the bodies of a couple of wounded and exhausted countrymen, ere he could
again struggle to his feet, the horse of more than one spurring rider
had trampled over him, and he lay disabled and helpless, at the mercy of
any dragoon who might chance to ride that way.

"'The Lord hath afflicted me in the day of His fierce anger,'" groaned
the Covenanter. "'He hath made my strength to fall; the Lord hath
delivered me into their hands, from whom I am not able to rise up.'"

"Aye!" whimpered a wounded man who lay partly across the Borderer's
legs. "'The Lord was as an enemy; He hath swallowed up Israel.' And I'm
thinkin', 'gin He send nae help, and that sune, we're no muckle better
than deid men. Eh! weary fa' the day I left my ain pleugh stilts, an' my
ain fireside."

"Na, na, freend. He that setteth his hand to the plough, let him not
look back," answered the Borderer. "'Gin I win oot o' this, I trow I'll
'hew Agag in pieces before the Lord,' or a's dune. We will yet smite the
Philistines, destroy utterly the Amalakites! Aye! smite them hip and
thigh, even from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof!"

This fiery Borderer, Ringan Oliver by name, a man of gigantic strength
and great courage, a strong pillar of the Covenant, was a native of
Jedwater, where he and his fathers before him had for generations
occupied the small holding of Smailcleuchfoot. From the turmoil of the
disastrous flight after the battle of Bothwell Bridge, and from the
close search of the pursuing soldiers, Ringan Oliver did eventually
escape, sore battered, and not without much difficulty and danger, and
for many a month thereafter he lay in hiding; caves, holes in the moors,
and dripping peat hags, were his shelter, heather and ferns his bed,
many a time when the hunt waxed hot. And in 1680, hearing of the return
from Holland of the outlawed Hall of Haughhead, he speedily joined that
noted Covenanter, hiding with him, "lurking as privily as they could
about Borrowstounness and other places on both sides of the Firth of
Forth"; and he was with Hall and "worthy Mr. Cargill" when "these two
bloody hounds, the curates of Borrowstounness and Carriden, smelled out
Mr. Cargill and his companion," and sent to the Governor of
Borrowstounness that information which led to the death of one of the
three Covenanters. Mr. Cargill and Ringan Oliver got clear away from the
house at Queensferry where Colonel Middleton, single-handed, tried to
arrest them, but