if possible, to occupy an anxious woman's mind, I remarked, "Oh, a
stick can be a very sound weapon in a good hand."

"It's about all that the orders of search and suppression have left us
Jacobites," remarked Marget; "openly confessed, anyhow, for I suppose
there may be a small, concealed arsenal or two, even among our Corgarff
hills."

Nothing, apparently, had happened outside in those tense minutes, and
it was the strain of waiting which made us resolutely talk of
nothing--but a stick. There had been no further cry since the "Lie
close" already mentioned, and it, no doubt, had been a mischance on the
part of Red Murdo. All was silence and black without, and within all
quiet alarm, such as you get when a household suppresses itself in
obedience to some demand.

It was an oppressive silence, this waiting, and I was glad to hear
Marget tap the floor with her sinewy hazel and say merrily, thinking to
lighten her mother's concern, "My grandfather insisted that a stick
with a nob was no stick for a Highland gentleman. It escaped, he would
say, when it was most needed, and that might, at times, leave the best
of Highland gentlemen by the wayside." Joking, under difficulties!

She paused, for there arose a crack-cracking as of men coming closer
among the scrub of heather and fern which surrounded the Dower House,
only it was quite momentary. The stick which she had half-lifted, an
unconscious act of readiness for defence, tapped back on to the floor,
and my sword-point made a sharper rattle, though I was unaware that my
hand had even moved it. The tyranny of doing nothing began to be
intolerable and to insist on an issue, be it what it might.

Think of the situation for me, and although I am, I hope, neither more
selfish nor more cowardly than other men, I could not help doing that.
Here was I, the chief and head of his Majesty's garrison at Corgarff
Castle, standing defence on the door-step of a Jacobite household. Why
was I there at all? What was I there to accomplish? How was I to do
this unknown something and return with composure to my quarters, secure
in my loyalty to King George and his ministers?

Moreover, what had I come out for to see? A mere expedition of
burglary by a band of hungry caterans who took the chattels of friend
or foe indifferently? Possibly that was all. Then I could have
fetched half-a-dozen soldiers and apprehended those same footpads, or,
at all events, driven them to the hills