No light matter was it to harry that corbie’s nest.  Carlisle Castle was a strong castle, strongly garrisoned, and to make a raid on an English town was a bold attempt indeed.  But fear was a thing unknown to the Border reivers, and the flower of them rode with Buccleuch that night—­close on his horse’s heels Wat o’ Harden, Walter Scott of Goldielands, and Kinmont’s own four stalwart sons—­Jock, Francie, Geordie, and Sandy.  As the dark night hours wore on, sleet and wind were reinforced by a thunderstorm.

     “And when we left the Staneshaw-bank,
     The wind began full loud to blaw,
     But ’twas wind and weet, and fire and sleet,
     When we came beneath the castle wa’.”

When the besiegers reached the castle they found some of the watch asleep, and the rest sheltering indoors from the storm.  The outside of the castle was left to take care of itself.  It was dismaying to find the scaling ladders too short to be of any use, but a small postern gate was speedily and quietly undermined.  Drifting sleet, growling thunder, and the wails of the wind drowned all sounds of the assault, and soon there was no further need for concealment, for the lower court of the castle was theirs.  The guard started up, to find sword-blades at their throats; two of them were left dead, and the rest were speedily overpowered.  Buccleuch, the fifth man in, gave the command to proclaim aloud their triumph: 

“‘Now sound out trumpets!’ quoth Buccleuch; ‘Let’s waken Lord Scroope right merrilie!’ Then loud the Warden’s trumpet blew—­ ’O wha daur meddle wi’ me?’”

While Buccleuch himself kept watch at the postern, two dozen stout moss-troopers now rushed to the castle gaol, a hundred yards from the postern gate, forced the door of Kinmont Willie’s prison, and found him there chained to the wall, and carried him out, fetters and all, on the back of “the starkest man in Teviotdale.”

“Stand to it!” cried Buccleuch—­so says the traitor, a man from the English side, who afterwards acted as informer to the English Warden—­“for I have vowed to God and my Prince that I would fetch out of England, Kinmont, dead or alive.”

Shouts of victory in strident Scottish voices, the crash of picks on shattered doors and ruined mason-work, and that arrogant, insolent, oft-repeated blast from the trumpet of him whom Scrope described in his report to the Privy Council as “the capten of this proud attempt,” were not reassuring sounds to the Warden of the English Marches, his deputy, and his garrison.  Five hundred Scots at least—­so did Scrope swear to himself and others—­were certainly there, and there was no gainsaying the adage that “Discretion is the better part of valour.”  So, in the words of the historian, he and the others “did keip thamselffis close.”

But no sooner had the rescue party reached the banks of the Eden than the bells of Carlisle clanged forth a wild alarm.  Red-tongued flames from the beacon on the great tower did their best, in spite of storm and sleet, to warn all honest English folk that a huge army of Scots was on the war-path, and that the gallows on Haribee Hill had been insulted by the abduction of its lawful prey.