ld man hastily to look round.
Curiosity had overcome her caution; the girl had ventured from her
shelter, and, standing behind Ringan, had been trying to see, past the
edge of the window, how things were going outside. Perhaps she had a
lover in the attacking party, and feared for his safety. Anyhow, as she
lent forward, forgetting her own danger, a bullet meant for the old man
found its billet in her throat. For a moment Ringan stood aghast, then
knelt by the dying girl, striving in vain to staunch the blood that
gushed from her wound. And as he realised that such a hurt was far
beyond his simple skill, the lust to kill was born again in the old
man's breast. He forgot that he was old, forgot how the treacherous
years had stolen from him the vigour and spring that had been his,
forgot everything but the half-crazy desire for vengeance.

With the roar of a wounded tiger he tore down the barricades fixed by
himself not an hour before, snatched from its place over the fire the
trusty old broad-sword that had served him so well in former days, flung
wide the door, and charged blindly out on his enemies. Alas for Ringan
Oliver! Even as he crossed the threshold, a rope, or some part of his
discarded barricade, caught his foot, and like the Philistines' mighty
god Dagon lang syne before the Ark of the Lord, he fell prone on his
face, and the enemy was on him in an instant.

Even then, disarmed and smothered by numbers as he was, the struggle for
a time was by no means unequal, and more than once, with gigantic
effort, he had all but flung off his captors. Perhaps, in the end, the
task might even have been too much for the sheriff's party had it not
been that a treacherous tinker, named Allan, with a hammer struck the
old man a heavy blow on the face, fracturing the jaw and partially
stunning him. Then, bound hand and foot, Auld Ringan was carried to
Edinburgh. There, in the Tolbooth, he lay for eight long years,
suffering tortures, first from his broken jaw, and later from old wounds
that now broke out afresh. He that had lived so long a life in the pure
fresh air of the Border, who had loved more to hear the lark sing than
the mouse cheep, now languished in a foul, insanitary prison, and it was
but the ghost of his former self that at the end of his long confinement
crept away to pass the brief remainder of his days in a house in the
Crosscauseway, Edinburgh.

Auld Ringan Oliver died in 1736. He sleeps among the martyrs in