The Collected Works of D. K. Broster. D. K. Broster

be found and stopped before he reaches this house!”

      “Certainly he should be,” agreed Mrs. Stewart. “Unfortunately—be quiet, my child—unfortunately, I do not know in which direction he has gone, whether down the glen or up it.”

      “Mr. Chalmers was going to Balquhidder,” observed Peggy with composure. “He telled me; he said tell Mother, but I forgot—Mother, please put my bread mannie in the oven!”

      The two adults looked down anxiously at the source of this information.

      “Are you sure, Peggy, that that is where Mr. Chalmers has gone?—Yes, darling,” added her mother hastily, “I will have your bread mannie put in at once if this gentleman will excuse me.” She gave Ewen a look which seemed to say, ‘I am not usually so weak and indulgent, but it is politic in this case, for if she cries we shall get no more out of her.’

      Yet, as it happened, indulgence got no more either, for there seemed no more for Peggy to tell when she was asked, and so Ewen stood on the threshold of Mrs. Stewart’s spotless kitchen and watched with troubled eyes the consignment of Peggy’s masterpiece to the oven. And, with his own boys in mind, he found time to wonder at that world set apart, that fairy world in which children dwell, and to think how happily and uncomprehendingly they move amid the tragedies and anxieties of the other, touching them at every point, and often by sheer contrast heightening them, but usually unaffected by the contact. . . .

      Then Mrs. Stewart came out, saying over her shoulder to someone within, “Janet, keep the child with you for a while. Mr. Cameron, you’ll take some refreshment before you start?”

      But Ewen refused, hungry and spent though he was, for he would not spare the time. Mrs. Stewart, however, returned swiftly to the kitchen, and was heard giving orders for bread and meat to be made ready for him to take with him.

      “Now I’ll give you directions,” she said, hurrying out again. “Yet, Mr. Cameron, I cannot think that this is true about a warrant, for had there been any soldiers on the march from Loch Lomond side the country people would most certainly have sent messengers on ahead to warn us. For I have heard my husband say that since the garrison at Inversnaid makes a practice of selling meal and tobacco to the Highlanders, and there is a canteen in one of the barrack rooms itself, many a piece of news leaks out to us that way. For this is all, as you know, what the English call a ‘disaffected’ region, and ‘Mr. Chalmers’ has been with us for some time quite unmolested.”

      “Yet in this case extraordinary precautions may have been taken against any tidings reaching you,” urged Ewen. “And I have seen a letter from a member of General Churchill’s household which stated that a warrant had been issued on the fifteenth—six days ago. It was in fact that letter which brought me here, for I did not know my cousin’s whereabouts. But they certainly know it in Edinburgh. Someone has informed against him, Mrs. Stewart.”

      She was plainly shocked. “Oh, sir, that’s impossible! No one in these parts would do such a thing!”

      But Ardroy shook his head. “It may not have been a man from this district, but it has been done—and by someone who had speech with the Doctor recently. It remains now to circumvent the traitor. Supposing the child to have been mistaken, have you any trusty person whom you can send in the opposite direction, or in any other where you think ‘Mr. Chalmers’ likely to have gone?”

      “Only the gardener; but I will send him at once up the glen. Yet if Peggy is right, ’tis you will meet the Doctor, though I know not how far you’ll have to go, nor whether you had best——” She stopped and drew her brows together. “Nay, I believe he ever takes the track through the wood when he goes to Balquhidder, for the path down the open glen gives no shelter in case of danger. It will be best for you to go by the wood. You saw the burn, no doubt, as you came up to the house? Follow it a space down the glen till it goes into the wood, and go in with it. The track then runs by the water till it mounts higher than the burn; but you cannot miss it. And I must tell you,” she finished, “that Mr. Chalmers is wearing a black wig, which changes him very much; and commonly, unless he forgets, he makes to walk with a stoop to reduce his height. But you’ll be knowing his appearance well, perhaps?”

      “Very well indeed,” said Ewen, checking a sigh. “God grant I meet him! I am to begin by following the burn, then?” He repeated her simple instructions and went towards the door. Every moment he expected it to be flung wide by a redcoat.

      But he opened it, and there was nothing but the pale unclouded sun, almost balanced now on one of the crests opposite, the sharp sweet hill air, and a murmur of wind in the pines below the house. On the threshold Mrs. Stewart tendered him the packet of bread and meat, and a small voice from a lesser altitude was also heard offering turn, as sustentation, ‘my bread mannie’. It was true that this gift, withdrawn from too brief a sojourn in the oven, was far from being bread, but Ewen gravely accepted the amorphous and sticky object and wrapped it in his handkerchief. He could not refuse this fair-haired child whose tidings might be destined to prove the salvation of Archibald Cameron, and he stooped and kissed her. The little figure waving an adieu was the last thing he saw as he walked quickly away from the house towards the wood which clung about the downward course of the Calair.

      (2)

      As Mrs. Stewart had said, the track through the wood was quite easy to find and follow, and Ewen hurried along it at a very fast pace, since the farther from Stewart’s house he could encounter Archie the better. And yet, it might be a wild goose chase into which he had flung himself; it might be for the sake of a mere rumour that he, Ewen Cameron of Ardroy, had assaulted the future Earl of Stowe and stolen, or rather borrowed, a horse. The pistols he had certainly stolen, for he had not left them, as he had the horse, at the inn at Tyndrum, but had kept them with him, and might be glad of them yet. For though, contrary to all his expectations, he was in time to warn Archie (if only he could come upon him) he could not feel at ease about the warrant, even though its execution was so strangely delayed, or believe that machinery of the kind, once set in motion, would cease to revolve.

      So he hastened on; the path, fairly wide here, having quitted the stream, was full of holes crammed with damp, dead leaves; through the bare oaks and ashes and the twisted pine boughs on his left he saw the sun disappear behind the heights opposite. As its rays were withdrawn the air grew at once colder, and an uneasy wind began to move overhead; it left the oaks indifferent, but the pines responded to its harper’s touch. Ardroy had lived his life too much in the open air and in all weathers to be much mentally affected by wind, yet the sound tuned with his anxious thoughts almost without his being aware of it.

      So far he had not met or even seen a single person, but now, as he heard steps approaching, his pulse quickened. He was wrong—it was not Archie, for there came into sight an elderly man bent under a load of sticks which he had evidently been gathering in the wood. No word issued from him as they passed each other, but he turned, sticks and all, and stared after the stranger. Meanwhile Ewen hastened on; he must, he thought, have come a considerable way by now, and for the first time he began to wonder what he should do if he got to Balquhidder itself without encountering his cousin, and to regret that he had not asked Mrs. Stewart’s advice about such a contingency.

      It was while he was turning over this difficulty in his mind that he came round a bend in the woodland path and perceived, at the foot of a tree, a man with one knee on the ground, examining something at its foot. Was it? . . . it looked like . . . Yes! He broke into a run, and was upon Doctor Cameron before the latter had time to do more than rise to his feet and utter an amazed:

      “Ewen! Ewen! . . . It can’t be! How, and why——”

      And not till that moment did it occur to Ewen that all this had happened before, in different surroundings. “I am come to warn you—once again, Archie!” he said, seizing him by the arms in his earnestness. “You must come no farther—you must not return to Stewart’s house. There’s a warrant out against you from Edinburgh, and soldiers coming from Inversnaid. Your hiding-place has been betrayed.”

      “Betrayed!” said Archibald Cameron in incredulous