e times, the miseries of travel, the
cursed inns, bandits licensed and unlicensed, craft, violence, and
robbery! The merchant bewailed all life and kept a hawk eye upon his
treasure on the Spanish road. At last he and his guard, his mules and
muleteers, turned aside into a skirting way that would bring him to a
town visible at no great distance. Left alone, Ian viewed from a
hilltop the roofs of this place, with a tower or two starting up like
warning fingers. But his road led on through a mountain pass.

The earth itself seemed to be climbing. The mountain shapes, little
and big, gathered in herds. Cliffs, ravines, the hoarse song of water,
the faces of few human folk, and on these written "Mountains,
mountains! Live as we can! Catch who catch can!" After a time the road
was deprived of even these faces. The Scot thought of home mountains.
He thought of the Highlands. Above him and at some distance to the
right appeared a distribution of cliffs that reminded him of that
hiding-place after Culloden. He looked to see the birchwood, the
wheeling eagle. The sun was at noon. Riding in a solitude, he almost
dozed in the warm light. The Highlands and the eagle wheeling above
the crag.... Black Hill and Glenfernie and White Farm and
Alexander.... Life generally, and all the funny little figures running
full tilt, one against another....

His horse sprang violently aside, then stood trembling. Forms, some
ragged, some attired with a violent picturesqueness, had started from
without a fissure in the wood and from behind a huge wayside rock. Ian
knew them at a glance for those brigands of whom he had heard mention
and warning enough. Don Fernando had once described their practices.

Resistance was idle. He chose instead a genial patience for his
tower, and within it keen wits to keep watch. With his horse he was
taken by the fierce, bedizened dozen up a gorge to so complete and
secure a robber hold that Nature, when she made it, must have been in
robber mood. Here were found yet others of the band, with a bedecked
and mustached chief. He was aware that property, not life, answered to
their desires. His horse, his fine cloak, his weapons, the small mail
and its contents, with any article of his actual wearing they might
fancy, and the little, little, little money within his purse--all
would be taken. All in the luck! To-day to thee, to-morrow to me. What
puzzled him was that evidently more was expected.

When they condescended