The Black Colonel | Page 9

he whispered in his hoarse voice, as if he did not want the
corporal to hear. I took the letter, and before I could even break the seal
he was gone again, without motion of salute or further word, all quite
in the Black Colonel's manner of doing things.
It was addressed "To Captain Ian Gordon," and when I opened the
envelope and unfolded the contents I found them to commence with
these same words and no other form of ceremony. I instantly knew the
strong, irregular, aggressive and yet persuasive handwriting to be that
of the Black Colonel, but unconsciously, as a girl tries at the end of a
story to find whether happiness be there, I turned to the
signature--"your kinsman, Jock Farquharson of Inverey." What went
before, when I had time to master it, was this:
"These greetings, which I am inditing in the cold safety of the Colonel's
Bed, a fastness where no enemy has yet tracked me, though all my true
friends in the countryside know the secret roads to it, will be delivered
to you by my faithful Red Murdo, who deserves blessings, whereas I
sometimes give him curses; and their purpose is to tell you explicitly
why I asked you to meet me in the Pass the other evening, since events,
on which I here offer no comment, made it impossible for us to have
any plain, forthright talk.
"I'll reveal the heart of my business by recalling that there is a long
association between our families, who have always been friends and
enemies, and that the Corgarff Forbeses also come into this association,

and continue it, in a fashion which takes me to our personal quarrel of
Stuart and Guelph, because, by the exercise of a little ingenuity, such as
is permissible, and a kinsmanship such as is proper, there may emerge
good seasoning for us all.
"Pray remember that if the Corgarff Forbeses were to fail in issue, and
there is only one life between them and that failure, the life of a young
unmarried lady, I, by descent on the distaff side, which I need not
outline in particularity, would be heir to the estates; only as a Jacobite
outlawed, a broken man, I can inherit nothing, not even possess, little
as it is now, my own in peace.
"But, if I am not ill-informed, and news travels among the hills as
swiftly as, we are told, it travels in the desert, King George's advisers
would gladly return the Corgarff estates to the Forbes family if that
family had a strong man at its head and so such an influence as would
keep the region, always a key to the Highlands, I will not exactly say in
order for the German king, because that would be a tactless fashion of
arranging, but wean it gradually from its sympathy for Prince Charlie,
and his house of misadventure and ill-luck.
"Now, if you will be good enough to assume in me qualities for this
mission and the willingness to undertake it; if you will accept the
circumstance that it would merely be a case of a remote legal heir
coming into his own by a round-about way; and if you will set those
facts in what I consider the national importance of the matter and help
it forward in a form so delicate and chivalrous that I must not even hint
it, why, you will be rendering a potent service to the cause which
enlists you and which might, who knows, enlist me also!"
That was the letter, considered in language, crafty in purpose, really, an
overture for the hand of Marget Forbes, and I sat far into the night,
while my peat fire died out in Corgarff Castle, wondering how I was to
answer it, and, even more, how I myself stood towards the acute
personal situation which it created. For I saw that the Black Colonel
meant to make love and do business at the same stroke, not for the first
time, perhaps, in his life of emprise; and certainly here was no new
thing in the world's queer story.

V.--A Cairn of Remembrance
It is a good way, when you are in doubt, to wait and let events shape a
decision, and this was how I came to regard the Black Colonel's letter.
He had set me a pretty puzzle in his written words, because, contrasted
with the light touch-and-go of spoken words, these always seem to
have something fateful in them, as of a king's signature to a decree.
Moreover, I was vaguely conscious of being the guardian of a woman's
instinct for safety, an instinct which arrives with the cradle and only
goes with the grave, and that made me feel somewhat helpless; a man
in depths he cannot