“Would you?  Stand still till I find her.  I heard her move this minute.”

Babbie crouched upon a big stone and sat motionless while he groped for her.  Her breathing might have been tied now, as well as her mouth.  She heard him feeling for her, first with his feet and then with his hands, and swearing when his head struck against a tree.

“I ken you’re within hearing,” he muttered, “and I’ll hae you yet.  I have a gully-knife in my hand.  Listen!”

He severed a whin-stalk with the knife, and Babbie seemed to see the gleam of the blade.

“What do I mean by wanting to kill you?” he said, as if she had asked the question.  “Do you no ken wha said to me, ’Kill this woman?’ It was the Lord.  ‘I winna kill her,’ I said, ’but I’ll cart her out o’ the country.’  ‘Kill her,’ says He; ’why encumbereth she the ground?’”

He resumed his search, but with new tactics.  “I see you now,” he would cry, and rush forward perhaps within a yard of her.  Then she must have screamed had she had the power.  When he tied that neckerchief round her mouth he prolonged her life.

Then came the second hurricane of rain, so appalling that had Babbie’s hands been free she would have pressed them to her ears.  For a full minute she forgot Dow’s presence.  A living thing touched her face.  The horse had found her.  She recoiled from it, but its frightened head pressed heavily on her shoulder.  She rose and tried to steal away, but the brute followed, and as the rain suddenly exhausted itself she heard the dragging of the dogcart.  She had to halt.

Again she heard Dow’s voice.  Perhaps he had been speaking throughout the roar of the rain.  If so, it must have made him deaf to his own words.  He groped for the horse’s head, and presently his hand touched Babbie’s dress, then jumped from it, so suddenly had he found her.  No sound escaped him, and she was beginning to think it possible that he had mistaken her for a bush when his hand went over her face.  He was making sure of his discovery.

“The Lord has delivered you into my hands,” he said in a low voice, with some awe in it.  Then he pulled her to the ground, and, sitting down beside her, rocked himself backward and forward, his hands round his knees.  She would have bartered the world for power to speak to him.

“He wouldna hear o’ my just carting you to some other countryside,” he said confidentially. “’The devil would just blaw her back again, says He, ‘therefore kill her.’  ’And if I kill her,’ I says, ‘they’ll hang me.’  ‘You can hang yoursel’,’ says He.  ‘What wi’?’ I speirs.  ‘Wi’ the reins o’ the dogcart,’ says He.  ‘They would break,’ says I.  ‘Weel, weel,’ says He, ’though they do hang you, nobody’ll miss you.’  ‘That’s true,’ says I, ’and You are a just God.’”

He stood up and confronted her.

“Prisoner at the bar,” he said, “hae ye onything to say why sentence of death shouldna be pronounced against you?  She doesna answer.  She kens death is her deserts.”