Of small avail were the judge’s struggles; as well might an infant struggle in the folds of a python.  Ere even an elderly man’s scant breath was quite spent, he lay among the whins, bound hand and foot, trussed like a fowl, and with the upper part of his body and his head wrapped in the stifling folds of the great cloak.

That was the last of the outer world that Lord Durie knew or saw for many a long day.  His horse, with muddied saddle, and broken reins trailing on the ground (muddied and broken, no doubt, by the horse rolling), was found next day grazing on the links.  But of the judge, no trace.  He might—­as some, with the superstition of the day, were disposed to believe[1]—­have been spirited away by a warlock; or, perhaps, even like Thomas the Rhymer, he had vanished into Fairyland.  Tidings of him there were none.  The flowing waters of the Forth had effectually wiped out his horse’s tracks along the shore, and during the night a rising wind had effaced the footsteps of his captor in the dry loose sand between tide-mark and links.  Thus every trace of him was lost.  His body, maybe, might have drifted out to sea; perhaps it lay now by the rocks of some lonely shore, or on the sands, with mouth a-wash and dead hands playing idly with the lapping water.  Wife and family mourned as for one dead.  And after the first nine days’ wonder, even in Parliament House and Law Courts, for lack of food speculation as to his fate languished and died.  A successor filled his office.

[1:  In the seventeenth century belief in witchcraft was almost at its height over the whole of Europe, and in Scotland the hunt after witches and warlocks was peculiarly vindictive.  To obtain confession, the most incredible tortures—­as cruel as anything practised by Red Indians on their prisoners—­were inflicted on accused persons, men and women, and escape was seldom possible for these poor creatures.  Nor were such beliefs and practices confined to the benighted times of the seventeenth century.  Even as late as 1722, in Sutherlandshire, a woman was burned for witchcraft.  Her crime was that she had transformed her own daughter into a pony, and had ridden her throughout an entire night.  Conclusive proof of the charge was found in the fact that the poor woman’s daughter was lame afterwards both in hands and feet.

Nothing was too absurd, no charge too wicked or too childish, to obtain universal belief in those times.]

Meantime, bound to the saddle in front of his captor, by little-known hill paths the judge had been borne swiftly through the night.  The long, melancholy wail of a whaup, the eerie hoot of an owl, at times smote dully on his ear; but to all his entreaties and his questions no human voice made answer; in stony silence his abductor rode steadily on.  Over hill and dale, over rough ground and smooth, splashing through marshy soil where the hoofs of the heavily laden horse sucked juicily, through burns, and across sodden peaty