Peter the Renegade
by S. R. Crockett
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: EPISODE ONE – The Scout-Master of the Fourth
Swearwords: None.
Description: EPISODE ONE – The Scout-Master of the Fourth
This fine series of stories of the Peninsular War was the last work of the late Mr S. R. Crockett. The Peninsular War is a subject in which Mr Crockett was particularly well informed, and we know that he undertook the writing of these stories for the Grand Magazine with pleasure and zest. The series is based upon the exploits of a soldier who, deserting from Sir John Moore’s army, placed himself in command of one of the Spanish guerrilla bands, and on many occasions helped to turn the tide of battle in favour of British arms.
They broke like a whirlwind upon the three deserters straggling painfully away from the line of retreat. The roar of the storm among the foothills of Ludo dulled the feet of their horses.
Before they knew it they were surrounded in a tiny cirque or cove of the Sierras into which the snow was drifting in fierce gusts. And through the flurrying drifts came the rearguard of Paget’s Horse, very angry and sharp-set on the track of just such laggards and renegades as were these three.
Their leader, or at least the man of mark amongst them, was tall Peter Blake, adventurer pur sang, late Scout-Master to the 4th Dragoons.
With him were Mark O’Hanlon of the pack train and a ragged linesman of unknown name whose back was still raw and scarred from Moore’s ready triangles. All three had got drunk in the wine vaults of Bembibre and for this offence, one – the nameless man – had already suffered when the provost marshal set up his posts at the close of the day’s march. These played a great part in Moore’s retreat and were responsible for more men missing than were ever captured by Soult’s voltigeurs.
Now it was that little cirque walled in with basalt that did it, for you cannot climb obsidian rocks black and slippery as the bottom of smashed wine bottles. Twenty feet of such work would cut both hands and feet to pieces.
So ‘Bang-bang-bang!’ Two cavalry pistols and one well-kept Brown Bess spoke out at short range. The leading sergeant of Lane’s Light swayed towards the edge of the precipice. His charger pawed desperately at the crumbly edge, lost grip, threw back his head, and both went rolling over and over till they fell with a splash into the green rush of the river.
O’Hanlon was taken with his musket still smoking. The linesman with the scarred back collapsed into a tumble of wet rags. He had blown out his brains rather than face the provost marshal rolling up his sleeves at the triangles. And who shall say that he had not chosen well?
The fate of ex-Scout-Master Peter Blake was different. Being a man of foresight and infinite experience, he wasted no time in fruitless musketry practice. At the first glimpse of the shining bits and light blue jackets of the British cavalry he clasped his knees with his hands, ducked his head well between his arms, and let himself go, turning desperate cartwheels down the pass of Dispeño Perros, the place for casting down dead dogs.
Such as could unsling their carbines fired at him. But Peter’s route was accidental. Boulders were many. He plunged in and out of bewildering copse-woods. The sweeping party found the thresh of the snow exasperating. Clouds of stinging whiteness blinded the moving target, and at best it was but cavalryman’s marksmanship – which is proverbially, twenty misses to a hit.
Of Peter they saw no more. He had gone to where the curlews nest the winter through.
‘Coorli – coorli – coorli!’ they cry as they go about in wide circles, discontented at being disturbed, flying low, touching the dead bracken with their wings. In the midst of this Peter was now sitting up, thoughtfully rubbing his bruises with dock-leaf juice.
For him Ensign Vane made no search, recognising that the tall man had made good. He contented himself with tying up O’Hanlon and recovering the sergeant’s body from the pool below, the right heel still locked in the stirrup. They took O’Hanlon off to the drum-head court-martial, to be condemned to die at break of day, a white sheet from the adjutant’s notebook being mercifully pinned over his heart.
But far away among the curleywee and the rusty ferns sat Peter Blake, soldier of fortune, rough-rider, linguist, classic scholar, dashing fighter and present renegade.
He was canvassing his hurts and at the same time explaining his position to a young person who had apparently been waiting to receive him. She was seated on the trunk of a fallen tree, her chin in her palms and she regarded Peter’s attempts at first aid surgery with contemptuous amusement. They had made acquaintance thus:
‘Hallo!’ cried Peter. ‘Who are you?’
‘I am Froyla,’ she had replied. ‘Who are you?’
She glanced at his rags of uniform.
‘You are English,’ she asserted and then without waiting she continued, ‘I could mend that great tear at your elbow – and if you think licking your wounds is any good, you are mistaken. Dogs do that.’
Peter grinned.
‘Licking is good,’ he said, ‘the frosty bite in the air stops the aching – ever try?’
‘I know something better,’ said the girl on the log. ‘You are a soldier. Face about!’
Peter swung himself about on his tussock of grass. He heard the rustle of skirts, then the rending of linen, and in a moment the soft unhurried Spanish voice was bidding him ‘keep still’ – while she tied up a wound on his neck through which a chance bullet, half spent among the rocks, had rasped its way without doing much harm.
Now Peter made his first mistake. Of infinite ruse and guile in war, he had till now been content to make move à la hussard – hussar fashion. He put his arm about the girl’s waist as she bent over him. It seemed no more than her due – the least he could do.
‘Let go, I tell you!’
Peter drew her still closer. There was a short struggle, and then, chill as ice, hot as fire, a stiletto went through the fleshy part of his forearm. The next moment the bracken glade was empty, and Peter, much astonished and sucking instinctively at his wound, found himself alone with the whaups and the golden plover.
‘Coorli – coorli – coorli – coorli!’
The cry died away in an airy diminuendo, and Peter a minute later could hardly believe that the girl calling herself Froyla had been there at all, within all too easy reach of his arm. But there was his neck bound knowledgably up. There was proof more pregnant in the little pinpricks of the stiletto, and abandoned on the russet fern tops, the remainder of the torn breadth of linen, of a fineness such as he had only seen on his mother’s bleaching green by the Rerrick shore.
Peter Blake was a man of the present. His religion was chiefly the very practical one of how to make the best of the various ‘bad jobs’ into which his recklessness had led him.
He recognised that he had lost his nationality. He had cut himself off from all – regiment, rank, promotion, pension.
‘Ended!’ he muttered. ‘Done with! Free Toom! Rubbish shot here! Thank God, that’s over, Peter! Now what’s next?’
There were other countries, other services, other people who would be glad to welcome a Peter Blake if only they would let him get within welcoming distance. Ah, but would they? Not very likely. He wished he had consulted the little lady of the stiletto and the torn breadth of linen on the point.
