Black Andy, with the pouch of guineas comforting the breast of him like liquor, so that he hardly missed his wrap-rascal or his bonnet that were drying by the kitchen fire, ran along the broken road for Kippen. It was like the bed of a burn, and like a rested monster rose the storm afresh from the Hieland hills. One glance he gave behind him at a step or two from the window whence he burst; so dark was the night that the inn in the womb of it was quite invisible. He looked over his shoulder for a second time, having run for a little, and saw the bobbing of a lanthorn. His amiable host was already on his track, and Kippen was plainly no place for Black Andy. With an oath he quitted the road, ran down through a clump of hazel, and launched on the rushy moss that (as the story goes) had once been a part of the sea that threshed on Stirling rock. Like many another man, this scamp, unskilled in thievery, had no sooner escaped the urgent danger of arrest than he rued his impulsive fall to the temptation of a bag of clinking coins. He had drunk through an idle youth, and others had paid the lawing; he had diced and cheated; he had borrowed and left unpaid; he had sold bad cattle and denied his warrandice; he had lived without labour—all of which is no more different from theft than tipsyness is different from drunkenness. But hitherto he had stopped on the verge of crime denominate, and it was his mother’s only glad reflection when the thought of his follies haunted her pillow. Had the temptation of the inn-wife’s gold come to him on another night, and elsewhere, he could have turned the broad of his back on it, and mustered conquering hosts of fear and of expedience to his support; the misfortune was that it found him in a desperate hour. For a week he had been in a most jovial company with some Campsie lairds; he had spent the price of his father’s horse to the last plack royally, as if he had been a bonnet-laird himself, and New Year’s Day should have seen him back at Blaruisken with the price of the horse, or else it meant disaster. Even that consideration scarcely would have made a thief of him (as he thought now), but for the wife in the Moss of Flanders inn; she had so little deserved to be the sole possessor of such gold. A comely wife, a civil wife, a reasonably hospitable wife (as he argued with himself), might have kept her money on the doorstep, and he would have been the last to meddle with it; but this one deserved some punishment, and he was, in a fashion, Heaven’s instrument. The husband—true, he was a kindly soul (and here the instrument of Heaven found his sophistry weak a little at the knees); but Black Andy had an intuition that the hoard was secret, even from the husband, and he guessed aright the wife would never report the actual nature of her loss.