Read Ebook: The Black Colonel by Milne James

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Ebook has 644 lines and 47791 words, and 13 pages

"Truth," said I quickly, gaining my tongue, "will force you to eat those words, for I knew nothing of all this. It will be a bitter meal for you to digest, if I, by good chance, am there to assist you."

"A Highland welcome will be yours," quoth he arrogantly; "a welcome as warm as if I were to bring my riding whip round your shoulders now."

His words, cracking as if they were a lash, stung me beyond endurance. I made a step to strike him, and we might have been at it, like common brawlers, only he saved us from that shame. He had been waiting with his left foot in the stirrup. When I drove at him he swung on to the back of Mack, who turned half round, as a spirited horse does in the process of being mounted. This threw his big body between us, but the Black Colonel leant down and said in my ear, "To our next meeting, my kinsman! May it be soon!"

Then he rode for an opening in the undergrowth which braided the lower slopes of the precipitous Pass, and I was left alone, a man all a-wonder, for events were growing beyond me, as they do when suddenly we find our whole personal fortune, even our spiritual destiny, put to the ordeal of the unexpected.

How shall I tell, with proper restraint and yet efficiency, what followed the going of the Black Colonel on his black horse?

The Pass, wherein we had met so sharply, lies almost due east and due west. You would have a good idea of its appearance, if you were to suppose a hill twice as long from east to west as it is broad from north to south. Then imagine its length sliced in two, and each half, by force of dead weight, falling away from the other. Heather and whins had seeded on the sliced faces, and after them the hardy silver birch and the hardier green fir had sprung up. Nature makes coverings for the sores suffered by Mother Earth, as a dog licks a bruise until the hair grows again.

The strong Highland winds and the heavy Highland rains and snows had wrinkled the riven hill in a hundred ways. Its twin faces were warted with rocks, from which most of the soil had been washed away, leaving them as though suspended in mid-air. Waters, draining from the higher hills, had run down those faces, making ribboned scores to the bottom. There had been constant falls of earth from above, and here and there a large tree had been thrown over the abyss, and, in that position, holding on by its roots, had taken a new lease of life.

Thanks then to Nature, working for long years, the twin, or rather the divorced hill-cheeks which, at their separation, were raw earth, now had a covering of undergrowth and overgrowth. It would be dead in the winter when the sap is down, budding in the spring when the sap rises, green in the summer when it has run into leafage, brown in the autumn when the storage roots begin to call their own back again.

A sort of rough road, worn by usage, as a short-cut for the folk of the region, ran on the level between the halves of the Pass. Big rocks fallen from above lay around, and I confusedly sat down beside one of these. It broke the snellish wind which had begun to blow with the first dawn, as it often does in those parts, a blast to the parting night and the coming day.

Presently a shot was fired from one end of the Pass and I could make no mistake as to the weapon used. It was the military flintlock, a clumsy gun, better suited to scare crows than shoot straight, but it was the best we had.

A warning, a signal for some purpose, I judged, because it was followed by what I can only describe as a waiting silence. You had the echoes of the shot scattering up the heights of the Pass, and then a tense feeling in the atmosphere, as if a hundred men expected an answer. It came, in another straggling shot, from the other end of the Pass.

Next there was solid evidence that what I heard had been a pre-arranged signal, to which a plan of campaign attached. At each end of the Pass I saw the red-coats multiply until they formed faint bunches of colour. Who, I wonder, first clothed the soldier man in scarlet, for an easier target he could not offer, even to an ill-shooting flint-lock. Scarlet and the pageantry of courts, scarlet and the capturing of women's hearts, but for the soldier himself, when he gets down to his trade, it is scarlet and death.

As I waited intently and looked, I could almost count, up on the brows of the Pass, how many red-coats the sentinels of our first alarm had grown into. They made dots, moving against the skyline, and, as I next made out, they were in concert with other knots of scarlet, active at the end of the Pass below. I did not need to be a soldier of some instinct, which I hope I always have been, to grasp the order and purpose of those doings.

Clearly the plan was to search the bottom of the Pass and its northern top with men who would meet midway, two parties below, and two above. The Black Colonel could not, therefore, get away by the western end, which led to his habitual fastness up the valley of the Dee, for the door of escape was sealed. No hope could lie south, or east, because that would be to come out into open country where numbers would capture any fugitive. There was nothing but the northern side, no possibility of escape except up its stern face, and it was a forlorn possibility, alike on account of the terrible climb and because the red-coats were already there, shaping to cut off even an attempt in this direction.

What would the Black Colonel do? What was he doing? I wondered, and two thoughts came to me, one that as an animal pursued ever makes for home, if only to reach it and die, so a hunted man will do likewise, should there be the smallest prospect of success; the other that possibly it is the sounder doctrine to face great perils in getting clear, when you are sure of an open road and a place of refuge, rather than seek deliverance by an easier door and then land in unknown plights.

True strategy in any tight place, military or civil, is based on a knowledge of human nature, what the enemy will do. That entails the gift of imagination, and there was a touch of it in the disposition going on before my eyes. The knots of red on the bottom pathway drew together, and the red strings on the northern height were also approaching each other. They progressed warily, but I could see an occasional gleam of bare bayonets against the skyline, silhouetted by the trees.

Presently a rumble of displaced stones reached my ear from the other side of the Pass. My eye searched for the spot, halfway up, where the trees grew sparser and the hard, sharp rocks gained the dominance. Out from this streak of trees and rocks rode the Black Colonel on black Mack, and I gasped at his dare-devilry.

I understood instinctively that, by cautious pilotage, probably dismounting and leading his horse at places, he had managed, undiscovered, to get thus far up that northern cliff, for it was almost sheer. But he must next make the upper, still steeper half, with little shelter from the on-coming flint-locks, and the worst kind of footing for Mack. Could any horse foaled of a mare climb that crag and bear his rider to safety, for this was the double, doubtful issue?

When, a moment later, the soldiers caught sight of the Black Colonel they halted in mute surprise, then shouted, as a dog barks on sight of a quarry, the killing instinct in man and beast finding tongue. It was instantly a gamble of the pursued and the pursuers, to escape or to capture, the keenest yet least noble game which can be played, that with a human life for the prize. The Black Colonel, a man with a bar-sinister, but a remarkable man, was the hunted, and two companies of King George's soldiers, decent fellows enough each man of them, were the hunters. The outcome depended chiefly on a horse, but such a horse, Mack!

The King's word had gone round the countryside that our rebel and canteran was to be taken alive or dead. That is a mandate which loses its dividing line when the guns begin to shoot. Therefore, while the soldiers shouted, on getting sight of the Black Colonel, they also began to fire wildly at him. The immediate range was too far for harm to hit him, but it would shorten swiftly enough. Realizing this, he stretched himself along his horse's neck, thus showing a smaller target, and, as I felt sure, whispering words of encouragement into the great creature's ear.

The tradition is that the Black Colonel used his dirk for spur on that ride, but I, who was a witness, know better. He did not need to use it, and would not have done so in any event, loving Mack as he did. His soft Gaelic whisper of bidding was his only spur, and up, up, slowly, yet surely, went the gallant animal. Ah! you should have seen it all. It was fine.

Mack's shapely, muscular body was stretched like whip-cord against the dull grey of the broken precipice. You could fancy you heard the very cracking of his sinews as he rose foot by foot. The reins lay on his neck, and I saw the Black Colonel slip oft the bridle, with its heavy iron bit, to give him the uttermost chance. The rivulet of stones which his hoofs had set going grew into a stream, telling me that, while ever he lost a little on the treacherous ground, he more than made it good with the next stride.

The sight so moved me that I nearly shouted in admiration and quite forgot the pursuers. The soldiers in the hollow of the Pass had met and were loading and shooting with a certain discipline. The Black Colonel's real danger, however, was not from this fusilade but from the intercepting soldiers at the top of the Pass. Theirs had been a longer and rougher way to travel; would they, by the time he reached the summit, if reach it he did, be near enough to capture or shoot him?

Up, up, still panted the noble Mack, almost exhausted, until, with a final effort, he gained the last ridge and, oh, what a relief! His flanks heaved, his beautiful head dropped to the heather, and I could see that his forequarters had turned from black to a lather of white foam, testimony to the great strain of the climb. The Black Colonel sprang from the saddle, walked to the edge of the crag, took his dirk from his garter and put it to his lips. He was vowing the oath of a "broken" Highlander, to be revenged, or thanking Providence for his escape, perhaps both.