He blasphemed himself for a fool. Why could he not keep his hands to himself? At bottom he had meant no ill, but how was she to know that? He was rightly served, and covering up the stab with a tiny wisp of rag teased into waste, he took the linen between his teeth and bound it up tightly with the other hand.
‘Lucky it’s my left. It will stiffen presently, and a man never knows what is before him. Peter, were her eyes dark green or hazel? A pint of good Riocha that they were hazel!’
High above him he made out above the tops of the pine trees the flicker of a camp fire – not the fire itself but the ‘skarrow’ of it in the sky. Then Peter suddenly discovered, without canvassing at all, that he was both cold and hungry. He was also sleepy and however mild the Gallegan night can be upon the peninsula where Spain thrusts a snout far out into the Gulf Stream, though roses and fuchsias bloom perennial, Peter knew better than to risk going to sleep on her bare mountains of a December night.
If only he had kept his arm to himself, he might have been warming his toes at that blaze, or one like it and now if that girl only spoke three words he might have Romana or the skulking Molinos plundering him for the sake of his valuables.
‘Valuables!’ Peter laughed aloud.
Nevertheless he went through his pockets. He had only a very excellent knife, sheathed in pigskin, the copper ornaments on which were responsible for several grievous bumps and scratches upon his person. Ah, yes, there was his watch – gold, jewelled in holes, signed by the Chronometer Maker Royal – an instrument quite unfit for a renegade and an outcast. But as it reincarnated one of the several pasts of Scout-Master Peter, he had kept it by him. The inscription, ‘To Peter Blake, writer at Dacca, for exceptional valour and the saving of life and property, from His Majesty’s East India Company,’ spoilt the selling value of it, and the fact that he had lost the key made it less useful than it might have been till he could obtain another.
Still the case was heavy enough to drive in tent-pegs with, and quite good enough to tempt thievish fingers to cut throats for its possession.
He must therefore hide the watch, which in that land of caverns and holes in the ground was easily done. He found one with a conspicuous white splash of silicate over the entrance. He groped his way within with extreme care, for far below him, somewhere in the bowels of the mountain, he heard the racing drum of falling water. Peter found a dry hiding-place, large as his palms laid together, and here he placed the inscribed watch, covering it with the rags of a handkerchief and blocking the orifice with a neat wedge picked from the floor. Then, always in the dark, he verified his marks, and came out with the feeling that somehow his life was astonishingly simplified for him.
But far above among the dark pine blotches the watch-fire waxed and waned as armful after armful of pine branches and heath twigs were thrown upon it.
Peter took himself to meditation. He weighed carefully the pros and cons of his situation. A Spanish commando – good – not French certainly – still less British. But a free command here in Gallicia, playing the shuttlecock between two armies, meant neither more nor less than a gang of thieves! But then, every soldier in Spain was a thief, and the biggest thief of all was one Buonaparte, at the head of three hundred thousand of them.
Peter had lifted loot too often to have any moral scruples in time of war. But he could have wished the guerrilla procedure a trifle more regular. It would mean no more than a stoop, a swoop, some cracking of pistols, much downward slashing of sabres, more stabbing upwards of knives, as much looting as the time and place would allow, and then hurry back again to the safe shelter of the brousse – which means prickly cover of all sorts, from plain gorse to self-sown saplings, and high enough in places to hide a man standing erect.
No great glory, thought Peter, but after all, the thing had its possibilities – and, indeed, he had not much choice.
Ex-Scout-Master Peter had been born on Solway side. He was, therefore, by nature the type of the ruseful adventurous, self-assertive, self-reliant Scot of Galloway – the stock of John Paul, the first American admiral. Not so fortunate, perhaps, had been Peter Black as the son of the Kirkbean gardener. But then Admirable Paul Jones was dead, while, though hard-pressed, Peter the Scout-Master was very much alive –wherein he had undoubtedly the advantage.
Thirty years of age, fourteen of knocking about the world had produced only one broad-bladed Toledo knife, and a hidden watch with an inscription on it which spoilt its selling value. The harvest had not been great – wars, peace, quill-driving, treasure-seeking, gold-digging, man-hunting, slave-selling, had produced just these. By the pawnbroker’s standard perhaps about ten guinea’s worth, but to the inward eye much more – they had produced Peter! And what Peter was has yet to be told.
No drunkard, though he owed his present plight to a carouse in the wine vaults of Bembibre, where with some hundreds of others he had arrived, chilled to the bone by the drenching rain of the Sierras. Only his was the greatest sin for he had been carrying despatches. And owing to the picking of his pocket, the expected battle of Ludo had not been fought and General Frazer’s whole column had lost itself on the mountains towards Vigo, sixty thousand pounds in coined gold had been hidden (Peter knew where) and the field artillery of an entire division had been abandoned.
Small wonder that the carrier of Sir David Baird’s despatches had made haste to escape. He had sinned the sin without pardon – he a striped man, almost an officer.
Peter cursed the wine of Bembibre taken on an empty stomach, and compared it unfavourably with the fine ripe whisky of the paternal still.
‘There is not a headache in a gallon of it,’ he asserted rather at large. For as he had not tasted that since he was sixteen, and then under a severe paternal eye, Peter’s experience of unlicensed Galloway liquor could not have been great.
‘But never again – never again!’ he vowed to himself. ‘Yes,’ he agreed with the unpleasant Something within him, which for old sake he called his conscience, ‘it served me right. What business had I among such undisciplined swine – I a trusted man, an old soldier, with my hand on a commission?’
He was well served – he had got his deserts.
‘And so here ye are Peter, my lad, shelterless on the mountains on a cold December night, enemies on every side and the devil of a hunger in your belly!’
But Peter’s nature did not allow him to remain long depressed. Gloom was not in his line. In Galloway it rains so much that any blink of sunshine is welcomed as ‘fine harvest weather,’ or at least as the promise of it.
‘A God’s mercy it is to be dry,’ said Peter, shivering as the Sierra wind cut him to the bone – ‘dry and comfortable. I own I shall be warmer when I meet a woman with a needle and thread. Oh, Peter, what a fool ye were! If ye had behaved yersel’ wi’ the lass, by this time your coat would have been mended and you sitting cocking your toes at the fine warm fire.’
He examined injuries under the light of the stars.
