w called Francie's
Cairn. For a while it was told that Francie walked. Aggie Hogg met him
in the gloaming by the cairnside, and he spoke to her, with chattering
teeth, so that his words were lost. He pursued Rob Todd (if any one
could have believed Robbie) for the space of half a mile with pitiful
entreaties. But the age is one of incredulity; these superstitious
decorations speedily fell off; and the facts of the story itself, like
the bones of a giant buried there and half dug up, survived, naked and
imperfect, in the memory of the scattered neighbours. To this day, of
winter nights, when the sleet is on the window and the cattle are quiet
in the byre, there will be told again, amid the silence of the young and
the additions and corrections of the old, the tale of the Justice-Clerk
and of his son, young Hermiston, that vanished from men's knowledge; of
the two Kirsties and the four Black Brothers of the Cauldstaneslap; and
of Frank Innes, "the young fool advocate," that came into these moorland
parts to find his destiny.

CHAPTER I

LIFE AND DEATH OF MRS. WEIR

The Lord Justice-Clerk was a stranger in that part of the country; but
his lady wife was known there from a child, as her race had been before
her. The old "riding Rutherfords of Hermiston," of whom she was the last
descendant, had been famous men of yore, ill neighbours, ill subjects,
and ill husbands to their wives, though not their properties. Tales of
them were rife for twenty miles about; and their name was even printed
in the page of our Scots histories, not always to their credit. One bit
the dust at Flodden; one was hanged at his peel door by James the Fifth;
another fell dead in a carouse with Tom Dalyell; while a fourth (and
that was Jean's own father) died presiding at a Hell-Fire Club, of which
he was the founder. There were many heads shaken in Crossmichael at that
judgment; the more so as the man had a villainous reputation among high
and low, and both with the godly and the worldly. At that very hour of
his demise he had ten going pleas before the Session, eight of them
oppressive. And the same doom extended even to his agents; his grieve,
that had been his right hand in many a left-hand business, being cast
from his horse one night and drowned in a peat-hag on the Kye-skairs;
and his very doer (although lawyers have long spoons) surviving him not
long, and dying on a sudden in a bloody flux.

In all these generations, while a male Ru