Then speeding in the opposite direction Rob found a lodging in another inn, and slept far into the following day--the day on which he was to meet Muckle John and win to freedom at last. After all the turmoil and distress of the weeks following Culloden, it was a strange enough sensation to think of the great towns ahead in Holland or France, where there was no dire necessity to keep one eye over your shoulder and the other cocked upon the end of the street, and where a Jacobite was not considered food for the nearest gallows tree. So thinking (and yet with misgiving for all that) Rob passed cannily out of Edinburgh and along the way to Leith, and again the dread fear that he was being followed took possession of him. The sun was falling when he saw the lonesome gibbet tree stuck up against the skyline. On it the body of some luckless creature was swinging in its chains--he could just catch the dreary creaking on the wind. He looked backward for the twentieth time. But all the desolate landscape seemed empty of living soul or beast. And yet he could have sworn that he had seen a head dodge behind the tussock of coarse rank grass just on the top of the mound. He was so sure of it he ran back, but when he reached it there was nothing. Then bending as a true hillsman reads the ground he saw the fresh mark of a boot in the wet sand. There was danger lurking amongst the dunes, and still no sign of Muckle John. Out on the Firth of Forth a ship was running up her canvas to the breeze, and it set him wondering in an idle fashion whether Muckle John might not be already aboard starting for France. And then the sunlight faded and the greyness of the gloaming crept up from the sea. Clink, clink, went the chains upon the forlorn gibbet tree, and with a deeper rustier note as the wood groaned and shuddered in its joints. He walked slowly up the sloping sandy path. Above him, black above the evening sky swung the dead man--some poor soul less guilty of wrong maybe than he himself. Then sitting upon a heap of sand beside the dreary burden with its dismal refrain he waited for what might befall. That there was danger afoot he knew instinctively, but his great reliance upon Muckle John seemed to almost dissipate such perils. There was a mountain of strength in Muckle John. The darkness was falling fast when of a sudden, like the spring of a leopard for swiftness, a man was upon his back and with the crook of his arm around his throat. Uttering one faint cry Rob tumbled backwards, and before he could struggle to his feet, his legs were gripped by another man and a third flung himself bodily upon his chest. As far as Rob was concerned the question of France was over and done with. It was a sad enough ending to all his brave adventures to be bowled over by three vagabonds on Leith sands, and trussed like a hen. But there was more in it than that.