Nor was she long gone before she returned with my mother. They had called the sentry in to his evening meal, and supplied him with something to drink. For they had had the garrison long enough with them to learn that all soldiers are great trenchermen, and can right nobly "claw a bicker" and "toom a stoup" with any man. CHAPTER XXVIII. THE WELL-HOUSE OF EARLSTOUN. So as soon as the soldier was snugly housed with the servant lass, the two women came to me, where I sat at the back of the door of the well-house. Chiefly I wanted to hear what had brought Maisie of the Duchrae so far from home as the house of Earlstoun. It seemed to betoken some ill befallen my good friends by the Grenoch water-side. But my mother stooped down and put her arms about me. She declared that she would have me taken up to the west garret under the rigging, where, she said, none of the soldiers had ever been. But there I would in no wise go, for well I knew that so soon as she had me there, and a dozen soldiers between me and a dash for liberty, she would forthwith never rest until she had me out again. Then the next idea was that I should go to the wattled platform on the oak, to which Sandy resorted; but I had fallen into a violent horror of shaking and hot flushes alternating with deadly cold, so that to bide night and day in the sole covert of a tree looked like my death. At last Maisie Lennox, who had a fine discernment for places of concealment in the old days when we two used to play at "Bogle-about-the-Stacks" at the Duchrae, cast an eye up at the roof of the well-house. "I declare, I think there is a chamber up there," she said, and stood a moment considering. "Give me an ease up!" she said quietly to my mother. She did everything quietly. "How can there be such a place and I not know it?" said my mother. "Have I not been about the tower these thirty years?" But Maisie thought otherwise of the matter, and without more ado she set her little feet in the nicks of the stones, which were rough-set like the inside of a chimney. Then putting her palm flat above her, she pushed an iron-ringed trap-door open, lifted herself level with it, and so disappeared from our view. We could hear her groping above us, and sometimes little stones and lime pellets fell tinkling into the well. So we remained beneath waiting for her report, and I hoped that it might not be long, for I felt that soon I must lay me down and die, so terrible was the tightness about my head. "There is a chamber here," she cried at last. "It is low in the rigging and part of the roof is broken towards the trees, but the ivy hides it and the hole cannot be seen from the house." "The very place! Well done, young lass!" said my mother--much pleased, even though she had not found it herself. For she was a remarkable woman. Maisie looked over the edge. "Give me your hand?" she said.