For a while, in the night and the black water that was deep as to his

saddle-girths, he wrought with his staff like a smith at his stithy, and

great was the sound of oaths and blows. With that the ambuscade was

burst, and he rode for home with a pistol-ball in him, three knife

wounds, the loss of his front teeth, a broken rib and bridle, and a

dying horse. That was a race with death that the laird rode! In the

mirk night, with his broken bridle and his head swimming, he dug his

spurs to the rowels in the horse's side, and the horse, that was even

worse off than himself, the poor creature! screamed out loud like a

person as he went, so that the hills echoed with it, and the folks at

Cauldstaneslap got to their feet about the table and looked at each

other with white faces. The horse fell dead at the yard gate, the laird

won the length of the house and fell there on the threshold. To the son

that raised him he gave the bag of money. "Hae," said he. All the way

up the thieves had seemed to him to be at his heels, but now the

hallucination left him - he saw them again in the place of the ambuscade

- and the thirst of vengeance seized on his dying mind. Raising himself

and pointing with an imperious finger into the black night from which he

had come, he uttered the single command, "Brocken Dykes," and fainted.

He had never been loved, but he had been feared in honour. At that

sight, at that word, gasped out at them from a toothless and bleeding

mouth, the old Elliott spirit awoke with a shout in the four sons.

"Wanting the hat," continues my author, Kirstie, whom I but haltingly

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