Elspeth in the double dykes—­alone—­and at night!  Oh, how Tommy would have liked to strike himself now!  She must have believed his wicked lie after all, and being so religious she had gone to—­He gave himself no time to finish the thought.  The vital thing was that she was in peril, he seemed to hear her calling to him, “Oh, Tommy, come quick! oh, Tommy, oh, Tommy!” and in an agony of apprehension he ran after her.  But by the time he got to the beginning of the double dykes he knew that she must be at the end of them, and in the Painted Lady’s maw, unless their repute by night had blown her back.  He paused on the Coffin Brig, which is one long narrow stone; and along the funnel of the double dykes he sent the lonely whisper, “Elspeth, are you there?” He tried to shout it, but no boy could shout there after nightfall in the Painted Lady’s time, and when the words had travelled only a little way along the double dykes, they came whining back to him, like a dog despatched on uncanny work.  He heard no other sound save the burn stealing on tiptoe from an evil place, and the uneasy rustling of tree-tops, and his own breathing.

The Coffin Brig remains, but the double dykes have fallen bit by bit into the burn, and the path they made safe is again as naked as when the Kingoldrum Jacobites filed along it, and sweer they were, to the support of the Pretender.  It traverses a ridge and is streaked with slippery beech-roots which like to fling you off your feet, on the one side into a black burn twenty feet below, on the other down a pleasant slope.  The double dykes were built by a farmer fond of his dram, to stop the tongue of a water-kelpie which lived in a pool below and gave him a turn every night he staggered home by shouting, “Drunk again, Peewitbrae!” and announcing, with a smack of the lips, that it had a bed ready for him in the burn.  So Peewitbrae built two parallel dykes two feet apart and two feet high, between which he could walk home like a straight man.  His cunning took the heart out of the brute, and water-kelpies have not been seen near Thrums since about that time.

By day even girls played at palaulays here, and it was a favorite resort of boys, who knew that you were a man when you could stand on both dykes at once.  They also stripped boldly to the skin and then looked doubtfully at the water.  But at night!  To test your nerves you walked alone between the double dykes, and the popular practice was to start off whistling, which keeps up the courage.  At the point where you turned to run back (the Painted Lady after you, or so you thought) you dropped a marked stone, which told next day how far you had ventured.  Corp Shiach long held the championship, and his stone was ostentatiously fixed in one of the dykes with lime.  Tommy had suffered at his hands for saying that Shovel’s mark was thirty yards farther on.