‘Ye are a wonder,’ said Peter, addressing his coat. ‘Faith, I came down that hillside whirling like a Bengalee fire-cracker!’
The fire above drew him with an irresistible fascination.
Down in the valley the British rearguard was keeping up a dropping fire of warning and advertisement while on the other side French bugles blew ‘The March of Turenne’ and ‘Sambre et Meuse.’ These were the voltigeurs advancing victoriously on the Southern Ridges.
Peter crawled carefully farther and farther away from these distant noises. They belonged to a past so remote as to be almost forgotten.
To get above and behind that wavering glow Peter climbed well to the left, worming his way among these scattered boulders. His riding boots dug deep into the stiff shingle. Ice-covered spikes of rock burned his fingers like hot iron; but Peter persevered with recovered spirits, cheerful and content with himself, never doubting that an active spirit and a serene conscience would bring all to a successful issue.
‘After all you have been in tighter places, Peter,’ he meditated; ‘but ’ware that loose rock. If you send it down, my friend, you will have a dozen comitados up the hill to make inquiries.
‘You must succeed, my friend, or you must die,’ he reminded himself; ‘you can’t draw the game this time. Success or death, friend Peter. So make it success, seeing that if what your mother taught you is true, to die you are singularly unfit!’
He reached, still crawling, a little bare rocky spur which jutted out over the wavering flicker of the fire. With an infinity of caution Peter craned his neck and looked over. His nerves, more on the strain than he had imagined, relaxed instantly.
An encampment of country folk escaped to a high-lying nest of pasture, had established themselves there among the dwarf pines. The little campo was green with the mild rains of the Gulf Stream, though on the opposite flank of the mountain the frost bit shrewdly enough. Here were horses, cattle, and sheep. Refuges had been established for the horses, and the face of the rock was pitted with caves and shelters.
Peter could not estimate the number of the refugees, but he remarked with contentment that there were among them many active young men, muscular and well armed.
All Spain laughs at the poverty of the Gallegan because the poverty of his mountains has made him hewer of wood and drawer of water to the more fortunate provinces. But the Gallegan everywhere is grave and trustworthy, dignified even in a menial capacity, and the ex-Scout-Master knew that if they would once let him come among them the game was in his own hands.
He blessed the chance which had sent him for two years as a super-cargo to the Havanna, where, from a girl in the tobacco monopoly, he had learned Spanish of limited vocabulary, but excellent quality. If only he had a woman to talk to, he thought that the business would not go tardy foot. In any case, it was no use staying up there to freeze.
The Scot took a long breath – the brave man’s breath before he ventures all. Then from palms hollowed like a lily-sheath he produced the long melancholy whoop of the white owl. All country people know that the white bird hoots on the wing. So Peter judged that the sound thrice repeated from the same place would carry a message to the campo that a friend wished to communicate.
At the first sound, the movement of the camp was stilled.
‘Whoo-oot – whoo – who-ut!’
The notes fell soft and distinct, just as many a night on the march through Spain Peter had heard them come down to the camp of the 4th Dragoons.
In a moment only the men were to be seen taking their places behind the palisading which defended the campo on the only side from which it could be approached. Though he could not see, Peter knew that the women and children were in the caves, and the armed men each at his appointed place. The sentinel on the rock overlooking the valley had fallen back at the second hooting of the owl.
Only the cattle were left standing gazing stupidly at the olla bubbling over the heaped red embers.
Then, and not till then, did the three answering whoops come back from the campo.
‘Good stuff down there,’ said Peter as he descended: ‘if I don’t get my throat cut during the next five minutes I shall make something of these fellows yet. Now you are almost there, Peter. Nothing for it but to shut your eyes and take your gruel!’
He paused in the gateway, with a swift gesture threw his sheath and all into the middle of the campo and then advanced with a slow and regular pace, his hands open above his head.
‘Friend – friend – friend!’ he repeated aloud.
‘Stop where you are, friend,’ a voice unseen but near answered.
‘What is your name, and what do you want in this place?’
‘Blake is my name – cousin of General Blake. I have escaped from the French. I ask only for food and a place to lay my head!’
‘It may be. It may well be,’ said the voice at his elbow, ‘but stand very still. We are poor ignorant folk and these are all our possessions. If you seek to rob us, God have mercy on your soul.’
‘I am poor, unarmed, wounded,’ Peter spoke with a very creditable break in his voice – ‘and very hungry. I shall die if you do not help me; even now I faint.’
‘Señor,’ said the voice of authority, ‘very particularly I recommend you not to faint till the young men have searched you. You Carlos, Vincente, Ramon, go forward! Keep your guns pointed, Carlos and Ramon. Vincente, search him.’
The young men advanced, finger on trigger. Peter was calm personally, but he prayed a little that none of the others might be nervous. The lads were young, the muskets probably old and his anxiety for them was legitimate. They could just as well have crooked their fore-fingers over the trigger guard. If he lived he would show them how.
Vincente searched him carefully and Peter talked steadily all the time. He kept his hands up and his eyes front – but he talked. He embroidered adventures. He sang the greatness of his cousin the General, the friend of Castanos, the victor of Baylen. He told them how, born of a foreign father, but taught to love Spain by a Gallegan mother, he had battled against the French.
At last, as nothing whatever was found, he was permitted to drop his arms. The muskets were lowered and the men flocked eagerly about him. An old man, with a shaven chin and a monk’s face roughly blocked out as with a hatchet, then took him in hand. He must answer many questions.
He told them how on his way back to his cousin he had been captured by the French, who would have certainly shot him, but that he saved himself by taking a cartwheel roll down the precipice over there – Dispeño Perres was the name of it.
They murmured their amazement in sympathy.
‘Dispeño Perres! What a place to break necks. Poverino, no wonder he had many wounds to dress!’
The women closed about him eagerly to assist, but one gaunt old crone fingered the bandage about his arm which was ridiculously disproportioned to the pin-prink beneath, which had in fact, closed up almost as soon as it had done bleeding.
‘I made that linen,’ she cried; ‘I and no other spun it!’
‘How came you by the good mother’s linen?’ demanded the old man.
Peter, who told the truth by preference when it would serve as well as a lie, was about to tell the story, when his eyes fell on the very girl of the stiletto strolling nonchalantly towards him from the camp fire which she had been replenishing.
Very sweet and innocent she looked and instantly his will changed.
‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘I lay upon the ground like one dead. Perhaps the Holy Virgin sent Saint Elizabeth while I swooned, but when the snowflakes on my face brought me round I was bandaged as you see.’
‘More likely a band of good-for-nothing gipsies who have plundered our bleaching greens or the houses we left behind us at La Giralda. I myself have lost many things, a petticoat among others. I should not wonder; indeed it is very likely the same!’
So spoke Froyla, calmly bending over the wounds, her young head and supple body looking strangely out of place among the elders, worn by toil and childbirth.
‘The bandaging is very badly done,’ she went on, fingering the knots critically. ‘But then all gipsies are heathen dogs, and for that matter so are the English.’
‘I shall take you at your word, señorita,’ said Peter. ‘I wager my good Toledan knife (which is all the robbers have left me) against one lock of your jetty curls that I know more prayers in Latin than any priest in the archdiocese of Tarragona! Why, till the rascals stole it, I read my breviary every day like a priest.’
‘Better than many, I daresay,’ said Froyla. ‘You can borrow from the Reverend Father Molinos when he next comes to visit us.’
‘The devil take him!’ thought Peter; ‘that is by no means so good. Molinos is, they say, the worst of all. He plunders the wounded, English and French alike, says a prayer, and cuts their throats afterwards.’
But nevertheless he went on talking. He must make a conquest of the tribe before the coming of the lawless priest. If the young men would only list with him he would teach them how to send Molinos skipping like a ball at la pelote.
Froyla had given him a grateful glance in recognition about the Romanichels. She was doubtless the chief’s daughter, for she leaned confidently on the arm of the old man who had asked him so many questions. She might help him greatly if she would; but at present Peter knew better than to pay her the least attention.
Nevertheless he felt her soft nimble fingers about his head and arms, retying bandages and re-dressing wounds. A cap of woven silk was pulled down to his ears to hold it all in place. A red tassel dandled rakishly over one eye, and Peter, full of content in the present, told his tales, and with his toes to the fire of pine knots listened to the bubbling of the olla in the pots.
Supper seemed long in arriving, but that is the way of Spanish meals all over the peninsula. With the first rich aromatic platter of meat and vegetables, the first gurgle of warm wine in his throat, something gay and cheerful descended upon the encampment.
The men were served first, Gallegan fashion. They ate seated each upon his chair or stool, with a hasty table of planks laid on tressels in the midst. Froyla directed the women with a word or a movement of the hand.
Afterwards the women sat down and a few of the young men, of whom Peter made himself one, served them. He spoke deferentially to Froyla, continuing the tale of his marvellous adventures, and interesting all within reach of his voice, who often paused to listen to him. In return Froyla told him who they were among whom he found himself.
‘We are two families, much intermarried,’ she explained, ‘both from the same village, La Giralda - you have heard of it doubtless – the same in which Don Carlos Molinos was priest. Cardoños and Feliçé are the only two family names, and now we do not know whether our poor little village has been burnt. At any rate, here we all are, safe as the campo of the Peak – men, women, children and cattle.’
Peter, contented with his good meal, spoke encouragement. They had good shelter, plenty of provender; with a little skill, of which he, the cousin of the General, had plenty, the young men might be drilled and the place made a fortress.
Froyla shook her head and sighed.
‘It is hard to keep the lads here all winter doing nothing. The campo is no place for them. We have lost several already to the guerrilla bands. And who can blame them? I should do the same if I were a man.’
Peter took his courage in both hands.
‘What if we have a band of our own – the band Blake-Cardoños. Will you help me señorita?’
The girl looked at him curiously. He exhibited his wounded arm, about which, as the bleeding had stopped, no compress had been put.
‘I was rightly served,’ he murmured; ‘but pray consider the temptation.’
Froyla Cardoños examined the wound with the precision of an expert in such matters.
‘Whoever gave you that little souvenir,’ she said, ‘wished you no great harm.’
And so with these words and from that moment the guerrilla band of Blake-Cardoños took shape.
The next morning at breakfast, when the men were seated, Peter remained standing.
‘Are we Christians or dogs?’ he said ‘Is it right that we should fall on our food without a blessing asked in the holy Latin?’
‘We have no priest,’ said the old chief apologetically, laying down his clasp knife and horn spoon.
Peter crossed himself, and in excellent Latin repeated the Benediction upon such as sit down to meat, concluding in the name of Santa Eudoxia, Santa Isidora, and especially the great and holy Saint Jaime de Campostella.
The effect, upon the elders especially, was impressive and immediate. The family connection Cardoños-Feliçé had obviously entertained an angel unawares.
Only ex-Scout Master Peter was not content with the performance.
‘It is a pity,’ he said, stuffing his mouth with meat, potato and peppers, all steamed appetisingly together, ‘I ought to have known the names of more saints!’
And he made a mental note to learn a dozen or so the next time that a calendar should fall under his eye.
Peter spent the day in busy preparation. He helped the old women to carry water. He talked unweariedly to the old men. He mended the trigger of a musket so cleverly that the whole of the fighting strength of La Giralda put in an appearance at an informal inspection of arms, where Peter praised, blamed, instructed and in bad cases promised repairs, when they should help him to set up a forge.
The dark Spanish eyes watched him first with slowly waning suspicion, then with interest, lastly with admiration. It was very well for the elders of the tribe to be impressed with his Latin. But these were men of his own age and younger. He must show himself no spoil-sport.
So to win them he kept his strongest card till after supper. He looked about for an instrument – anything from an organ to a penny whistle would serve. Peter had the gift. He knew no theory, but the music which set voices chanting and feet dancing flowed from anything he touched.
Had anyone a guitar?
Alas! They were poor mountaineers. They had nothing but the pipes.
‘The pipes! Let us have them,’ cried Peter delighted.
But when the poor apologies for the noble pipes of his own country were presented to him he hung his head for a moment almost discouraged.
‘O for an hour of my uncle Sandy’s fiddle!’ he groaned; ‘How I could make a jota go to the tune of ‘Tullochgorum’ or ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley’.
He handled the pipes a little contemptuously.
‘Well this is not Robin Oich, nor yet Macrimmon, but I daresay they will do well enough for my stupid Lowland fingers.’
But he need not have troubled himself. From the first shrill skirl of the drones and the lilt of a dance tune tentatively played, there was no doubt of Peter’s success.
