Chapter I

It was after Culloden. Though I, David Scott, was an unimportant person yet I lay in the Tolbooth, in Edinburgh, with my betters. I was a young man--twenty-two. I had fought for the Stuarts at Prestonpans, Falkirk and Culloden, without the least question that I can remember arising in my mind, that being the politics of my chief and my family and nearer acquaintance. Now I made as little question that I would not lie there in irons if I could help it. No, nor be shipped to Barbados or Virginia if I missed hanging!

I loosened a clamped bit of iron from the wall and turned it into a file.

It was dark night, a week later, when I got free. Dark and stormy and chill--in June, I guessed. I lifted the stanchels from the window and laid them all quietly upon the floor. Then I got through, and it was narrow indeed, that window, but I was thin enough from little fare and much misery. Got through and held by my hands for a moment, and dropped, and I knew that there was deep depth and I might break my legs.

I did not so, but I was sair bruised and shaken, and I thought I heard all around me whistles and calls, “He’s out! After him!” I crawled across the narrow, narrow lane to a buttress of Saint Giles and lay there shivering until I made out that it was only wind and rain and my own heart pumping in my ears and that my bones were not broken. A bell struck the middle night. I started up and began to weave around that church, close to the abutments, skirting the shops built against the wall. Every half-minute I looked toward Tolbooth. It was a wild night, with gusts of wind and rain and strange sulphurous lights racing through the clouds and at moments raising into an eerie quarter-light Giles above me and that black mass I was leaving, and other tall, grim houses of Auld Reekie. “A witches’ night!” I thought and wished I had a broomstick to fly over the Luckenbooths and away. I was ragged and cold and dizzied with hunger.

A fancied sound made me stand, scarce breathing, against the wall. The sound proved nothing, but while I stood there I had a vision. Gone was Edinburgh, gone the witches’ night. I saw and I breathed and I knew, and yet could give no name nor circumstance, a blue salt sea that rolled its long waves against a shore of dazzling sand. The surf was high and strong and white; on the burning sand lay a row of sharp-prowed, narrow boats; the sand stretched on and was met by palm trees, I that had never seen palm trees knowing them well enough. Stretched on and met palm trees, and a great mass of white masonry, wall and gateway and turret, and a strange kind of keep rising behind, and over all drooping an English banner. And I knew it and I didn’t know it, and in a moment it was gone, and this was Edinburgh on a wild night, and young David Scott, an escaping prisoner, with o’ermuch of practical matters before him to spend time with visions. Scots folk are liable to vision. Scots folk are baith the salt of the earth and the dung of the earth. Scots know the hills of heaven and the pits of hell. And there is a Debatable Land, but no Scots, I think, stay there long. Young David Scott was already, I know, on his way across, to the side of the dark.

This night in the material dark, in the material town, I had a goal that was no more nor less than Sandy Scott’s small house on the outskirts. If I could win there Sandy would hide me. I did it, stealing and stopping and now and then running, through the witches’ night. Crossing High Street, all the tall houses seemed to flare lights and shout at me. Later, two men did rise to question me. But, “What are _ye_ doing out at sic an hour, on sic a night? I’ve an honest airrand, but I misdoubt yours--an’ I think I hear the Watch!” With that, they turned quick their heads to listen, and I dived into Willy’s Wynd, and worked through that into Auld Man’s Wynd, and so pursued my journey.

An hour before the dawn I was at Sandy Scott’s and threw a clod against his window. He was a cautious man, but at last he let me in.

“What good will it do you if two are hangit?”

“It isn’t a question of hanging but of slaving in Virginia. I’ve seen it where I’m put down ‘Young and misguided.’ Let me lie in your barn, Sandy, and if I’m tracked you can swear you didn’t know it.”

“If my name were Campbell that would pass. But it’s Scott.”

“Aye, I came on that. Let me in, man, let me in!”

For the better part of a week I lay in his small, small loft amid old hay, and at night the cow munching and sighing below. Sandy brought me food, and each morn a drop of rum, and at night the news. “They’re speiring for you!”--“Jock Andrew at the Cannongate tauld me he saw ten soldiers had seized a laddie, thinkin’ ’twas you.”--“Now they’re saying a Dutch ship left Leith and you may ha’ swam out to her--and it seems to me a ship’s the best you can hope--and I wad gae at once!”

But I was not determined. I did not want to go to sea, nor to a foreign land--not yet! There was a glen that I wanted.

It was dull lying there upon the hay with a little light streaking through a handsbreadth opening. On the second day I twisted around at a noise and there, coming up the ladder, was Sandy’s wife, a pale young woman with a kirk look. “I hae brought you,” she said, “the Book. It maun be sair lying with naught tae do but picturing gibbets!” With that she gave me a brown volume and shook her head and descended the ladder.

Well, I had the Book, and there’s no denying that reading made the time pass. And that is all it did for me then--made the time pass. I was turning from the light even then, David Scott at twenty-two, foregathering with ancient, ancient cronies of the cave!

