sixty days."

"Ye're a sounder Scots lawyer than Prestongrange, then!" cries the
Writer. "He has had Alan summoned once; that was on the twenty-fifth,
the day that we first met. Once, and done with it. And where? Where, but
at the cross of Inverary, the head burgh of the Campbells. A word in
your ear, Mr. Balfour--they're not seeking Alan."

"What do you mean?" I cried. "Not seeking him?"

"By the best that I can make of it," said he. "Not wanting to find him,
in my poor thought. They think perhaps he might set up a fair defence,
upon the back of which James, the man they're really after, might climb
out. This is not a case, ye see, it's a conspiracy."

"Yet I can tell you Prestongrange asked after Alan keenly," said I;
"though, when I come to think of it, he was something of the easiest put
by."

"See that!" says he. "But there! I may be right or wrong, that's
guesswork at the best, and let me get to my facts again. It comes to my
ears that James and the witnesses--the witnesses, Mr. Balfour!--lay in
close dungeons, and shackled forbye, in the military prison at Fort
William; none allowed in to them, nor they to write. The witnesses, Mr.
Balfour; heard ye ever the match of that? I assure ye, no old, crooked
Stewart of the gang ever outfaced the law more impudently. It's clean in
the two eyes of the Act of Parliament of 1700, anent wrongous
imprisonment. No sooner did I get the news than I petitioned the Lord
Justice Clerk. I have his word to-day. There's law for ye! here's
justice!"

He put a paper in my hand, that same mealy-mouthed, false-faced paper
that was printed since in the pamphlet "by a bystander," for behoof (as
the title says) of James's "poor widow and five children."

"See," said Stewart, "he couldn't dare to refuse me access to my client,
so he _recommends the commanding officer to let me in_. Recommends!--the
Lord Justice Clerk of Scotland recommends. Is not the purpose of such
language plain? They hope the officer may be so dull, or so very much
the reverse, as to refuse the recommendation. I would have to make the
journey back again betwixt here and Fort William. There would follow a
fresh delay till I got fresh authority, and they had disavowed the
officer--military man, notoriously ignorant of the law, and that--I ken
the cant of it. Then the journey a third time; and there we should be on
the immediate heels of the trial before I had received my first
instruction. Am I not right to call thi