o find the
scaling ladders too short to be of any use, but a small postern gate was
speedily and quietly undermined. Drifting sleet, growling thunder, and
the wails of the wind drowned all sounds of the assault, and soon there
was no further need for concealment, for the lower court of the castle
was theirs. The guard started up, to find sword-blades at their throats;
two of them were left dead, and the rest were speedily overpowered.
Buccleuch, the fifth man in, gave the command to proclaim aloud their
triumph:

"'Now sound out trumpets!' quoth Buccleuch;
'Let's waken Lord Scroope right merrilie!'
Then loud the Warden's trumpet blew--
_'O wha daur meddle wi' me?'_"

While Buccleuch himself kept watch at the postern, two dozen stout
moss-troopers now rushed to the castle gaol, a hundred yards from the
postern gate, forced the door of Kinmont Willie's prison, and found him
there chained to the wall, and carried him out, fetters and all, on the
back of "the starkest man in Teviotdale."

"Stand to it!" cried Buccleuch--so says the traitor, a man from the
English side, who afterwards acted as informer to the English
Warden--"for I have vowed to God and my Prince that I would fetch out of
England, Kinmont, dead or alive."

Shouts of victory in strident Scottish voices, the crash of picks on
shattered doors and ruined mason-work, and that arrogant, insolent,
oft-repeated blast from the trumpet of him whom Scrope described in his
report to the Privy Council as "the capten of this proud attempt," were
not reassuring sounds to the Warden of the English Marches, his deputy,
and his garrison. Five hundred Scots at least--so did Scrope swear to
himself and others--were certainly there, and there was no gainsaying
the adage that "Discretion is the better part of valour." So, in the
words of the historian, he and the others "did keip thamselffis close."

But no sooner had the rescue party reached the banks of the Eden than
the bells of Carlisle clanged forth a wild alarm. Red-tongued flames
from the beacon on the great tower did their best, in spite of storm and
sleet, to warn all honest English folk that a huge army of Scots was on
the war-path, and that the gallows on Haribee Hill had been insulted by
the abduction of its lawful prey.

"We scarce had won the Staneshaw-bank,
When a' the Carlisle bells were rung,
And a thousand men on horse and foot,
Cam' wi' the keen Lord Scroope alon