So I lay there and read about King David from the time he watched the sheep and slew the giant until he died in Jerusalem. There was Jonathan and the cave of Adullam, and the water that his men brought him, and Michal, Saul’s daughter, and Abigail and Ahinoam, and Bathsheba the wife of Uriah, and at the last Abishag the Shunnamite. And then I read of King Solomon. And I read Ruth and Esther, and Haman’s gibbet made me see the hugeous gallows in the Grasmarket built for them who had fought for a Stuart, and the head on the spike atop the Tolbooth, and the legs and arms of “traitors” nailed above the Leith Port. It darkened while I saw all that until I could no longer read, and I lay there cold in the straw and ached for vengeance. Off and on during the night, which was wakeful, I saw these things, and when I started from dreams I knew that I had been killing. Hawley first, and then all Hanoverians. They were against me and thought they were victors; they were making me and mine suffer, suffer terribly; they were altogether hateful and unworthy to live! I killed them. Lying awake, panting a little, I still killed. And as for the Stuart Cause, it was Ours and therefore exquisitely right.

I slept and when again I waked was rid of that frenzy, but felt hard and dour. Dawn came in coldly, viewed from that strain between boards, in Sandy Scott’s barn.

Mysie Johnston--that was why I wanted to go west from Edinburgh, not east to any boat upon the salt, sair sea. Mysie Johnston--Mysie Johnston.

Saying and feeling that brought me away from the evil anger and the caked and frozen mood. Mysie, Mysie, Mysie, Mysie, Mysie!

The glen would be green now, and all the birds singing. We would walk there, and our arms would be about each other. Mysie, Mysie, Mysie, Mysie, Mysie! _And I will be a better man. And I will be a better man!_

So I thought, and maybe so I would. But I never saw Mysie Johnston again--not in the outer world, not in the outer!

For the fourth morning they took me. That very night to come I was to leave the barn and Sandy, for we thought, poor fools! that the search was given o’er. A neighbor--and I mistrust that neighbor!--had told him that a sergeant of Cope’s had told Phemie Nicholson that they had tracked me to the waterside at Leith.--Sandy had a decent suit for me, and I would foot it to a laird I knew beyond Melrose, who might give me a horse and an errand west. For my name now, it was Will Anderson, a good Whig name. Once in that glen that I kenned I might blithely hide the summer through. After that it was just possible that the ill wind that was blowing so fiercely might quiet down. In other words the _wrong side_ might tire of hanging and drawing and quartering and sending over seas in irons. So many “mights” and so many “ifs”, and it all came to naught, and I had Mysie only in dreams, and after a time the dreams died away.

Well, there I lay in the loft, quiet enough, and to wile the time read of Daniel in the lions’ den, and about King Belshazzar and the hand that wrote on the wall--when suddenly there was Sandy’s wife with a white, white face and world’s end in her voice. “They’re hauding him--they’re hauding Sandy by the aik tree! Five soldiers--they’re coming!”

With that she slipped down the ladder, and the next minute I heard her singing at her work, for all as if there was never but one party in the world and that God’s party.

“O God, do thou raise up thyself,
The earth to judgment call;
For thou, as thine inheritance,
Shall take the nations all.”

I made a burrow deep in the hay and covered myself and the Book and lay there stifling with a drumming heart. I remember--I remember! I clasped that Book, and I cried, _but not aloud_, “O I was reading Ye! If Ye are, save me now, save me and Mysie! And Ye will not let Sandy suffer that’s doing a friend’s part. Save! Save!”

But they came into the barn. I heard them below, and one mounted the ladder. “It’s dusk as sin up here!” Below him said another, “Look out that he doesn’t dirk you through the hay!” The first, at that, contented himself with a small trampling that did not bring him where I lay under the eaves. Presently he spoke. “Time lost to toss all this stuff aside! Easiest to fire it, and that’s what we’ll do. If he’s here he’ll come out, and if he isn’t it won’t be Holyrood that’s burnt!”

He went down the ladder. Presently I smelled the brand. I came out. They had taken away the ladder, so I held by my hands and dropped from the loft, flame singing now in my ears. The lower room was filled with smoke; through it I could just see them without the door, waiting for the tod smoked out. I had no weapon. Out I came, helpless as the tod. I was big and strong--“Big David Scott”--But what was that against five armed men? If I turned wolf from tod and sprang at their throats, then more surely still Hawley’s gallows in the Grasmarket! I walked out of the barn, hands up.

Oh, waly, waly, waly, Mysie Johnston!

The Tolbooth opened once more and swallowed me. I lay there two months expecting hanging. To this day I do not know the truth of my escaping that death. Some influence somewhere, but whose it was I do not know. Mysie had not the strength. Maybe after all it was God. But lying there in the dungeon that was for folk like me, for big, strong young men who broke gaol, I cursed God and was glad his book was burned in that burning barn.

In August I was taken from prison and marched with five Jacobites, young and middle-aged men, to Leith and set aboard the brig, _King William_, bound for Virginia and carrying thither a great parcel of poor men signed for servants to planters, and we six who had not signed but who natheless went.