Patsy by Samuel Rutherford Crockett (read aloud TXT) 📖

water. This was a negotiation which was better left to Honeypot and Derry Down. If the water was black and peaty with a heavy smell of rotting vegetation, the ponies knew it, but if they scented the fresh rush of a hill burn, or the soft coolness of an arm of sandy-bottomed loch, then Louis and Stair would suddenly feel the cool sluicing of water about their legs, causing them to turn their pistol belts over their shoulders, where Stair already carried his long-barrelled gun with the stock upwards.
"We shall close upon them at the White Loch," said Stair, during one of these pauses. "They have a long detour to make. I would rather have waited till they had got to the crossing of the Tarf, but that is too far for our beasts on these short nights of June."
(He meant the Wigtonshire Tarf, which comes from far Laggangairn and the Bloody Moss, not the shorter, fiercer tributary of the Dee.)
"The White Loch be it," said Louis, for indeed it was all the same to him. He was out to fight for Patsy, and fight he would. He did not care what his grandfather might say, nor what penalties he might incur. What Stair Garland was ready to do for Patsy, surely he had the better right to be a partner in.
They drove through a herd of kyloes recently sent down from Highland hills to try their luck on Galloway heather. The horns clicked sharply together. There was a whisking scamper of hoofs as the beasts fled every way, only to bunch anew a little farther out of the path of these wild riders.
Now Stair and Louis found themselves on a kind of track, narrow and stony underfoot. The blackfaced sheep of the hills had made it so, with their little pattering trotters which dug out a stone at every step. Above was a waste of boulder, grey teeth grinning through the black heather. They began to see more clearly, for they were now far above the mist, into which they would not again need to descend till they should reach the White Loch and cut down to head off their prey, comfortably rolling Gretnawards--a duke royal, a peer of the realm, and a spy with a promise of fortune in his breastpocket, all looking after Patsy Ferris, the daughter of the Picts, and drawn by Kennedy McClure's excellent pair of horses along the best road in all the south country.
Sometimes a wilder track led Stair and Louis unbreathed across an open moor, the path being too narrow to ride abreast, when it was the mare's privilege to lead. She snuffed the air, and even while keeping to her pace, would reach forward her neck to smell the better. Derry Down knew that she was on one of the old "drove roads" by which horses had been driven to the eastern fairs and trysts for hundreds of years, before ever Lord Hillsborough came into the land, or the pick of a governmental sapper had been set in the heather.
Generally the pursuers kept wide of all human habitation. They could see the stars now, and so in a manner choose their direction. The details they left to the horses, and especially to Stair's wise "Derry Down." But the scent of a single "keeping" peat in a herd's house would send them all up the hill again. It had been carefully bent over the red ashes to hold them alight till the morrow, for the goodwife's greater ease on rising, and also because it was the immemorial custom of all Moor folk from Killantringan even to the Moss of Cree.
A fly-by-night bumblebee, honey-drunk, followed the cavalcade blunderingly a little way, perhaps in the hope that they who seemed to know their way so well, might lead him safely home, ring the door-bell for him, and tumble him into the lobby of his home under the bent tussock where he fain would be. Nevermore would he stay out so late again. So much he would gladly promise the reproachful wife who had sat up for his coming.
But the ponies drew away, and there was nothing for him but to snuggle down with a buzz and a grumble among the wet bluebells and wait for daybreak, for sobriety and with it a new sense of direction.
Occasionally Stair urged his mare forward, though only by a closer clip of the knees. She was a willing beast, and responded gallantly. It was easy going now, and the night was speeding quickly. Presently they would need to go down the side of the fell, and skirt the White Water to their ambush place at the head of the Loch. Of this last, Stair thought exclusively. But with more of the mystery of an older race about him, Louis Raincy listened to the firs whispering confidences overhead as they sped downhill. Then came the birches' clean rustle--for the burn they were following led them among copses where the legs of the horses risped with a pleasant sound through the lash of leaves.
The ponies were going easily now, their masters being sure that they were far in advance of their time. They had cut the circle cleanly, and those they were pursuing would have to make nearly three times the distance they had traversed.
Besides, Patsy's captors did not know they were being pursued. Never once did the "clash of the spurs" warn them that Care and his horsemen rode behind.
As the two came down from the high moors, tracking cautiously through the woods and stray belts of culture which hung about the thatched steadings and shy, deep-hidden farm-towns, a wildness awoke in Stair Garland. The little mare, Derry Down, responded to his mood. She held her head high, and capered like an unbitted yearling fresh off the first spring pastures.
