S. R. Crockett

“ 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. ”

“ Lads from all Galloway were there, shock-headed Vikings, with far-looking blue eyes, from Kirkmaiden to Leswalt, black, hook-nosed Blairs and McCallums from Garlieston sat beside Rerrick and Colvend men with deep-set eyes, the fine flower of the Free Trade, men whose forefathers had run cargoes for a hundred and thirty years into the same ports, and refused King's service for many thousand, though perfectly obedient to their own lords and war committees. There were always a plenty of fighting men along Solway shore, as the published rolls of 1638 attest. ”

“ Louis heard all this, and his eyes wandered no more to Mrs. Arlington. He thought of the seat in the niche of the beech-tree, the green and secret nest under the wall overlooking the path along which they could see Julian Wemyss pacing to and fro, his hands behind his back, and his eyes on the trout darting and swirling in the pools. Once more he scented the bog-myrtle and was the lad of the night rescue by the White Loch. Again Patsy was his Patsy, and he felt the sting of her hand, little and brown but very strong, on his smitten cheek. ”

“ I am a Pict—yes, I, Patsy Ferris! Uncle Julian says so. I am (so he tells me) a throwback to my grandmother's folk who were Fingauls—and her father the Laird of Kirkmaiden was the chief of them. That is why I do nothing, say nothing, think nothing like a scone-faced maid of the Scots. I am centuries older than they. If it ever arrives to me to fall in love with any man—it seems impossible, but Uncle Julian says it will come—it is I who will seek that man and make him love me, and if he ever leaves me or is untrue, I shall kill him. ”

“ The peat-cutting had increased the difficulty of reaching the central fastness of the Wild, for the ink-black tarns had been cunningly united, and the wide morass in front, where from black pools great bubbles for ever rose and lazily burst, had been dammed till it overflowed the meadows and lapped the sand-dunes behind the house of Abbey Burnfoot. Of course a pathway was left, indeed more than one, to provide a way of escape if the Bothy should happen to be blockaded. ”

“ He cursed Stair Garland and Julian Wemyss for mixing private quarrels with so sacred a mission as that of hoodwinking his Majesty's Customs.
"As good a cargo as ever came past the Point of Ayre," he grumbled, "and if young Garland had been attending to his business, we might have run it at the Mays Water as easy as changing money from one trousers pocket to the other. But now I must put these people on shore with the whole countryside humming with Preventives, and as like as not a brig-o'-war hovering about. There always is, when soldiers take a hand. ”

“ 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. ”