However, it was not long before he set off at full speed, motioning Waverley to follow him. The innocent took a difficult and dangerous path along the sides of a deep glen, holding on to bushes, rounding perilous corners of rock, till at last the barking of dogs directed them to the entrance of a wretched hovel. Here Davie's mother received Edward with a sullen fierceness which the young man could not understand--till, from behind the door, holding a pistol in his hand, unwashed, gaunt, and with a three weeks' beard fringing his hollow cheeks, he saw come forth--the Baron of Bradwardine himself. After the first gladsome greetings were over, the old man had many a tale to tell his young English friend. But his chief grievance was not his danger of the gallows, nor the discomfort of his hiding-place, but the evil-doing of his cousin, to whom, as it now appeared, the Barony of Bradwardine now belonged. Malcolm of Inch-Grabbit had, it appeared, come to uplift the rents of the Barony. But the country people, being naturally indignant that he should have so readily taken advantage of the misfortune of his kinsman, received him but ill. Indeed, a shot was fired at the new proprietor by some unknown marksman in the gloaming, which so frightened the heir that he fled at once to Stirling and had the estate promptly advertised for sale. "In addition to which," continued the old man, "though I bred him up from a boy, he hath spoken much against me to the great folk of the time, so that they have sent a company of soldiers down here to destroy all that belongs to me, and to hunt his own blood-kin like a partridge upon the mountains." "Aye," cried Janet Gellatley, "and if it had not been for my poor Davie there, they would have catched the partridge, too!" Then with a true mother's pride Janet told the story of how the poor innocent had saved his master. The Baron was compelled by the strictness of the watch to hide, all day and most of the nights, in a cave high up in a wooded glen.