Louis rode more quietly and also more steadily, and especially so when at last they got down to a made road in the valley of the White Water. Here Louis had several times to urge his companion to save the beasts a little, for if they rescued Patsy, they would need to bring her home on one or the other of them.
"We have to settle our accounts first," said Stair, "then we will think about taking her back to those who knew so ill how to protect her!"
He was silent a moment and then added as if in pity for Louis's ignorance, "See here, man, this is all my country. Think you there is a farm where I could not leave the ponies and get the loan of other? We are on the main caravan trail of the Free Traffickers, and there are few hereabouts who would venture to refuse Stair Garland."
Perhaps there was some boyish pride in this, but Louis had been long enough within the sound of the jingling anker chains and the creaking pack saddles to know that Stair spoke well within the truth. He felt with a sudden pang that in this rescue of Patsy he was playing a very secondary part. But the true nobility of soul shown by Stair Garland was not at the time revealed to him. He did not understand the reason why Stair had brought him at all. It was because he disdained to take an advantage. He would not magnify himself in Patsy's eyes while Louis, unwarned, slept in his bed at Castle Raincy.
Whatever the odds against him, Stair would give his adversary the floor, and at the end of the day accept the umpire's judgment as to which was the better man.


CHAPTER XII
PATSY'S RESCUE
Like a greyhound coursing sped the little mare. After Derry Down stretched the more sturdily built Honeypot. He made no flourishes with head or tail but simply laid well into his work, going so fast that his rider Louis Raincy seemed to be bending to meet a strong wind. The hedges and tree clumps poured behind as water from the prow of a wind-driven boat in a difficult sea-way.
Three or four times Louis tried to stop his companion, but Stair had a spot in his mind where he could hold up the carriage. It was a sharp angle of road, designed in days when levels and gradients were unthought of, and still permitted to linger on to the danger of travellers' necks. In fact the White Loch elbow remains to the moment of writing, in spite of all modern improvements, a trap for the unwary, merely because a laird's lodge-gate lies a few hundred feet to the north, and any new road must cut a shaving off the entrance to his avenue.
But that night Stair made use of the gates manorial. Tying their ponies to trees, they lifted the heavy gates off their hinges and "angled" them skillfully across the road so as to form a barrier which must stop the horses and carriage. Stair would have set up the barricade between the double turn of the S-shaped curve, but Louis pointed out that if the carriage went over the bridge, Patsy might very well be injured. So the gates were ultimately placed where the horses would be halted while ascending the long after slope with slackened pace.
Where Stair and Louis placed themselves, though some considerable way from the burn which ran at the bottom of the defile, they were still in a very pit of darkness. The leaves were dense overhead, and only the white gates gleamed very faintly in the trough of gloom where ran the eastern military road.
Louis lay under a tremulous rustle of leaves, for the wind was coming in from the sea, and listened to the trill and chirrup of the burn which carried off the overflow of the White Loch, as it muttered over its sands or clattered across the loose round pebbles of its numerous shallows.
The lads waited long and anxiously, not that they had any fear of having missed their mark, for Stair had searched in vain in all the softest spots for any trace of carriage wheels. They _must_ pass this way. They could not go off the road, because there was no other. But, what would have spoiled the matter more than a squadron of cavalry in attendance, was the fact that if they delayed much longer, the carriage would reach the Elbow of the White Water after daybreak.
From where they lay they could see the ragged fantastic line of the hills to the east behind which the sun would rise. Stair watched these anxiously. They had a clear hour before them, but unless the mist came up again with the tide, they could count on no more time.
Already out on the face of the moorland the curlews were crying tentatively one to the other. Louis would gladly have talked, but Stair sat grave and silent. At last, visibly unquiet, he betook himself up through the wood to the edge of an old turf-built fold where in summer the cows were wont to be milked. Here he occupied himself with the priming of his gun and looked to his pistols. An undefined glimmer from the sky and the absence of trees on the heathery slopes enabled him to dispense with other light.
In ten minutes he was back again by the side of Louis Raincy.
"They are coming," he whispered, "up yonder I heard the rumble of the carriage. Listen--we shall catch it in a minute."
Louis listened intently and at last could make out, from very far to the west, the rhythmic and yet changeful beating of the feet of horses. But it was not till the carriage had actually climbed to the summit and was rumbling down the slope that Stair Garland moved.
"I am going to meet them there at the gates," he said, "be you ready with the horses. There is a