CHAPTER XXXVII

A STRANGE MEETING

It was approaching the evening of the third day after riding forth upon his mission when Sholto, sleepless yet quite unconscious of weariness, approached the loch of Carlinwark and the cottage of Brawny Kim.  West and south he had raised the Douglas country as it had never been raised before.  And now behind him every armiger and squire, every spearman and light-foot archer, was hasting Edinburgh-ward, eager to be first to succour the young and headstrong chief of his great house.

Sholto had ridden and cried the slogan as was his duty, without allowing his mind to dwell over much upon whether all might not arrive too late.  And ever as he rode out of village or across the desolate moors from castle to fortified farmhouse, it seemed that not he but some other was upon this quest.

Something sterner and harder stirred in his breast.  Light-hearted Sholto MacKim, the careless lad of the jousting day, the proud young captain of the Earl’s guard, was dead with all his vanity.  And in his place a man rode southward grim and determined, with vengeful angers a-smoulder in his bosom,—­hunger, thirst, love, the joy of living and the fear of death all being swallowed up by deadly hatred of those who had betrayed his master.

Maud Lindesay was doubtless within a few miles of Sholto, yet he scarcely gave even his sweetheart a thought as he urged his weary grey over the purple Parton moors towards the loch of Carlinwark and the little hamlet nestling along its western side under the ancient thorn trees of the Carlin’s hill.

He rode down over the green and empty Crossmichael braes on which the broom pods were crackling in the afternoon sunshine, through hollows where the corn lingered as though unwilling to have done with such a scene of beauty, and find itself mewed in dusty barns, ground in mills, or close pressed in thatched rick.  He breasted the long smooth rise and entered the woods which encircle the bright lakelet of Carlinwark, the pearl of all southland Scottish lochs.

With a strange sense of detachment he looked down upon the green sward between him and his mother’s gable end, upon which as a child he had wandered from dawn to dusk.  Then it was nearly as large as the world, and the grass was most comfortable to bare feet.  There were children playing upon it now, even as there had been of old, among them his own little sister Magdalen, whose hair was spun gold, and her eyes blue as the forget-me-not on the marshes of the Isle Wood.  The children were dressed in white, five little girls in all, as for a festal day, and their voices came upward to Sholto’s ear through the arches of the great beeches which studded the turf with pavilions of green shade, tenderly as they had done to that of William Douglas in the spring-time of the year.

The minor note, the dying fall of the innocent voices, tugged at his heartstrings.  He could hear little Magdalen leading the chorus: