nd
groanings. I was so terrified that I caught hold of my bicycle and
tried to mount, but I was obliged to desist as I had not a particle of
strength in my limbs. Then to assure myself the moving of the tree was
not an illusion, I rubbed my eyes, pinched myself, called aloud; but
it made no difference--the rustling, bending, and tossing still
continued. Summing up courage, I stepped into the road to get a closer
view, when to my horror my feet kicked against something, and, on
looking down, I perceived the body of an English soldier, with a
ghastly wound in his chest. I gazed around, and there, on all sides of
me, from one end of the valley to the other, lay dozens of
bodies,--bodies of men and horses,--Highlanders and English,
white-cheeked, lurid eyes, and bloody-browed,--a hotch-potch of livid,
gory awfulness. Here was the writhing, wriggling figure of an officer
with half his face shot away; and there, a horse with no head; and
there--but I cannot dwell on such horrors, the very memory of which
makes me feel sick and faint. The air, that beautiful, fresh mountain
air, resounded with their moanings and groanings, and reeked with the
smell of their blood. As I stood rooted to the ground with horror, not
knowing which way to look or turn, I suddenly saw drop from the ash,
the form of a woman, a Highland girl, with bold, handsome features,
raven black hair, and the whitest of arms and feet. In one hand she
carried a wicker basket, in the other a knife, a broad-bladed,
sharp-edged, horn-handled knife. A gleam of avarice and cruelty came
into her large dark eyes, as, wandering around her, they rested on the
rich facings of the English officers' uniforms. I knew what was in
her mind, and--forgetting she was but a ghost--that they were all
ghosts--I moved heaven and earth to stop her. I could not. Making
straight for a wounded officer that lay moaning piteously on the
ground, some ten feet away from me, she spurned with her slender,
graceful feet, the bodies of the dead and dying English that came in
her way. Then, snatching the officer's sword and pistol from him, she
knelt down, and, with a look of devilish glee in her glorious eyes,
calmly plunged her knife into his heart, working the blade backwards
and forwards to assure herself she had made a thorough job of it.
Anything more hellish I could not have imagined, and yet it fascinated
me--the girl was so fair, so wickedly fair and shapely. Her act of
cruelty over, she sp