Then in a moment, like the breaking of a dam, the fear quite went from me. They were but common-place robbers after all, and I a craven and a coward to lie still while my master’s goods were being stolen before my eyes. I leaped out upon them without waiting to think, for I was not feared of a dozen such. ’Hold!’ I cried. ’Stand for your lives, gutter-thieves, or I will run you through!’ I stood in the doorway with my sword and dagger in hand, and as soon as I felt one come against the point of my blade, I let him have it with all my might, for it was not a time for half-measures. Then, though I heard the answering cry of wounding, there was no time for further action, for something came at me with a rush like a wild beast of the wood, and the snarl of the springing heather cat. Now there are many things that a lad of eighteen or nineteen may do—things of worth and daring—but he cannot stand against the weight of a strong and well-grown man when he leaps upon him. Therefore I cannot count it to my shame that now I was overcome and overborne. Once and again was I smitten, till I felt the iron, as it had been fire, strike me here and there. And though I felt no pain, there was something warm, which I divined to be my own blood, running down. Then I knew no more. When I awoke I was in the Grieve’s house, lying on a bed. Sir Thomas Kennedy, my master, and the Earl himself were bending over me. They had unclasped my hand, and now stood back in wonderment at what they found gripped in it. ’It is the key of the treasure chest of Kelwood—the key with my father, the King of Carrick’s seal graven upon it! Where could the lad have gotten it?’ Yet of a certainty they had taken it out of my tightly-clenched hand, which had been fixed upon something ever since they found me on the barn threshing-floor, where I lay senseless in a pool of my own blood. *CHAPTER XX* *THE SECRET OF THE CAIRD* It was, I can avouch, a strange experience for me to lie on my back in the Grieve’s house all through the long days of spring and summer. Kate Allison and her mother were tirelessly kind. The Grieve himself generally set his head past the door as he went and came from his meals, crying mayhap something of the day—that ’it was warm,’ or that it was ’a wat yin,’ and thinking it the height of a jest to say to me, ’An’ what kind o’ weather hae ye below the blankets?’ For with kindly-natured country folk a little jest goes a great way, and serveth as long without washing as a pair of English blankets. Then in the forenoon Sir Thomas would come in from the castle, opening the hallan door and walking across the Grieve’s kitchen as unceremoniously as he would have done in his own house. ’My lad, they have made a hand of you, but we will dowse them yet for that!’ was one of his stated encouragements to me. ’Let me see the clours—hoot, man, they will never mar you on your marriage day!’