Day began to come in,after years,I thought;and by that time we were past the greatest danger,and could walk upon our feet like men,instead of crawling like brutes.But,dear heart have mercy!what a pair we must have made,going double like old grandfathers,stumbling like babes,and as white as dead folk.
Never a word passed between us;each set his mouth and kept his eyes in front of him,and lifted up his foot and set it down again,like people lifting weights at a country play;[27]all the while,with the moorfowl crying "peep!"in the heather,and the light coming slowly clearer in the east.
I say Alan did as I did.Not that ever I looked at him,for Ihad enough ado to keep my feet;but because it is plain he must have been as stupid with weariness as myself,and looked as little where we were going,or we should not have walked into an ambush like blind men.
It fell in this way.We were going down a heathery brae,Alan leading and I following a pace or two behind,like a fiddler and his wife;when upon a sudden the heather gave a rustle,three or four ragged men leaped out,and the next moment we were lying on our backs,each with a dirk at his throat.
I don't think I cared;the pain of this rough handling was quite swallowed up by the pains of which I was already full;and I was too glad to have stopped walking to mind about a dirk.I lay looking up in the face of the man that held me;and I mind his face was black with the sun,and his eyes very light,but I was not afraid of him.I heard Alan and another whispering in the Gaelic;and what they said was all one to me.
Then the dirks were put up,our weapons were taken away,and we were set face to face,sitting in the heather.
"They are Cluny's men,"said Alan."We couldnae have fallen better.We're just to bide here with these,which are his out-sentries,till they can get word to the chief of my arrival."Now Cluny Macpherson,the chief of the clan Vourich,had been one of the leaders of the great rebellion six years before;there was a price on his life;and I had supposed him long ago in France,with the rest of the heads of that desperate party.Even tired as I was,the surprise of what I heard half wakened me.
"What,"I cried,"is Cluny still here?"
"Ay,is he so!"said Alan."Still in his own country and kept by his own clan.King George can do no more."I think I would have asked farther,but Alan gave me the put-off.
"I am rather wearied,"he said,"and I would like fine to get a sleep."And without more words,he rolled on his face in a deep heather bush,and seemed to sleep at once.
There was no such thing possible for me.You have heard grasshoppers whirring in the grass in the summer time?Well,Ihad no sooner closed my eyes,than my body,and above all my head,belly,and wrists,seemed to be filled with whirring grasshoppers;and I must open my eyes again at once,and tumble and toss,and sit up and lie down;and look at the sky which dazzled me,or at Cluny's wild and dirty sentries,peering out over the top of the brae and chattering to each other in the Gaelic.
That was all the rest I had,until the messenger returned;when,as it appeared that Cluny would be glad to receive us,we must get once more upon our feet and set forward.Alan was in excellent good spirits,much refreshed by his sleep,very hungry,and looking pleasantly forward to a dram and a dish of hot collops,of which,it seems,the messenger had brought him word.
For my part,it made me sick to hear of eating.I had been dead-heavy before,and now I felt a kind of dreadful lightness,which would not suffer me to walk.I drifted like a gossamer;the ground seemed to me a cloud,the hills a feather-weight,the air to have a current,like a running burn,which carried me to and fro.With all that,a sort of horror of despair sat on my mind,so that I could have wept at my own helplessness.
I saw Alan knitting his brows at me,and supposed it was in anger;and that gave me a pang of light-headed fear,like what a child may have.I remember,too,that I was smiling,and could not stop smiling,hard as I tried;for I thought it was out of place at such a time.But my good companion had nothing in his mind but kindness;and the next moment,two of the gillies had me by the arms,and I began to be carried forward with great swiftness (or so it appeared to me,although I dare say it was slowly enough in truth),through a labyrinth of dreary glens and hollows and into the heart of that dismal mountain of Ben Alder.
[27]Village fair.