Part 23 (1/2)

”Awfu' doin's! They've grippit Maister McCunn up the Mains road just afore the second milestone and forenent the auld bucht I fund his hat, and a bicycle's lyin' broken in the wud Haste ye, et the rest and awa' and seek hi s are ower auld Oh, laddie, dinna stop to speir questions They'll hae him murdered or awa' to sea And ot them baith Wae's me! Wae's me!”

The Die-Hard, as Wee Jaikie, did not delay His eyes had filled with tears at her nehich we know to have been his habit When Mrs

Morran, after indulging in a , looked back the road she had co up the hill like a terrier who has been left behind As he trotted he wept bitterly Jaikie was getting dangerous

CHAPTER XII

HOW MR McCUNN COMMITTED AN assAULT UPON AN ALLY

dickson always maintained that his senses did not leave him for more than a second or two, but he admitted that he did not remember very clearly the events of the next few hours He was conscious of a bad pain above his eyes, and so down his cheek There was a perpetual sound of water in his ears and of round and forced to walk, and are that his legs were inclined to wobble Sorip on each arm, so that he could not defend his face from the brambles, and that worried hi bruise and he dreaded anything touching it But all the time he did not open his mouth, for silence was the one duty that his muddled wits enforced He felt that he was not the ht disclose if he began to babble

Presently there came a blank space of which he had no recollection at all The round He thought that his head had got another whack froh, and that the pain put him into a stupor When he awoke he was alone

He discovered that he was strapped very tightly to a young Scotch fir

His arether with cords knotted at the back of the tree; his legs were shackled, and further cords fastened them to the bole Also there was a halter round the trunk and just under his chin, so that while he breathed freely enough, he could not le of bracken and scrub, and beyond that the gloom of dense pines; but as he could only see directly in front his prospect was strictly circus The pain in his head was now dulled and quite bearable, and the flow of blood had stopped, for he felt the incrustation of it beginning on his cheeks There was a tremendous noise all around hiale But there was an undercurrent of deeper sound--water surely, water churning a rocks It was a stream--the Garple of course--and then he remembered where he was and what had happened

I do not wish to portray dickson as a hero, for nothing would annoy hiht was not of his own danger It was intense exasperation at the o he should have been with Dougal arranging operations, giving hi, deciding how to use the co reinforcements Instead he was trussed up in a wood, a prisoner of the eneed at his bonds, and nearly throttled hiive a fraction of an inch Tears of bitter rage filled his eyes and made furrows on his encrusted cheeks Idiot that he had been, he had wrecked everything! What would Saskia and Dougal and Sir Archie do without a business man by their side? There would be a muddle, and the little party would walk into a trap He saw it all very clearly The men from the sea would overpower them, there would be murder done, and an easy capture of the Princess; and the police would turn up at long last to find an empty headland

He had also ht the enuine panic seized him There was no earthly chance of escape, for he was tucked away in this infernal jungle till such time as his ene would be like he had no doubts, for they knew that he had been their chief opponent

Those desperate ruffians would not scruple to put an end to him His , no doubt because of the presence of the cord below his chin He had heard it was not a painful death; at any rate he remembered a clerk he had once had, a feeble, timid creature, who had twice attempted suicide that way

Surely it could not be very bad, and it would soon be over

But another thought came to him They would carry him off in the shi+p and settle with him at their leisure No swift merciful death for him

He had read dreadful tales of the Bolsheviks' skill in torture, and now they all came back to him--stories of Chineseinches He felt suddenly very cold and sick, and hung in his bonds for he had no strength in his limbs

Then the pressure on his throat braced him, and also quickened his nuh his veins

He endured so clutches at his wits he ed to attain ato allow himself to become mad Death was death whatever form it took, and he had to face death as ht about it and wondered how he should behave if the thing came to him Respectably, he had hoped; heroically, he had sworn in his moments of confidence But he had never for an instant dreamed of this cold, lonely, dreadful business Last Sunday, he re in the afternoon sun in his little garden and reading about the end of Fergus MacIvor in _Waverley_ and thrilling to the romance of it; and then Tibby had come out and summoned him in to tea Then he had rather wanted to be a Jacobite in the '45 and in peril of his neck, and now Providence had taken hiroaned at the rearden In seven days he had found a neorld and tried a new life, and had come now to the end of it He did not want to die, less now than ever with such wide horizons opening before hireat life great hazards must be taken, and there was always the risk of this sudden extinguisher Had he to choose again, far better the shway on to which he had blundered No, by Heaven, no!

Confound it, if he had to choose he would do it all again So hiure strapped to the fir, but had there been a witness he would have noted that at this stage dickson shut his teeth and that his troubled eyes looked very steadily before hi, for if he thought at all there would be a flow of memories, of his wife, his home, his books, his friends, to unman him So he steeled hi white sheep in a gate He noted a robin below the hazels, strutting impudently And there was a tit on a bracken frond, whichsway like one of the see-saws he used to play with as a boy There was no wind in that undergrowth, and any movement must be due to bird or beast The tit flew off, and the oscillations of the bracken slowly died away Then they began again, but more violently, and dickson could not see the bird that caused the down at the roots of the covert, a rabbit, perhaps, or a fox, or a weasel

He watched for the first sign of the beast, and thought he caught a glimpse of tawny fur Yes, there it was--pale dirty yelloeasel clearly Then suddenly the patch grew larger, and to his amazement he looked at a human face--the face of a pallid sled itself, followed by thin shoulders, and then by a pair of very dirty bare legs The figure raised itself and looked sharply round to make certain that the coast was clear Then it stood up and saluted, revealing the well-known lineaht dickson knew that he was safe by that certainty of instinct which is independent of proof, like the n and has his prayer answered He observed that the boy was quietly sobbing

Jaikie surveyed the position for an instant with red-rie of the blade on his thumb He darted behind the fir, and a second later dickson's wrists were free

Then he sawed at the legs, and cut the shackles which tied theether, and then--most circumspectly--assaulted the cord which bound dickson's neck to the trunk There now res and the body to the tree

There was a sound in the wood different from the wind and stream Jaikie listened like a startled hind