arms, while the
Abbot kept his feet behind him like a boat in a ship's wake. The
thunder roared overhead like the sea bellowing in a cave's mouth, and
the great pines bent their heads away from the mighty wind, straining
and creaking and lashing each other in their blind fury.

Malise and the Abbot seemed to hear about them the plunging of
riderless horses as they stumbled downwards through the night, their
path lit by lightning flashes, green and lilac and keenest blue, and
bearing between them the senseless form of William Earl of Douglas.

CHAPTER VI

THE PRISONING OF MALISE THE SMITH

[Now these things, material to the life and history of William, sixth
Earl of Douglas, are not written from hearsay, but were chronicled
within his lifetime by one who saw them and had part therein, though
the part was but a boy's one. His manuscript has come down to us and
lies before the transcriber. Sholto MacKim, the son of Malise the
Smith, testifies to these things in his own clerkly script. He adds
particularly that his brother Laurence, being at the time but a boy,
had little knowledge of many of the actual facts, and is not to be
believed if at any time he should controvert anything which he
(Sholto) has written. So far, however, as the present collector and
editor can find out, Laurence MacKim appears to have been entirely
silent on the subject, at least with his pen, so that his brother's
caveat was superfluous.]

* * * * *

The instant Lord William entered his own castle of Thrieve over the
drawbridge, and without even returning the salutations of his guard,
he turned about to the two men who had so masterfully compelled his
return.

"Ho, guard, there!" he cried, "seize me this instant the Abbot of the
New Abbey and Malise MacKim."

And so much surprised but wholly obedient, twenty archers of the
Earl's guard, commanded by old John of Abernethy, called Landless
Jock, fell in at back and front.

Malise, the master armourer, stood silent, taking the matter with his
usual phlegm, but the Abbot was voluble.

"William," he said, holding out his hands with an appealing gesture,
"I have laboured with you, striven with, prayed for you. To-night I
came forth through the storm, though an old man, to deliver you from
the manifest snares of the devil--"

But the Earl interrupted his recital without compunction.

"Set Malise MacKim in the inner dungeon," he cried. "Thrust his feet