The Black Colonel | Page 5

cracking as if they were a lash, stung me beyond endurance.
I made a step to strike him, and we might have been at it, like common
brawlers, only he saved us from that shame. He had been waiting with
his left foot in the stirrup. When I drove at him he swung on to the back

of Mack, who turned half round, as a spirited horse does in the process
of being mounted. This threw his big body between us, but the Black
Colonel leant down and said in my ear, "To our next meeting, my
kinsman! May it be soon!"
Then he rode for an opening in the undergrowth which braided the
lower slopes of the precipitous Pass, and I was left alone, a man all
a-wonder, for events were growing beyond me, as they do when
suddenly we find our whole personal fortune, even our spiritual destiny,
put to the ordeal of the unexpected.

III.--Over the Hills of Home
How shall I tell, with proper restraint and yet efficiency, what followed
the going of the Black Colonel on his black horse?
The Pass, wherein we had met so sharply, lies almost due east and due
west. You would have a good idea of its appearance, if you were to
suppose a hill twice as long from east to west as it is broad from north
to south. Then imagine its length sliced in two, and each half, by force
of dead weight, falling away from the other. Heather and whins had
seeded on the sliced faces, and after them the hardy silver birch and the
hardier green fir had sprung up. Nature makes coverings for the sores
suffered by Mother Earth, as a dog licks a bruise until the hair grows
again.
The strong Highland winds and the heavy Highland rains and snows
had wrinkled the riven hill in a hundred ways. Its twin faces were
warted with rocks, from which most of the soil had been washed away,
leaving them as though suspended in mid-air. Waters, draining from the
higher hills, had run down those faces, making ribboned scores to the
bottom. There had been constant falls of earth from above, and here
and there a large tree had been thrown over the abyss, and, in that
position, holding on by its roots, had taken a new lease of life.
Thanks then to Nature, working for long years, the twin, or rather the

divorced hill-cheeks which, at their separation, were raw earth, now
had a covering of undergrowth and overgrowth. It would be dead in the
winter when the sap is down, budding in the spring when the sap rises,
green in the summer when it has run into leafage, brown in the autumn
when the storage roots begin to call their own back again.
A sort of rough road, worn by usage, as a short-cut for the folk of the
region, ran on the level between the halves of the Pass. Big rocks fallen
from above lay around, and I confusedly sat down beside one of these.
It broke the snellish wind which had begun to blow with the first dawn,
as it often does in those parts, a blast to the parting night and the
coming day.
Presently a shot was fired from one end of the Pass and I could make
no mistake as to the weapon used. It was the military flintlock, a
clumsy gun, better suited to scare crows than shoot straight, but it was
the best we had.
A warning, a signal for some purpose, I judged, because it was
followed by what I can only describe as a waiting silence. You had the
echoes of the shot scattering up the heights of the Pass, and then a tense
feeling in the atmosphere, as if a hundred men expected an answer. It
came, in another straggling shot, from the other end of the Pass.
Next there was solid evidence that what I heard had been a
pre-arranged signal, to which a plan of campaign attached. At each end
of the Pass I saw the red-coats multiply until they formed faint bunches
of colour. Who, I wonder, first clothed the soldier man in scarlet, for an
easier target he could not offer, even to an ill-shooting flint-lock.
Scarlet and the pageantry of courts, scarlet and the capturing of
women's hearts, but for the soldier himself, when he gets down to his
trade, it is scarlet and death.
As I waited intently and looked, I could almost count, up on the brows
of the Pass, how many red-coats the sentinels of our first alarm had
grown into. They made dots, moving against the skyline, and, as I next
made out, they were in concert with other knots of scarlet, active at the
end