“Well, then, east, ye see, we have the muirs,” said Alan.  “Once there, David, it’s mere pitch-and-toss.  Out on yon bald, naked, flat place, where can a body turn to?  Let the red-coats come over a hill, they can spy you miles away; and the sorrow’s in their horses’ heels, they would soon ride you down.  It’s no good place, David; and I’m free to say, it’s worse by daylight than by dark.”

“Alan,” said I, “hear my way of it.  Appin’s death for us; we have none too much money, nor yet meal; the longer they seek, the nearer they may guess where we are; it’s all a risk; and I give my word to go ahead until we drop.”

Alan was delighted.  “There are whiles,” said he, “when ye are altogether too canny and Whiggish to be company for a gentleman like me; but there come other whiles when ye show yoursel’ a mettle spark; and it’s then, David, that I love ye like a brother.”

The mist rose and died away, and showed us that country lying as waste as the sea; only the moorfowl and the pewees crying upon it, and far over to the east, a herd of deer, moving like dots.  Much of it was red with heather; much of the rest broken up with bogs and hags and peaty pools; some had been burnt black in a heath fire; and in another place there was quite a forest of dead firs, standing like skeletons.  A wearier-looking desert man never saw; but at least it was clear of troops, which was our point.

We went down accordingly into the waste, and began to make our toilsome and devious travel towards the eastern verge.  There were the tops of mountains all round (you are to remember) from whence we might be spied at any moment; so it behoved us to keep in the hollow parts of the moor, and when these turned aside from our direction to move upon its naked face with infinite care.  Sometimes, for half an hour together, we must crawl from one heather bush to another, as hunters do when they are hard upon the deer.  It was a clear day again, with a blazing sun; the water in the brandy bottle was soon gone; and altogether, if I had guessed what it would be to crawl half the time upon my belly and to walk much of the rest stooping nearly to the knees, I should certainly have held back from such a killing enterprise.

Toiling and resting and toiling again, we wore away the morning; and about noon lay down in a thick bush of heather to sleep.  Alan took the first watch; and it seemed to me I had scarce closed my eyes before I was shaken up to take the second.  We had no clock to go by; and Alan stuck a sprig of heath in the ground to serve instead; so that as soon as the shadow of the bush should fall so far to the east, I might know to rouse him.  But I was by this time so weary that I could have slept twelve hours at a stretch; I had the taste of sleep in my throat; my joints slept even when my mind was waking; the hot smell of the heather, and the drone of the wild bees, were like possets to me; and every now and again I would give a jump and find I had been dozing.