He did all this, as I could follow, in the grey morning light, coolly, nay disdainfully, seeming to regard the bullets from the converging sharp-shooters as just so many bees buzzing harmlessly about him. Next, he tightened the girth, which Mack's panting had loosened, bridled the horse again, vaulted lightly into the saddle, touched his bonnet in mock salutation, and rode over the hills for home.

There were those who saw a white horse go up the strath that morning with, as they swore, the Black Colonel for rider, though all knew the actual colour of Mack to be black. There were others who said it was Death on his White Horse, and because a man died in the same small hours those mongers of destiny were believed.

If this were a story invented, and not a tale of true happenings, there would be an end when the Black Colonel rode triumphantly from the Pass.

But, sitting alone and lonely a few days later in my room at Corgarff Castle, and reflecting on the affair, I said to myself that it was only the beginning. A drama of real life rarely closes with the hero in heroics, the heroine a-swoon in her beauty, and the world a-clap with admiration.

No doubt the Black Colonel had got away very well, almost as if he had leapt through a lighted window, with a resounding crash of broken glass. Well, there would be the fragments to gather up, for the fragments have always to be remembered, or they may cause harm. Here I was a fragment, and I asked myself into what basket I was to be gathered, because, you should know, the hills give those of us who dwell among them a sense of fate--of the inevitable.

I was awakened from these thoughts by the entrance of my lieutenant, who said, "Still sighing that you were out of the chase after the Black Colonel?"

I answered vaguely, "A soldier who is a real soldier, which I may or may not be, is always sorry to miss an enterprise, whether it be duty or merely an adventure."

"Well," he remarked, "you had not been long gone when word came from Braemar Castle that the Black Colonel was to be in the Pass of Ballater about midnight, meeting some unknown person, and asking us to help capture him. We saw nothing of the other person, whether man or woman."

He looked slyly at me, and I remembered having said to him that I had had a tryst to keep among the hills. You must not, I think, mislead people by telling what is untrue, but you need not tell everything if it is going to make mischief. Mostly it is poor policy to try and ram the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, down a man's throat, because your version of it may not be his, and, anyhow, it makes dry eating.

My thoughts have a habit of wandering, of dreaming dreams, often when they should be otherwise occupied, and isn't there a bunch of manuscript verse somewhere in testimony of the same? Knowing this the lieutenant lighted and smoked a pipe of American tobacco, then a novelty and a luxury in the Scottish Highlands. With a wink of the eye he asked, "Who was she, captain? Wench or maid?" And he pronounced the words in different tones, as if I needed to be instructed about the difference he implied by them. A man says nothing to an arch-pleasantry like that, unless he be no man and only a babbler and boaster of his conquests. Then he has had none, and is a liar. No sort of fellow more fills men with contempt, and women, by their woman's instinct, pass him by, for any confidence whatever, in word or in deed.

"Don't let it be one of the Black Colonel's flames," said the lieutenant with a laugh, as he went out again, without the answer he had not expected, being himself a gentleman. "It needs a long spoon to sup with that dark devil at any time, but come between him and his rustic gallantries and you'll need a longer spoon than Corgarff Castle happens to possess."

The Black Colonel and I, as you will have gathered, were on different sides in politics, though we belonged to neighbouring clans which had many associations; he a Farquharson, I a Gordon. He was Jock Farquharson of Inverey, the last of his house, as I can say looking back on him, and doomed, so a woman of second-sight had declared, when he was born, to be the last; while I, Ian Gordon, was a cadet of the Balmoral Gordons, captain in his Majesty's Highland Foot, with no more to expect than what my commission brought me, and that was little enough.

He was a Jacobite, keeping that rebel flame alive in the Aberdeenshire Highlands, when, on the heels of the "Forty-Five," a red and woeful time, we were half-heartedly scotching it with garrisons in the Castles of Braemar and Corgarff. Yes, I wore the scarlet tunic of King George, thanks to family circumstances which had woven themselves before I was born, but the tartan lay under it, next my heart. We were rivals in war, thrown on different sides by the fates which gamble so strangely with mere men. Was there to be a still more vital rivalry? As has been hinted, I had more than rumours of the Black Colonel's strange powers among women. What if he had Marget Forbes in his dark eye?

