“We cannot pass that way--the soldier men would shoot us,” I answered her with truth. “Then take me to my Auntie Jean,” she persisted, catching at my hand pettishly, and then throwing it from her, “and my mother will come for me in the morning.” “But where does your Auntie Jean live?” “How can I tell--it is such a long way?” she answered. “It is in a house in the middle of a loch!” Now this could only mean in the old tower of Lochinvar. But that was a yet longer and more difficult road than to the Earlstoun, and the line of sentries up the Bennan side barred our progress as completely as ever. Nevertheless there was something attractive in the little maid’s idea. For that ancient strength, alone among all the neighbouring houses, sheltered no band of troopers. Kenmure, Earlstoun, Gordonston, and even our own little farm town of Ardarroch were all manned and watched, but the half-ruinous block-house of Lochinvar set in the midst of its moorland loch had been left untenanted. Its owner, Walter Gordon, the famous swordsman, was in exile abroad, so they said, and the place, save for a room or two, totally disrupted and broken down. There was, therefore, no safer refuge for little Mary, if indeed her aunt dwelt there and we could find our way. Suddenly, as we looked about, an idea came to me, and, what is not so common, the means of carrying it out. The sheepfolds (or “buchts”) in which we were hiding were walled in with rough stones from the hill, piled so as to form dry dykes, high and strong, and the entrances were defended by heavy wooden gates swung upon posts driven deep into the ground. The gates lifted away easily from their hinges. Two or three of these would make a secure enough raft if I could only fasten them together. And even as I set about to find ways and means, I was conscious of a change. A strange elation took me at the heart, and ran through my veins like unaccustomed wine. I was no longer the careless herd laddie. I had entered life. I knew the penalty of failure. The man in the brown coat lying prone on his face up there above me on the crest of the Bennan quite clearly and sufficiently pointed that moral. So, with the little girl close behind me, I searched both sets of “buchts” from end to end. I found three gates which could be easily detached from their posts. These I dismounted one after another. How, then, was I to get them to the water’s edge, for they were far too heavy for my puny strength? I could only break a limb from a tree and draw them down to the loch shore on that, even as I had often helped my father to bring home his faggots of firewood from the hill upon a _carr_, or trail-cart of brushwood.