Heads began to nod in unison, feet jigged on the beaten earth, where, in front of the great lean-to stable, was their dancing floor. The girls danced shyly in the direction of the young men. The men silently but with expressive eyes challenged each his querido, till with a snap of fingers and thumbs and a simultaneous rush Feliçé and Cardoños were alike under the spell of their master and at his bidding forgot all the pinch of misery, their deserted village, whitewashed and tree-shaded, in the Mero Valley. The joy of life sang in their ears. Faster and faster went the dance, till with a shout of ‘Twenty Thousand Devils’, Don Severo himself plunged into the dance and the aged wise women of the campo, tucking up their dismal robes of Isabellino flannel, legged it with the best.
Peter’s tune was ‘Mistress McLeod of Rääsay’ and he played it as no tune had ever been played on the small pipes of Gallicia. The piper himself could by no means keep still, but walked up and down as his teacher, Pipe-Major Ewan of the Black Watch, had recommended, ‘wagging his rump like a wild goat upon the mountains of Bether.’
The music died out in the long wail of the drones as the piper checked his quarter-deck promenade.
Peter went to bed and slept soundly that night. He knew that he had entered into a new incarnation. He was no longer ex-Scout Master Blake in danger of a firing party, but El Capitan Peter, chief of the new band of guerrillas, better armed, better disciplined, better led than any other, a power anywhere between Portugal and the Pyrenees.
Best of all, better than warmth, safety, friends, captainship, there was Froyla – Froyla of the dark hair and the lips scarlet as a June pomegranate flower.
Peter the renegade fell asleep thinking about her. Were her eyes dark sea-green or only hazel?
He must find out tomorrow.
And above the stars shone and silence fell, while Captain Peter Blake, soldier of fortune and gentleman adventurer, said over the Lord’s Prayer and the twenty-third Psalm because of the promise he had made to his mother as they cowered awhile in the shelter of the march dyke the night he left Galloway fourteen years ago.
They broke like a whirlwind upon the three deserters straggling painfully away from the line of retreat. The roar of the storm among the foothills of Ludo dulled the feet of their horses.
Before they knew it they were surrounded in a tiny cirque or cove of the Sierras into which the snow was drifting in fierce gusts. And through the flurrying drifts came the rearguard of Paget’s Horse, very angry and sharp-set on the track of just such laggards and renegades as were these three.
Their leader, or at least the man of mark amongst them, was tall Peter Blake, adventurer pur sang, late Scout-Master to the 4th Dragoons.
With him were Mark O’Hanlon of the pack train and a ragged linesman of unknown name whose back was still raw and scarred from Moore’s ready triangles. All three had got drunk in the wine vaults of Bembibre and for this offence, one – the nameless man – had already suffered when the provost marshal set up his posts at the close of the day’s march. These played a great part in Moore’s retreat and were responsible for more men missing than were ever captured by Soult’s voltigeurs.
Now it was that little cirque walled in with basalt that did it, for you cannot climb obsidian rocks black and slippery as the bottom of smashed wine bottles. Twenty feet of such work would cut both hands and feet to pieces.
So ‘Bang-bang-bang!’ Two cavalry pistols and one well-kept Brown Bess spoke out at short range. The leading sergeant of Lane’s Light swayed towards the edge of the precipice. His charger pawed desperately at the crumbly edge, lost grip, threw back his head, and both went rolling over and over till they fell with a splash into the green rush of the river.
O’Hanlon was taken with his musket still smoking. The linesman with the scarred back collapsed into a tumble of wet rags. He had blown out his brains rather than face the provost marshal rolling up his sleeves at the triangles. And who shall say that he had not chosen well?
The fate of ex-Scout-Master Peter Blake was different. Being a man of foresight and infinite experience, he wasted no time in fruitless musketry practice. At the first glimpse of the shining bits and light blue jackets of the British cavalry he clasped his knees with his hands, ducked his head well between his arms, and let himself go, turning desperate cartwheels down the pass of Dispeño Perros, the place for casting down dead dogs.
Such as could unsling their carbines fired at him. But Peter’s route was accidental. Boulders were many. He plunged in and out of bewildering copse-woods. The sweeping party found the thresh of the snow exasperating. Clouds of stinging whiteness blinded the moving target, and at best it was but cavalryman’s marksmanship – which is proverbially, twenty misses to a hit.
Of Peter they saw no more. He had gone to where the curlews nest the winter through.
‘Coorli – coorli – coorli!’ they cry as they go about in wide circles, discontented at being disturbed, flying low, touching the dead bracken with their wings. In the midst of this Peter was now sitting up, thoughtfully rubbing his bruises with dock-leaf juice.
For him Ensign Vane made no search, recognising that the tall man had made good. He contented himself with tying up O’Hanlon and recovering the sergeant’s body from the pool below, the right heel still locked in the stirrup. They took O’Hanlon off to the drum-head court-martial, to be condemned to die at break of day, a white sheet from the adjutant’s notebook being mercifully pinned over his heart.
But far away among the curleywee and the rusty ferns sat Peter Blake, soldier of fortune, rough-rider, linguist, classic scholar, dashing fighter and present renegade.
He was canvassing his hurts and at the same time explaining his position to a young person who had apparently been waiting to receive him. She was seated on the trunk of a fallen tree, her chin in her palms and she regarded Peter’s attempts at first aid surgery with contemptuous amusement. They had made acquaintance thus:
‘Hallo!’ cried Peter. ‘Who are you?’
‘I am Froyla,’ she had replied. ‘Who are you?’
She glanced at his rags of uniform.
‘You are English,’ she asserted and then without waiting she continued, ‘I could mend that great tear at your elbow – and if you think licking your wounds is any good, you are mistaken. Dogs do that.’
Peter grinned.
‘Licking is good,’ he said, ‘the frosty bite in the air stops the aching – ever try?’
‘I know something better,’ said the girl on the log. ‘You are a soldier. Face about!’
Peter swung himself about on his tussock of grass. He heard the rustle of skirts, then the rending of linen, and in a moment the soft unhurried Spanish voice was bidding him ‘keep still’ – while she tied up a wound on his neck through which a chance bullet, half spent among the rocks, had rasped its way without doing much harm.
Now Peter made his first mistake. Of infinite ruse and guile in war, he had till now been content to make move à la hussard – hussar fashion. He put his arm about the girl’s waist as she bent over him. It seemed no more than her due – the least he could do.
‘Let go, I tell you!’
