The Bothy on the Wild of Blairmore was an entrenched camp, for Stair was too good a general not to see to the state of his defences, to his victualling and armament from the beginning. So, though the moment of the attack was a surprise, its manner had long been foreseen. As Stair had repeatedly said, "The sea is never shut!"

Landing parties from the Britomart and Vandeleur had marched up the Valleys, and the Preventive men of all the West of Galloway had quietly gathered at Stranryan in order to co-operate with them.

It was Stair who stumbled upon a picket of the Britomart men hidden among the eastern sand-dunes. He was on his way to meet Joseph, Whitefoot as usual at his heels, when suddenly the dog sprang forward, eyes blazing, hackles stiff, his nose high in the air, and his teeth bared, ready to bound. Stair restrained him and crept to the lip of a little sandy cup where, from the midst of a clump of dry saw-edged sea-grass, he could look down on a group of men busied about their soup-kettle.

"Silly fools," he muttered to himself, "they do not know that the first handful of heather and dried bracken they throw on their fire, will send a skarrow to the sky that will warn every soul within twenty miles. If I had not been a blind idiot, and thinking of something else, I should have seen it long before I came so far."

And looking over his shoulder he saw to the right, to the left, and behind him towards the cliffs seaward, multitudinous pulsing ruddy camp-fire blooms, waking, waxing and falling, that told of a general investment of their fastness, so long secure. In spite of the surprise, however, Stair managed to meet Joseph and to warn him that nothing further must be attempted except by means of Whitefoot. He introduced the wise collie and made him give his two front paws to the confidential servant in token of amity, while he repeated his name over and over again—"Joseph! Joseph!"

"Ao-ouch!" whispered Whitefoot, as much as to say, "Of course I understand! Do you think that I, Whitefoot Garland, am some silly puppy gambolling through life?"

For Whitefoot was a grave dog and had had to do with many very serious things indeed—things which touched even the life of his master. So it is no wonder that at this time of day he rather resented pains being taken with his education. It was like setting a double-first to construe the first book of CÆsar.

Stair returned to the Bothy with his heart heavy and many thoughts churning within him. He reached the Wild safely with nothing worse to report than the fact that he was fired upon by a sentry, which warned him that he must not come that way too often. He did not enter directly into the Bothy, where, as he knew, Julian Wemyss would be doing an hour's reading before turning in. Instead he betook himself to the dam which his brothers and the band had constructed at the close of the autumnal peat-leading.

All the winter the Sunk of Blairmore had been full of black moss water. For the greater part of the cold weather it had been frozen and snow-bound. But now, swollen with spring rains, the ditches of the Sunk were lipping to the overflow. Stair took the great iron gelleck and with a blow or two knocked back the clutches of the flood-barriers. Then flinging down the huge crow-bar, he fled for his life, the ink-black water hissing and spurting at his heels. It was not noisy, that water. It ran silently, almost oilily, but all the same it followed after, and it was swirling black about Stair Garland's knees as he scrambled up the high platform of the Bothy, at the place where you could dig out the sand and sea-shells of a past age from among the roots of the heather.

"That will put out one or two of their fires for them!" he exclaimed triumphantly, and even as he spoke he heard cries announcing danger, hasty preparations for flight, while the red "skarrows" in the sky winked only once or twice more and were then wiped out clean all along the east and west borders of the Wild. Only on the high southern cliffs the fires still shone. And Stair knew that it was thither that the drowned-out investing parties would be compelled to retreat.

From the north there came no sign, for there alone no fires had been lighted. But the Wild spread the farthest and was most dangerous and inaccessible in that direction. Only morning would reveal the solitary tiny zigzag of path which connected them with their fellows, a path which Stair believed to be quite impossible—unless—and here a suspicion went flashing through his mind which sent him indoors with a bound. No, Eben the Spy was lying on his bed apparently sound asleep.

Stair gazed at him with a bitter smile.

"That's what comes of having a bad record against you," he murmured, "the man may be quite innocent. He may be really asleep. Yet as things are I dare not treat him as if he were either. To-morrow he must do a little scouting for us. He shall feel for the enemy, and if they fire upon him—well and good, then he has not brought the enemy down upon us. But because of his past, he must undergo the ordeal by fire and water.

"Well, we will let him sleep, but all the same I shall keep an eye upon him to see that he does not take French leave during the night!"

Stair called Mr. Wemyss from his reading. The ex-ambassador thought that a new parcel of books had arrived, and made haste to obey. He saw the door of the Bothy open and Stair, a large, dark shape vaguely outlined against a rosy illumination, the cause of which he did not understand, leaning easily with his shoulder against the lintel-post, blocking all exit.

"Well, Stair," said Julian, "did you find Joseph? Had he any word of the Good Intent?"

"I did find Joseph," said Stair curtly, "and it will be a long time before I find him again. Do you see that?"

"That" referred to the numerous fires which were now being lighted on the heights of the sand-hills, by the fugitives from the camps in the hollows of the Wild, who had been driven out by the invading waters of the dam constructed by the Garland brothers and their followers.