Wherever the heart is concerned you have intuition, and that is why a woman has more of such super-sense, or rather, I would say, of wonderously delicate feeling, than a man. She needs it, being oftener heart-strung, because the wells of her heart are more emotional.

I suspected, from the first, why the Black Colonel wanted to meet me, and for no other reason would I have consented to meet him. But our meeting had been so brief, so disturbed, so futile as regards its purpose, that I had got no light from him whatever. Still, ever since then I had been seeing, in the mirror of life, the face of Marget Forbes, a daughter of the clan whose name she bore, a handsome lass with a long pedigree, heiress to the lands of Corgarff, now forfeit for the Jacobite cause, when they should come back to her line, and incidentally, but all importantly, a kinswoman both of Jock Farquharson and myself.

Memory is rarely honest with us, because it is imperfect, and unconsciously we tell the best account of things, but I fancy I was wondering on this text when there came at my door the sharp rap of bony, hurried knuckles. "Enter!" I said, and in marched the corporal of the guard. His hand went easily to the salute. He had a message in his face.

"What is it?" said I, for I expected nothing of moment, beyond a poor devil of a Jacobite captured, or a "sma' still" raided and its rude whisky drunk by the red-coat raiders until they were merrily "fou."

"Sir," he answered in the parade voice which the regular soldier soon acquires, this, softened by his nice Scots drawl, "Sir, there's a man outside an' he says he's a letter for you and that he maun gie it to yoursel'."

"What's he like? Where does he come from? Is he friend or no friend?"

"Canna' say, sir. I should think no friend. He's short and swack o' body, red of hair and face, wears a kilt o' Farquharson tartan, and winna' say where he comes frae. He has a letter for you, sir, and is to deliver it himself, an' that's a' he'll tell."

"Bring him in," I ordered, and in came, as, by now, I half expected, Red Murdo, the Black Colonel's henchman. I had seen him before, and by hearsay was more than familiar with his repute as an excellent servant to his not so excellent master.

"A letter," he whispered in his hoarse voice, as if he did not want the corporal to hear. I took the letter, and before I could even break the seal he was gone again, without motion of salute or further word, all quite in the Black Colonel's manner of doing things.

It was addressed "To Captain Ian Gordon," and when I opened the envelope and unfolded the contents I found them to commence with these same words and no other form of ceremony. I instantly knew the strong, irregular, aggressive and yet persuasive handwriting to be that of the Black Colonel, but unconsciously, as a girl tries at the end of a story to find whether happiness be there, I turned to the signature--"your kinsman, Jock Farquharson of Inverey." What went before, when I had time to master it, was this:

"These greetings, which I am inditing in the cold safety of the Colonel's Bed, a fastness where no enemy has yet tracked me, though all my true friends in the countryside know the secret roads to it, will be delivered to you by my faithful Red Murdo, who deserves blessings, whereas I sometimes give him curses; and their purpose is to tell you explicitly why I asked you to meet me in the Pass the other evening, since events, on which I here offer no comment, made it impossible for us to have any plain, forthright talk.

"I'll reveal the heart of my business by recalling that there is a long association between our families, who have always been friends and enemies, and that the Corgarff Forbeses also come into this association, and continue it, in a fashion which takes me to our personal quarrel of Stuart and Guelph, because, by the exercise of a little ingenuity, such as is permissible, and a kinsmanship such as is proper, there may emerge good seasoning for us all.

"Pray remember that if the Corgarff Forbeses were to fail in issue, and there is only one life between them and that failure, the life of a young unmarried lady, I, by descent on the distaff side, which I need not outline in particularity, would be heir to the estates; only as a Jacobite outlawed, a broken man, I can inherit nothing, not even possess, little as it is now, my own in peace.

"But, if I am not ill-informed, and news travels among the hills as swiftly as, we are told, it travels in the desert, King George's advisers would gladly return the Corgarff estates to the Forbes family if that family had a strong man at its head and so such an influence as would keep the region, always a key to the Highlands, I will not exactly say in order for the German king, because that would be a tactless fashion of arranging, but wean it gradually from its sympathy for Prince Charlie, and his house of misadventure and ill-luck.

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