“There’s bluid on him!” cried one who had been vainly essaying to clap a battered hat on to the head of the form that lay unconscious in the mud.  A hard task it was presently, when his senses began to return, to get the wounded sailor unsteadily on his legs; a harder to get him home.  The captain could give but a poor account of how he came to be lying there; thickly and indistinctly he tried to explain that he had laid a course for his own moorings, and had been keeping a bright look-out, when suddenly he had been brought up all standing, and he thought he must have run bows on into some other craft, for he remembered no more than getting a crack over his figurehead.  Morning was treading on the heels of night before Hislop and Wallace had got the damaged man home and had left him safely stowed in bed, and themselves were peacefully snoring, unconscious of coming trouble.

A day or two passed quietly, and the damaged man already was little the worse of his adventure.  Then, however, the rumour quickly spread that not only had the Captain been assaulted, but that he had been robbed.  Gossip flew from tongue to tongue, and folk began to look askance on Wallace and Hislop, muttering that “they aye kenned what was to be the outcome”; for who, thought they, but Wallace and Hislop could have been the robbers?  They had found him lying, the worse of liquor, having damaged his head in falling, and they had robbed him, either then or when they undressed him in his room, believing that he would have no recollection of what money he had carried that night, nor, indeed, much of the events of the entire evening.  It was all quite plain, said those amateur detectives.  They wondered what the fiscal was thinking of that he had not clapped the two in jail lang syne.  So it fell out that, almost before they realised their danger, the two men were at Jedburgh, being tried on a capital charge.

The evidence brought against them was for the most part of no great account, and the old sea captain was unable to say that either man had assaulted him, or, indeed, that he had any clear recollection of anything that had happened after he left the inn.  They might have got off—­indeed they would have got off—­but for one unfortunate circumstance, which in the eyes of the jury completely damned them.  In possession of one of them was found a guinea, which the captain had no hesitation in identifying as a peculiarly-marked coin which he had carried about with him for many years.  That was enough for the jury.  They and counsel for the prosecution would credit no explanation.

The story told by Hislop and Wallace was that on the night of the assault they had been drinking and playing cards in a public-house in Kelso; that late in the evening a soldier had come in and had joined in the game, losing a considerable sum; that in consequence of his losses he had produced a guinea, and had asked if any of the company could change it.  Hislop had given change, and the guinea found in his possession was that which he had got from the soldier.  “A story that would not for a moment hold water,” said counsel, when the unfortunate men failed to produce evidence in support of their story; and the judge, in his summing up, agreeing with the opinion of counsel for the prosecution, the jury brought in a verdict of guilty, and both men were condemned to be hanged.