Julian Wemyss gazed a little stupidly. His eyes were unaccustomed to the dark, and he blinked like one who finds a difficulty in believing the evidence of his senses.

"Are these really fires?" he asked, covering his eyes with his hand.

Stair softly shut the door behind the two of them. It would not now matter whether the spy were asleep or awake.

"Now do you understand?" he said softly.

"They are fires, and we are surrounded by water. You have let out the dam!"

Stair sketched his night's adventure, with his hand on Whitefoot's head, who sat staring out at the winking fires gravely and wisely, as one who knew all about it and would have a great deal to say to the matter before all was done.

"Ah," said Julian Wemyss, "this is no chance business. They have been preparing it with the long hand. But why did they not charge from all sides at once and so rush the Bothy?"

"They could not," said Stair simply, "of course there were three easy paths then where there is only one very difficult one now. But, you see, they did not know that. They did not know and they do not know the strength of our garrison, or how soon we hope to be reinforced."

"I suppose," Julian whispered, "you have every confidence—?" And he indicated the ulterior of the Bothy where the ex-spy was sleeping.

"No," murmured Stair, "but I shall be sure to-morrow as soon as the sun is up. Possible treachery within the camp is not the sort of thing one can afford to let drag!"

"Provisions?" queried Julian.

"For a year!" said Stair.

"Water?"

"As you see!" And he swept his arm largely round the circle of the Wild. "We shall make a filter with a little granite sand (silver sand they call it). After passing it two or three times through this, the peat water will be fairly palatable. At least we shall need to put up with it!" And then Stair communicated to his fellow-prisoner his idea of the defence of the Bothy.

"We do not want to kill any of these men who have been ordered to come and starve us out," he said. "You have your house and your position. It is true that you have killed Lord Wargrove, but if he had not been a friend of the Regent and a confidant of Lyonesse, you might have walked the streets of London after a month or so, and no man would have dreamed of disquieting you. I am in a wholly different case. They are eager to see me hanged, and would not hesitate to make it high treason—"

"High treason only affects the person of the King," said Julian Wemyss; "not that that will help matters much, the Regent's judges being what they are."

"At any rate," said Stair, "killing a blue-jacket or an exciseman will do us no good, and I am for firing blanks except in the very last extremity—of course, if it is our life or that of another man, I think we owe it to ourselves to see that the funeral is the other fellow's!"

Stair Garland slept that night outside, wrapped in his plaid, with Whitefoot crouched in the corner of it. The watcher's back was against the door of the Bothy, the key of which was in his pocket. He was taking care that his ex-spy did not take it into his head to escape the ordeal of the morning.

At daybreak Stair rose to his feet and shook himself comprehensively. His limbs were stiff with the cold and damp. Whitefoot had been alert most of the night. He was unquiet and whined occasionally to himself, but very softly. The fires on the sand-dunes agitated him—perhaps also the unrest of his master, who with his own comfortable bed within a dozen yards, had chosen so incommodious a way of spending the night. Every few minutes Whitefoot aroused himself and paced stealthily round the little hut, his head in the air, sniffing the four winds for information. He tried the black lipping water with his paw and shook it dry again. That also he did not understand. However, he believed that Stair Garland did. The knowledge comforted him and sent him back to the nook of his master's plaid, where he nestled down without turning round, which was perhaps the most wonderful accomplishment of this wonderful dog.

Whether Eben McClure, ex-superintendent of recruitment and common informer, slept well or not during the first night of the investing of the Bothy of the Wild, is known only to himself. He at least pretended to pass an excellent night. The pretence was forced upon him by Stair Garland camping outside, his rifle ready to his hand, and the ceaseless patter of Whitefoot's alert sentry-go going round and round the hut.

By half-past five the day was beginning to come. Stair entered the Bothy, shook Eben by the shoulder and bade him prepare breakfast. Meals must now be taken as occasion served, and the whole business of their daily life would have to be reorganized. For they were now a city in a state of siege.

Eben knew too well the conditions of his life's tenure, to refuse to do anything Stair Garland bade him. He believed that while in the company of any of the band, he existed only by sufferance and had reason to be grateful for each hour of life vouchsafed to him.

So he made the porridge without demur, just as he had gone to bed fully dressed so as to be ready for any demand that the night might bring.

The meal being properly stirred, the porridge was poured into three wooden platters. Then Stair took a lump of fine Glenanmays salt butter from the firkin and dabbed it into the centre of each dish, the same amount for each. After which he went and knocked on the thin partition of Julian Wemyss's cubicle. Mr. Wemyss was already on foot, and had, in fact, almost finished the elaborate toilette which was habitual to him.

He saluted Stair and the spy with his usual calm civility, and with one glance at the stained, "up-all-night" look of Stair's dress, he gathered the truth. Stair Garland had been watching while he slept. He blushed a little at the thought, and resolved that for the future he would do his full share of night duty. Nay, even to-day he would see to it that Stair got his proper hours of repose. In the meantime, however, Stair's mind was full of quite another matter.

