel o’ Criffel, which is the highest hill in that locality, and as they say, stands up from Solway, watching the tides and spinning the weather.

I was to do nothing except lie thus prone on my forefront, with my nose cocking out of the heather, and keep a watch till Silver Sand came back. It grieved me to be so actionless. It would have suited me better to be up and doing, if it were only to escape that lass’s tongue. But my heart grew sore for the thought of her among all these regardless men.

Now there were a number of low, dwarfish scurrie thorns, bent away from the sea by the wind, on this waste place – the moor being generally very flat and bare. I remembered that I had come over to harry gleds’ nests here in the years when yet my father was alive, and I could think on such things.

It came to my mind also at the same time that that was both a higher and a safer place for my watch quite near, by reason that it stood on a little mound that had been made by the hand of man, some say for the purposes of baron’s justice in the old time of pit and gallows. There was also a stone dyke round a well, which always flowed cool and clear from under a great rock in the midst of the bit scrunts of birks and flat-lying, ground-creeping thorns.

I did not think that Silver Sand would be disappointed or angry, because the place where I designed to go was but a few hundred yards further west, and at the head of a glen which led up from the shore. This would also, as I well knew, be our best road to the boat we had left on the shingle. So, as silently as I could, I retreated through the long trough of the cold, black-looking moss-haggs. I had not gone far, progressing, as the partan-crab is said to do, backwards, when a rush of escaping cattle tore over the face of the moor, and one great stot coming my way trod upon me and gorroched me deeper into the black peat broth. For a long while I lay still as death, but as there seemed to be no pursuer, more stealthily than ever I resumed my way.

Soon I was climbing, a fearsome spectacle of dirt, up the side of the knowe of the ‘scroggie thorns’. Suddenly, as I crawled, I was seized from behind in a grasp that threatened to dislocate my neck-bone, and a voice in my ear said, very low and deadly: ‘Yae word, ye crawlin’ blastie, an’ I’ll let the life oot o’ ye!’

Now this was not at all a useful observation. It was a perfect impossibility for me to utter a word had my life depended on it, for the thumbs which were choking me had been at the work before, and the pressure on my windpipe threatened to shut out the breath of life from me in a few moments. There were flashes of fire in my eyes, and stars that fell and burst; a sound as of a great spate of waters roared in my ears; then darkness.

To all intents and purposes I died then, for to lose consciousness by violence is to die. What more is there left to experience – in this life, at least?