Kidnapped
I told him about my guide, for I was proud of what I had done, and my
vanity for once got the heels of my prudence. At the mention of the
five shillings he cried out so loud that I made up my mind I should say
nothing of the other two, and was glad he could not see my blushes.
“Was it too much?” I asked, a little faltering.
“Too much!” cries he. “Why, I will guide you to Torosay myself for a
dram of brandy. And give you the great pleasure of my company (me that
is a man of some learning) in the bargain.”
I said I did not see how a blind man could be a guide; but at that he
laughed aloud, and said his stick was eyes enough for an eagle.
“In the Isle of Mull, at least,” says he, “where I know every stone and
heather-bush by mark of head. See, now,” he said, striking right and
left, as if to make sure, “down there a burn is running; and at the head
of it there stands a bit of a small hill with a stone cocked upon the
top of that; and it’s hard at the foot of the hill, that the way runs by
to Torosay; and the way here, being for droves, is plainly trodden, and
will show grassy through the heather.”
I had to own he was right in every feature, and told my wonder.
“Ha!” says he, “that’s nothing. Would ye believe me now, that before
the Act came out, and when there were weepons in this country, I could
shoot? Ay, could I!” cries he, and then with a leer: “If ye had such a
thing as a pistol here to try with, I would show ye how it’s done.”
I told him I had nothing of the sort, and gave him a wider berth. If
he had known, his pistol stuck at that time quite plainly out of his
pocket, and I could see the sun twinkle on the steel of the butt. But
by the better luck for me, he knew nothing, thought all was covered, and
lied on in the dark.
He then began to question me cunningly, where I came from, whether I
was rich, whether I could change a five-shilling piece for him (which
he declared he had that moment in his sporran), and all the time he kept
edging up to me and I avoiding him. We were now upon a sort of green
cattle-track which crossed the hills towards Torosay, and we kept
changing sides upon that like dancers in a reel. I had so plainly the
upper-hand that my spirits rose, and indeed I took a pleasure in this
game of blindman’s buff; but the catechist grew angrier and angrier,
and at last began to swear in Gaelic and to strike for my legs with his
staff.
Then I told him that, sure enough, I had a pistol in my pocket as well
as he, and if he did not strike across the hill due south I would even
blow his brains out.
He became at once very polite, and after trying to soften me for some
time, but quite in vain, he cursed me once more in Gaelic and took
himself off. I watched him striding along, through bog and brier,
tapping with his stick, until he turned the end of a hill and
disappeared in the next hollow. Then I struck on again for Torosay, much
better pleased to be alone than to travel with that man of learning.
This was an unlucky day; and these two, of whom I had just rid myself,
one after the other, were the two worst men I met with in the Highlands.
At Torosay, on the Sound of Mull and looking over to the mainland
of Morven, there was an inn with an innkeeper, who was a Maclean, it
appeared, of a very high family; for to keep an inn is thought even more
genteel in the Highlands than it is with us, perhaps as partaking of
hospitality, or perhaps because the trade is idle and drunken. He spoke
good English, and finding me to be something of a scholar, tried me
first in French, where he easily beat me, and then in the Latin, in
which I don’t know which of us did best. This pleasant rivalry put us at
once upon friendly terms; and I sat up and drank punch with him (or to
be more correct, sat up and watched him drink it), until he was so tipsy
that he wept upon my shoulder.
I tried him, as if by accident, with a sight of Alan’s button; but it
was plain he had never seen or heard of it. Indeed, he bore some grudge
against the family and friends of Ardshiel, and before he was drunk
he read me a lampoon, in very good Latin, but with a very ill meaning,
which he had made in elegiac verses upon a person of that house.
When I told him of my catechist, he shook his head, and said I was lucky
to have got clear off. “That is a very dangerous man,” he said; “Duncan
Mackiegh is his name; he can shoot by the ear at several yards, and has
been often accused of highway robberies, and once of murder.”
“The cream of it is,” says I, “that he called himself a catechist.”
“And why should he not?” says he, “when that is what he is. It was
Maclean of Duart gave it to him because he was blind. But perhaps it was
a peety,” says my host, “for he is always on the road, going from
one place to another to hear the young folk say their religion; and,
doubtless, that is a great temptation to the poor man.”
At last, when my landlord could drink no more, he showed me to a bed,
and I lay down in very good spirits; having travelled the greater part
of that big and crooked Island of Mull, from Earraid to Torosay, fifty
miles as the crow flies, and (with my wanderings) much nearer a hundred,
in four days and with little fatigue. Indeed I was by far in better
heart and health of body at the end of that long tramp than I had been
at the beginning.
CHAPTER XVI
THE LAD WITH THE SILVER BUTTON: ACROSS MORVEN
There is a regular ferry from Torosay to Kinlochaline on the mainland.
Both shores of the Sound are in the country of the strong clan of the
Macleans, and the people that passed the ferry with me were almost all
of that clan. The skipper of the boat, on the other hand, was called
Neil Roy Macrob; and since Macrob was one of the names of Alan’s
clansmen, and Alan himself had sent me to that ferry, I was eager to
come to private speech of Neil Roy.