Peter drew her still closer. There was a short struggle, and then, chill as ice, hot as fire, a stiletto went through the fleshy part of his forearm. The next moment the bracken glade was empty, and Peter, much astonished and sucking instinctively at his wound, found himself alone with the whaups and the golden plover.
‘Coorli – coorli – coorli – coorli!’
The cry died away in an airy diminuendo, and Peter a minute later could hardly believe that the girl calling herself Froyla had been there at all, within all too easy reach of his arm. But there was his neck bound knowledgably up. There was proof more pregnant in the little pinpricks of the stiletto, and abandoned on the russet fern tops, the remainder of the torn breadth of linen, of a fineness such as he had only seen on his mother’s bleaching green by the Rerrick shore.
Peter Blake was a man of the present. His religion was chiefly the very practical one of how to make the best of the various ‘bad jobs’ into which his recklessness had led him.
He recognised that he had lost his nationality. He had cut himself off from all – regiment, rank, promotion, pension.
‘Ended!’ he muttered. ‘Done with! Free Toom! Rubbish shot here! Thank God, that’s over, Peter! Now what’s next?’
There were other countries, other services, other people who would be glad to welcome a Peter Blake if only they would let him get within welcoming distance. Ah, but would they? Not very likely. He wished he had consulted the little lady of the stiletto and the torn breadth of linen on the point.
He blasphemed himself for a fool. Why could he not keep his hands to himself? At bottom he had meant no ill, but how was she to know that? He was rightly served, and covering up the stab with a tiny wisp of rag teased into waste, he took the linen between his teeth and bound it up tightly with the other hand.
‘Lucky it’s my left. It will stiffen presently, and a man never knows what is before him. Peter, were her eyes dark green or hazel? A pint of good Riocha that they were hazel!’
High above him he made out above the tops of the pine trees the flicker of a camp fire – not the fire itself but the ‘skarrow’ of it in the sky. Then Peter suddenly discovered, without canvassing at all, that he was both cold and hungry. He was also sleepy and however mild the Gallegan night can be upon the peninsula where Spain thrusts a snout far out into the Gulf Stream, though roses and fuchsias bloom perennial, Peter knew better than to risk going to sleep on her bare mountains of a December night.
If only he had kept his arm to himself, he might have been warming his toes at that blaze, or one like it and now if that girl only spoke three words he might have Romana or the skulking Molinos plundering him for the sake of his valuables.
‘Valuables!’ Peter laughed aloud.
Nevertheless he went through his pockets. He had only a very excellent knife, sheathed in pigskin, the copper ornaments on which were responsible for several grievous bumps and scratches upon his person. Ah, yes, there was his watch – gold, jewelled in holes, signed by the Chronometer Maker Royal – an instrument quite unfit for a renegade and an outcast. But as it reincarnated one of the several pasts of Scout-Master Peter, he had kept it by him. The inscription, ‘To Peter Blake, writer at Dacca, for exceptional valour and the saving of life and property, from His Majesty’s East India Company,’ spoilt the selling value of it, and the fact that he had lost the key made it less useful than it might have been till he could obtain another.
Still the case was heavy enough to drive in tent-pegs with, and quite good enough to tempt thievish fingers to cut throats for its possession.
He must therefore hide the watch, which in that land of caverns and holes in the ground was easily done. He found one with a conspicuous white splash of silicate over the entrance. He groped his way within with extreme care, for far below him, somewhere in the bowels of the mountain, he heard the racing drum of falling water. Peter found a dry hiding-place, large as his palms laid together, and here he placed the inscribed watch, covering it with the rags of a handkerchief and blocking the orifice with a neat wedge picked from the floor. Then, always in the dark, he verified his marks, and came out with the feeling that somehow his life was astonishingly simplified for him.
But far above among the dark pine blotches the watch-fire waxed and waned as armful after armful of pine branches and heath twigs were thrown upon it.
Peter took himself to meditation. He weighed carefully the pros and cons of his situation. A Spanish commando – good – not French certainly – still less British. But a free command here in Gallicia, playing the shuttlecock between two armies, meant neither more nor less than a gang of thieves! But then, every soldier in Spain was a thief, and the biggest thief of all was one Buonaparte, at the head of three hundred thousand of them.
Peter had lifted loot too often to have any moral scruples in time of war. But he could have wished the guerrilla procedure a trifle more regular. It would mean no more than a stoop, a swoop, some cracking of pistols, much downward slashing of sabres, more stabbing upwards of knives, as much looting as the time and place would allow, and then hurry back again to the safe shelter of the brousse – which means prickly cover of all sorts, from plain gorse to self-sown saplings, and high enough in places to hide a man standing erect.
No great glory, thought Peter, but after all, the thing had its possibilities – and, indeed, he had not much choice.
Ex-Scout-Master Peter had been born on Solway side. He was, therefore, by nature the type of the ruseful adventurous, self-assertive, self-reliant Scot of Galloway – the stock of John Paul, the first American admiral. Not so fortunate, perhaps, had been Peter Black as the son of the Kirkbean gardener. But then Admirable Paul Jones was dead, while, though hard-pressed, Peter the Scout-Master was very much alive –wherein he had undoubtedly the advantage.
Thirty years of age, fourteen of knocking about the world had produced only one broad-bladed Toledo knife, and a hidden watch with an inscription on it which spoilt its selling value. The harvest had not been great – wars, peace, quill-driving, treasure-seeking, gold-digging, man-hunting, slave-selling, had produced just these. By the pawnbroker’s standard perhaps about ten guinea’s worth, but to the inward eye much more – they had produced Peter! And what Peter was has yet to be told.
No drunkard, though he owed his present plight to a carouse in the wine vaults of Bembibre, where with some hundreds of others he had arrived, chilled to the bone by the drenching rain of the Sierras. Only his was the greatest sin for he had been carrying despatches. And owing to the picking of his pocket, the expected battle of Ludo had not been fought and General Frazer’s whole column had lost itself on the mountains towards Vigo, sixty thousand pounds in coined gold had been hidden (Peter knew where) and the field artillery of an entire division had been abandoned.
Small wonder that the carrier of Sir David Baird’s despatches had made haste to escape. He had sinned the sin without pardon – he a striped man, almost an officer.
Peter cursed the wine of Bembibre taken on an empty stomach, and compared it unfavourably with the fine ripe whisky of the paternal still.
