The sergeant saluted, and marched Neal out of the house. His coat was dragged off him, his shirt stripped from his back, his hands tied to the tree which stood before Moylin’s house. He set his teeth and waited. The predominating feeling in his mind at first was not fear but furious anger. He had shrunk in terror from the near prospect of seeing Finlay die. He felt nothing now except a passionate desire for revenge. The sergeant swung the trooper’s belt round his head, making it whistle through the air. Neal shivered and shrank, but the blow did not fall. The sergeant was in no hurry. “You hear that,” he said, swinging the belt again. “Will you speak before I lay it on you? You shall have time to consider. Nobody shall say I hurried a prisoner. We’ll sing you a psalm, my dearly beloved, a sweet psalm to a most comfortable tune. At the end of the first verse I’ll give you another chance. If you don’t speak then----. Now Tarn, now lads all, tune up to the Ould Hunderd, “‘There was a Presbyterian cat Who loved her neighbour’s cream to sup; She sanctified her theft with prayer Before she went to drink it up.’” The troopers, who appeared to have learned both tune and words since the night when the sergeant sang them in Dunseveric meeting-house, shouted lustily. Following their sergeant, they drawled the last line until it seemed to Neal as if they would never reach the end of it. “Now, Mr. Neal Ward,” said the sergeant, “you’ve had a most comfortable and cheering psalm for the hour of your affliction. Will you speak, or----. Damn your soul, Tam, what are you at?” The man next him lurched suddenly forward, clutching at the sergeant. In another instant there was a dull thud, and Donald Ward stood over the sergeant with a pistol, grasped by its barrel, in his hand. He had brought the butt of it down on the man’s skull. Two more of the yeomen fell almost at the same instant. The rest, three of them with wounds, fled, yelling, down the lane. “The croppies are on us! Hell and murder! We’re dead men!” There were about twenty of them, all well armed, but a night surprise has a tendency to shake the firmest nerves. Captain Twinely and his fellow-officer played no very heroic part. At the first sound of the shouting and the footsteps of the flying troopers they rushed into the inner room and crawled under the bed, fighting desperately with each other for the place nearest the wall, but Donald Ward had no time to go after them. “Cut the boy down,” he said. It was Felix Matier who set Neal free. “Oh, whistle and I will come to you, my lad,” he quoted, as he hustled the shirt over Neal’s shoulders. “Why didn’t you whistle, Neal, or shout, or something? Only for that devil’s song we’d never have found you. I guessed he was at some mischief when I heard him begin it.”