The loyalty of Eben McClure must be tested, and Stair was only waiting for the end of the meal in order to instruct the victim how he was to prove it. The door was open and Eben sat on the inner side of the table facing it. Between him and the light were Stair Garland and Stair Garland's gun. As usual Mr. Wemyss sat at the end of the table nearest to the fire.

"Eben," said Stair Garland, setting his elbows squarely on the table and leaning forward, "you are an intelligent man and you will understand that since the Bothy has been surrounded by an armed force and we may expect an assault any hour, your position has very much changed. We took you, to a very great extent, on your own statement. Now I do not think that you have sold us, or that you have brought these people down upon us. But we need to be sure. It will be obvious to you that if we are to depend on a third man in our midst, that third man must have all our confidence. Now, this is what I intend that you shall do. You and I shall follow the path as far as the big peat knoll. There we shall be in full view of the posts of the Preventive men. Having arrived there, you will appear to break from me after a struggle, and run as hard as you can towards the north in the direction of the excisemen. They will know you very well, having been your old cronies. You will have a white handkerchief in your hand which you will wave to them. If they take that signal to mean that you are escaping, we on our side will understand that you have been at your old tricks. If they fire—then you are cleared and can turn and come back to us. I will protect your retreat. Now do you quite understand?"

Frequently in the exercise of his profession, Eben had need of indomitable courage, but now perhaps more than ever. Yet he was steadfast.

"I see no reason why you should trust me," he said. "I am willing to take the risk. When shall we start?"

"Now," said Stair, and in a minute more he was marching his man along the narrowing pathway between the dark pools of peat water. "There is only one thing I have to say. Do not pass the dwarf thorn-tree at the big elbow. If you run past that, I shall know you have it in your mind to desert, and it will be my duty to shoot. You know I do not miss."

It was a grey day with a gentle wind, the sky of a teased pearl woolliness with curious warm tints in it here and there. The face of the moorland was generally black, sometimes broken by borders of vivid green about the pools, and along the path edges by the little rosy rootlets of the plant called Venus's Flytrap.

They came to the outlying peat knoll, where an extra supply of fuel had been left under shelter during the previous autumn. Quite half of it still remained, and the "fause-hoose," or cavernous pit left from the digging out of the peats, afforded the best of cover. From it Stair would be able to follow the spy with his rifle all the way to the posts of the Preventive men which had been established on the rising ground above the edge of the Wild. A portable semaphore stiffly flapped its arms as they looked, no doubt signalling their coming to other and more distant posts.

"There," said Stair, "they are all ready for you. Come outside and let us get our bit of a trial over. There is your handkerchief. As soon as you hear the bullets whistle, you can drop. Then turn about and crawl back to me."

"It does not seem to you somewhat cruel—this test?" said Eben McClure, looking wistfully at Stair. It was his only sign of weakness, and there are few who would have shown so little.

"No," said Stair, sternly, "when I think of those lads beaten insensible in the military prisons of your dÉpÔts or bleeding at the triangles—they gave Craig Easton a thousand lashes and he had had eight hundred of them before he died—I think I am letting you off easy. I ought to shoot you myself where you stand. And don't let me think too much about it or I may do it even yet. I am giving you your chance to be an honest man!"

They went together out into the open. Before them a little zigzag of pathway angled intricately among the sullen floods of the morass. The sky was pleasantly shell-tinted overhead. There was the way he must go. Never had life appeared so sweet to the spy.

But he went through his part like a man in a dream. He struggled with Stair Garland, and though he did not hear himself he shouted fiercely as if for life. It was very real indeed. Then suddenly he broke loose and ran down the narrow towpath of dry land between the ink-black pools. He was still shouting. He had forgotten to wave the handkerchief. Then suddenly before him he saw the thorn at the angle of the big elbow.

He longed for the rattle of muskets—either from before or behind. It did not seem to matter much to him now which it was to be. He felt desperate and forlorn, hating everybody—Stair Garland most of all.

"Hist—Skip! Crackle!" came a volley from far away to the north, and Eben cast himself down behind a heather bush to draw breath. They had fired, and he was a proven man. He had faced death to certify his truth to the salt he was eating, and now nothing remained but to withdraw as carefully as might be. He crawled backward, now scuttling from one little rickle of peats left forlornly out on the moor to the next sodden whin bush, the prickles of which yirked him as he threw himself down. Stair kept his word, and from his peatstack delivered a lively fire upon the men in the shelters on the northern hillsides.

Eben was very white when he came back and dropped limp among the peat. Stair said nothing, but for the first time he held out his hand. The spy had become a clean man again, and the same would be known from among all the folk from Nith Brig to the heuchs of the Back Shore of Leswalt. His kin would own him openly. Stonykirk parish was again free to him. Eben knew that he had not paid too dearly for his rehabilitation, for whatever the dangers he had faced or might be called upon to face, they were as nothing to the hate and opprobrium of the whole body of one's own people.