‘There is not a headache in a gallon of it,’ he asserted rather at large. For as he had not tasted that since he was sixteen, and then under a severe paternal eye, Peter’s experience of unlicensed Galloway liquor could not have been great.
‘But never again – never again!’ he vowed to himself. ‘Yes,’ he agreed with the unpleasant Something within him, which for old sake he called his conscience, ‘it served me right. What business had I among such undisciplined swine – I a trusted man, an old soldier, with my hand on a commission?’
He was well served – he had got his deserts.
‘And so here ye are Peter, my lad, shelterless on the mountains on a cold December night, enemies on every side and the devil of a hunger in your belly!’
But Peter’s nature did not allow him to remain long depressed. Gloom was not in his line. In Galloway it rains so much that any blink of sunshine is welcomed as ‘fine harvest weather,’ or at least as the promise of it.
‘A God’s mercy it is to be dry,’ said Peter, shivering as the Sierra wind cut him to the bone – ‘dry and comfortable. I own I shall be warmer when I meet a woman with a needle and thread. Oh, Peter, what a fool ye were! If ye had behaved yersel’ wi’ the lass, by this time your coat would have been mended and you sitting cocking your toes at the fine warm fire.’
He examined injuries under the light of the stars.
‘Ye are a wonder,’ said Peter, addressing his coat. ‘Faith, I came down that hillside whirling like a Bengalee fire-cracker!’
The fire above drew him with an irresistible fascination.
Down in the valley the British rearguard was keeping up a dropping fire of warning and advertisement while on the other side French bugles blew ‘The March of Turenne’ and ‘Sambre et Meuse.’ These were the voltigeurs advancing victoriously on the Southern Ridges.
Peter crawled carefully farther and farther away from these distant noises. They belonged to a past so remote as to be almost forgotten.
To get above and behind that wavering glow Peter climbed well to the left, worming his way among these scattered boulders. His riding boots dug deep into the stiff shingle. Ice-covered spikes of rock burned his fingers like hot iron; but Peter persevered with recovered spirits, cheerful and content with himself, never doubting that an active spirit and a serene conscience would bring all to a successful issue.
‘After all you have been in tighter places, Peter,’ he meditated; ‘but ’ware that loose rock. If you send it down, my friend, you will have a dozen comitados up the hill to make inquiries.
‘You must succeed, my friend, or you must die,’ he reminded himself; ‘you can’t draw the game this time. Success or death, friend Peter. So make it success, seeing that if what your mother taught you is true, to die you are singularly unfit!’
He reached, still crawling, a little bare rocky spur which jutted out over the wavering flicker of the fire. With an infinity of caution Peter craned his neck and looked over. His nerves, more on the strain than he had imagined, relaxed instantly.
An encampment of country folk escaped to a high-lying nest of pasture, had established themselves there among the dwarf pines. The little campo was green with the mild rains of the Gulf Stream, though on the opposite flank of the mountain the frost bit shrewdly enough. Here were horses, cattle, and sheep. Refuges had been established for the horses, and the face of the rock was pitted with caves and shelters.
Peter could not estimate the number of the refugees, but he remarked with contentment that there were among them many active young men, muscular and well armed.
All Spain laughs at the poverty of the Gallegan because the poverty of his mountains has made him hewer of wood and drawer of water to the more fortunate provinces. But the Gallegan everywhere is grave and trustworthy, dignified even in a menial capacity, and the ex-Scout-Master knew that if they would once let him come among them the game was in his own hands.
He blessed the chance which had sent him for two years as a super-cargo to the Havanna, where, from a girl in the tobacco monopoly, he had learned Spanish of limited vocabulary, but excellent quality. If only he had a woman to talk to, he thought that the business would not go tardy foot. In any case, it was no use staying up there to freeze.
The Scot took a long breath – the brave man’s breath before he ventures all. Then from palms hollowed like a lily-sheath he produced the long melancholy whoop of the white owl. All country people know that the white bird hoots on the wing. So Peter judged that the sound thrice repeated from the same place would carry a message to the campo that a friend wished to communicate.
At the first sound, the movement of the camp was stilled.
‘Whoo-oot – whoo – who-ut!’
The notes fell soft and distinct, just as many a night on the march through Spain Peter had heard them come down to the camp of the 4th Dragoons.
In a moment only the men were to be seen taking their places behind the palisading which defended the campo on the only side from which it could be approached. Though he could not see, Peter knew that the women and children were in the caves, and the armed men each at his appointed place. The sentinel on the rock overlooking the valley had fallen back at the second hooting of the owl.
Only the cattle were left standing gazing stupidly at the olla bubbling over the heaped red embers.
Then, and not till then, did the three answering whoops come back from the campo.
‘Good stuff down there,’ said Peter as he descended: ‘if I don’t get my throat cut during the next five minutes I shall make something of these fellows yet. Now you are almost there, Peter. Nothing for it but to shut your eyes and take your gruel!’
He paused in the gateway, with a swift gesture threw his sheath and all into the middle of the campo and then advanced with a slow and regular pace, his hands open above his head.
‘Friend – friend – friend!’ he repeated aloud.
‘Stop where you are, friend,’ a voice unseen but near answered.
‘What is your name, and what do you want in this place?’
‘Blake is my name – cousin of General Blake. I have escaped from the French. I ask only for food and a place to lay my head!’
‘It may be. It may well be,’ said the voice at his elbow, ‘but stand very still. We are poor ignorant folk and these are all our possessions. If you seek to rob us, God have mercy on your soul.’
‘I am poor, unarmed, wounded,’ Peter spoke with a very creditable break in his voice – ‘and very hungry. I shall die if you do not help me; even now I faint.’
‘Señor,’ said the voice of authority, ‘very particularly I recommend you not to faint till the young men have searched you. You Carlos, Vincente, Ramon, go forward! Keep your guns pointed, Carlos and Ramon. Vincente, search him.’
The young men advanced, finger on trigger. Peter was calm personally, but he prayed a little that none of the others might be nervous. The lads were young, the muskets probably old and his anxiety for them was legitimate. They could just as well have crooked their fore-fingers over the trigger guard. If he lived he would show them how.
Vincente searched him carefully and Peter talked steadily all the time. He kept his hands up and his eyes front – but he talked. He embroidered adventures. He sang the greatness of his cousin the General, the friend of Castanos, the victor of Baylen. He told them how, born of a foreign father, but taught to love Spain by a Gallegan mother, he had battled against the French.
