“Then, by God!  I tell you it was my mother that you mishandled that day.  Draw! you bloody dog!  Draw!” shouted the now thoroughly roused Borderer, snatching from its scabbard the sabre of a dragoon who stood close at hand.

It was no great fight.  The cavalryman had doubtless by far the greater skill with the sabre; but drink muddled his brain and hampered his movements, and the whirlwind attack of the younger man gave no rest to his opponent nor opportunity to steady himself.  In little more than a minute the dragoon lay gasping out his life.

“Had ye rued what ye did, ye should hae been dealt wi’ only by your Maker,” muttered the Borderer as the dead man’s comrades bore away the body.  “Little did I look to see you this day after a’ they years, or to have your bluid on my hands.  It was an ill chance that brought us thegither again, and an ill day for me an’ mine that lang syne brought you into our quiet glen.”

But the incident did not end here.  The private soldier had slain his superior in rank, and but for the strenuous representations of his company commander and sure friend, a native of his own part of the Border, it had gone hard with Private Maxwell.

The story, as told to his captain, was this.  Maxwell, then a half-grown boy, lived with his mother in a lonely cottage in a quiet Dumfriesshire glen.  They came of decent folk, but were very poor, sometimes in the winter being even hard put to it to find sufficient food.  The father, and all the family but this one boy, were dead; the former had perished on the hill during a great snowstorm, and the sons, long after, had all died, swept off by an outbreak of smallpox.  Thus the widow and her one remaining boy were left almost in destitution; but by the exercise of severe economy and by hard work, they managed to cling to their little cottage.

One morning—­it was a day in the summer of 1746; the heather was bursting into bloom, shadows of great fleecy clouds trailed sleepily over the quiet hillsides, larks sang high in the heavens, blue-bells swung their heads lazily in the gentle breeze, and all things spoke of peace—­there came the tramp of horses down the glen, past the rocks where the rowan-trees grew, and so up to the cottage door.

“Hi, old lady!” shouted the sergeant in charge of a half-dozen dragoons, “we must ha’ some’at to eat and drink.  We’ve been scouring them infernal hills since break o’ day, and it’s time we picked a bit.”

“Weel, sirs,” said the poor widow, “it’s but little I hae gotten, but that little ye shall freely hae.”  And she brought them “lang kale” and butter, and for drink offered them new milk, saying, as she handed it to the man, that this was her whole stock.

“Whole stock!” growled one who did not relish such food, “whole stock!  A likely story!  I daresay, if the truth was known, the old hag’s feeding a rebel she’s got hidden away in some snug hole hereaway.”