In the crowded boat this was of course impossible, and the passage was
a very slow affair. There was no wind, and as the boat was wretchedly
equipped, we could pull but two oars on one side, and one on the other.
The men gave way, however, with a good will, the passengers taking
spells to help them, and the whole company giving the time in
Gaelic boat-songs. And what with the songs, and the sea-air, and the
good-nature and spirit of all concerned, and the bright weather, the
passage was a pretty thing to have seen.
But there was one melancholy part. In the mouth of Loch Aline we found
a great sea-going ship at anchor; and this I supposed at first to be one
of the King’s cruisers which were kept along that coast, both summer
and winter, to prevent communication with the French. As we got a little
nearer, it became plain she was a ship of merchandise; and what still
more puzzled me, not only her decks, but the sea-beach also, were quite
black with people, and skiffs were continually plying to and fro between
them. Yet nearer, and there began to come to our ears a great sound
of mourning, the people on board and those on the shore crying and
lamenting one to another so as to pierce the heart.
Then I understood this was an emigrant ship bound for the American
colonies.
We put the ferry-boat alongside, and the exiles leaned over the
bulwarks, weeping and reaching out their hands to my fellow-passengers,
among whom they counted some near friends. How long this might have gone
on I do not know, for they seemed to have no sense of time: but at last
the captain of the ship, who seemed near beside himself (and no great
wonder) in the midst of this crying and confusion, came to the side and
begged us to depart.
Thereupon Neil sheered off; and the chief singer in our boat struck into
a melancholy air, which was presently taken up both by the emigrants and
their friends upon the beach, so that it sounded from all sides like a
lament for the dying. I saw the tears run down the cheeks of the men and
women in the boat, even as they bent at the oars; and the circumstances
and the music of the song (which is one called “Lochaber no more”) were
highly affecting even to myself.
At Kinlochaline I got Neil Roy upon one side on the beach, and said I
made sure he was one of Appin’s men.
“And what for no?” said he.
“I am seeking somebody,” said I; “and it comes in my mind that you will
have news of him. Alan Breck Stewart is his name.” And very foolishly,
instead of showing him the button, I sought to pass a shilling in his
hand.
At this he drew back. “I am very much affronted,” he said; “and this is
not the way that one shentleman should behave to another at all. The man
you ask for is in France; but if he was in my sporran,” says he, “and
your belly full of shillings, I would not hurt a hair upon his body.”
I saw I had gone the wrong way to work, and without wasting time upon
apologies, showed him the button lying in the hollow of my palm.
“Aweel, aweel,” said Neil; “and I think ye might have begun with that
end of the stick, whatever! But if ye are the lad with the silver
button, all is well, and I have the word to see that ye come safe. But
if ye will pardon me to speak plainly,” says he, “there is a name that
you should never take into your mouth, and that is the name of Alan
Breck; and there is a thing that ye would never do, and that is to offer
your dirty money to a Hieland shentleman.”
It was not very easy to apologise; for I could scarce tell him (what was
the truth) that I had never dreamed he would set up to be a gentleman
until he told me so. Neil on his part had no wish to prolong his
dealings with me, only to fulfil his orders and be done with it; and
he made haste to give me my route. This was to lie the night in
Kinlochaline in the public inn; to cross Morven the next day to Ardgour,
and lie the night in the house of one John of the Claymore, who was
warned that I might come; the third day, to be set across one loch at
Corran and another at Balachulish, and then ask my way to the house of
James of the Glens, at Aucharn in Duror of Appin. There was a good deal
of ferrying, as you hear; the sea in all this part running deep into the
mountains and winding about their roots. It makes the country strong to
hold and difficult to travel, but full of prodigious wild and dreadful
prospects.
I had some other advice from Neil: to speak with no one by the way, to
avoid Whigs, Campbells, and the “red-soldiers;” to leave the road and
lie in a bush if I saw any of the latter coming, “for it was never
chancy to meet in with them;” and in brief, to conduct myself like a
robber or a Jacobite agent, as perhaps Neil thought me.
The inn at Kinlochaline was the most beggarly vile place that ever pigs
were styed in, full of smoke, vermin, and silent Highlanders. I was not
only discontented with my lodging, but with myself for my mismanagement
of Neil, and thought I could hardly be worse off. But very wrongly, as I
was soon to see; for I had not been half an hour at the inn (standing in
the door most of the time, to ease my eyes from the peat smoke) when a
thunderstorm came close by, the springs broke in a little hill on which
the inn stood, and one end of the house became a running water. Places
of public entertainment were bad enough all over Scotland in those days;
yet it was a wonder to myself, when I had to go from the fireside to the
bed in which I slept, wading over the shoes.
Early in my next day’s journey I overtook a little, stout, solemn man,
walking very slowly with his toes turned out, sometimes reading in
a book and sometimes marking the place with his finger, and dressed
decently and plainly in something of a clerical style.
This I found to be another catechist, but of a different order from the
blind man of Mull: being indeed one of those sent out by the Edinburgh
Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge, to evangelise the more