nly sign of weakness, and there
are few who would have shown so little.

"No," said Stair, sternly, "when I think of those lads beaten insensible
in the military prisons of your _depots_ or bleeding at the
triangles--they gave Craig Easton a thousand lashes and he had had eight
hundred of them before he died--I think I am letting you off easy. I
ought to shoot you myself where you stand. And don't let me think too
much about it or I may do it even yet. I am giving you your chance to be
an honest man!"

They went together out into the open. Before them a little zigzag of
pathway angled intricately among the sullen floods of the morass. The
sky was pleasantly shell-tinted overhead. There was the way he must go.
Never had life appeared so sweet to the spy.

But he went through his part like a man in a dream. He struggled with
Stair Garland, and though he did not hear himself he shouted fiercely as
if for life. It was very real indeed. Then suddenly he broke loose and
ran down the narrow towpath of dry land between the ink-black pools. He
was still shouting. He had forgotten to wave the handkerchief. Then
suddenly before him he saw the thorn at the angle of the big elbow.

He longed for the rattle of muskets--either from before or behind. It
did not seem to matter much to him now which it was to be. He felt
desperate and forlorn, hating everybody--Stair Garland most of all.

"_Hist--Skip! Crackle!_" came a volley from far away to the north, and
Eben cast himself down behind a heather bush to draw breath. They had
fired, and he was a proven man. He had faced death to certify his truth
to the salt he was eating, and now nothing remained but to withdraw as
carefully as might be. He crawled backward, now scuttling from one
little rickle of peats left forlornly out on the moor to the next sodden
whin bush, the prickles of which yirked him as he threw himself down.
Stair kept his word, and from his peatstack delivered a lively fire upon
the men in the shelters on the northern hillsides.

Eben was very white when he came back and dropped limp among the peat.
Stair said nothing, but for the first time he held out his hand. The spy
had become a clean man again, and the same would be known from among all
the folk from Nith Brig to the heuchs of the Back Shore of Leswalt. His
kin would own him openly. Stonykirk parish was again free to him. Eben
knew that he had not paid too dearly for his rehabilitation, for
whatever the danger