At last, as nothing whatever was found, he was permitted to drop his arms. The muskets were lowered and the men flocked eagerly about him. An old man, with a shaven chin and a monk’s face roughly blocked out as with a hatchet, then took him in hand. He must answer many questions.
He told them how on his way back to his cousin he had been captured by the French, who would have certainly shot him, but that he saved himself by taking a cartwheel roll down the precipice over there – Dispeño Perres was the name of it.
They murmured their amazement in sympathy.
‘Dispeño Perres! What a place to break necks. Poverino, no wonder he had many wounds to dress!’
The women closed about him eagerly to assist, but one gaunt old crone fingered the bandage about his arm which was ridiculously disproportioned to the pin-prink beneath, which had in fact, closed up almost as soon as it had done bleeding.
‘I made that linen,’ she cried; ‘I and no other spun it!’
‘How came you by the good mother’s linen?’ demanded the old man.
Peter, who told the truth by preference when it would serve as well as a lie, was about to tell the story, when his eyes fell on the very girl of the stiletto strolling nonchalantly towards him from the camp fire which she had been replenishing.
Very sweet and innocent she looked and instantly his will changed.
‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘I lay upon the ground like one dead. Perhaps the Holy Virgin sent Saint Elizabeth while I swooned, but when the snowflakes on my face brought me round I was bandaged as you see.’
‘More likely a band of good-for-nothing gipsies who have plundered our bleaching greens or the houses we left behind us at La Giralda. I myself have lost many things, a petticoat among others. I should not wonder; indeed it is very likely the same!’
So spoke Froyla, calmly bending over the wounds, her young head and supple body looking strangely out of place among the elders, worn by toil and childbirth.
‘The bandaging is very badly done,’ she went on, fingering the knots critically. ‘But then all gipsies are heathen dogs, and for that matter so are the English.’
‘I shall take you at your word, señorita,’ said Peter. ‘I wager my good Toledan knife (which is all the robbers have left me) against one lock of your jetty curls that I know more prayers in Latin than any priest in the archdiocese of Tarragona! Why, till the rascals stole it, I read my breviary every day like a priest.’
‘Better than many, I daresay,’ said Froyla. ‘You can borrow from the Reverend Father Molinos when he next comes to visit us.’
‘The devil take him!’ thought Peter; ‘that is by no means so good. Molinos is, they say, the worst of all. He plunders the wounded, English and French alike, says a prayer, and cuts their throats afterwards.’
But nevertheless he went on talking. He must make a conquest of the tribe before the coming of the lawless priest. If the young men would only list with him he would teach them how to send Molinos skipping like a ball at la pelote.
Froyla had given him a grateful glance in recognition about the Romanichels. She was doubtless the chief’s daughter, for she leaned confidently on the arm of the old man who had asked him so many questions. She might help him greatly if she would; but at present Peter knew better than to pay her the least attention.
Nevertheless he felt her soft nimble fingers about his head and arms, retying bandages and re-dressing wounds. A cap of woven silk was pulled down to his ears to hold it all in place. A red tassel dandled rakishly over one eye, and Peter, full of content in the present, told his tales, and with his toes to the fire of pine knots listened to the bubbling of the olla in the pots.
Supper seemed long in arriving, but that is the way of Spanish meals all over the peninsula. With the first rich aromatic platter of meat and vegetables, the first gurgle of warm wine in his throat, something gay and cheerful descended upon the encampment.
The men were served first, Gallegan fashion. They ate seated each upon his chair or stool, with a hasty table of planks laid on tressels in the midst. Froyla directed the women with a word or a movement of the hand.
Afterwards the women sat down and a few of the young men, of whom Peter made himself one, served them. He spoke deferentially to Froyla, continuing the tale of his marvellous adventures, and interesting all within reach of his voice, who often paused to listen to him. In return Froyla told him who they were among whom he found himself.
‘We are two families, much intermarried,’ she explained, ‘both from the same village, La Giralda - you have heard of it doubtless – the same in which Don Carlos Molinos was priest. Cardoños and Feliçé are the only two family names, and now we do not know whether our poor little village has been burnt. At any rate, here we all are, safe as the campo of the Peak – men, women, children and cattle.’
Peter, contented with his good meal, spoke encouragement. They had good shelter, plenty of provender; with a little skill, of which he, the cousin of the General, had plenty, the young men might be drilled and the place made a fortress.
Froyla shook her head and sighed.
‘It is hard to keep the lads here all winter doing nothing. The campo is no place for them. We have lost several already to the guerrilla bands. And who can blame them? I should do the same if I were a man.’
Peter took his courage in both hands.
‘What if we have a band of our own – the band Blake-Cardoños. Will you help me señorita?’
The girl looked at him curiously. He exhibited his wounded arm, about which, as the bleeding had stopped, no compress had been put.
‘I was rightly served,’ he murmured; ‘but pray consider the temptation.’
Froyla Cardoños examined the wound with the precision of an expert in such matters.
‘Whoever gave you that little souvenir,’ she said, ‘wished you no great harm.’
And so with these words and from that moment the guerrilla band of Blake-Cardoños took shape.
The next morning at breakfast, when the men were seated, Peter remained standing.
‘Are we Christians or dogs?’ he said ‘Is it right that we should fall on our food without a blessing asked in the holy Latin?’
‘We have no priest,’ said the old chief apologetically, laying down his clasp knife and horn spoon.
Peter crossed himself, and in excellent Latin repeated the Benediction upon such as sit down to meat, concluding in the name of Santa Eudoxia, Santa Isidora, and especially the great and holy Saint Jaime de Campostella.
The effect, upon the elders especially, was impressive and immediate. The family connection Cardoños-Feliçé had obviously entertained an angel unawares.
Only ex-Scout Master Peter was not content with the performance.
‘It is a pity,’ he said, stuffing his mouth with meat, potato and peppers, all steamed appetisingly together, ‘I ought to have known the names of more saints!’
And he made a mental note to learn a dozen or so the next time that a calendar should fall under his eye.
Peter spent the day in busy preparation. He helped the old women to carry water. He talked unweariedly to the old men. He mended the trigger of a musket so cleverly that the whole of the fighting strength of La Giralda put in an appearance at an informal inspection of arms, where Peter praised, blamed, instructed and in bad cases promised repairs, when they should help him to set up a forge.
The dark Spanish eyes watched him first with slowly waning suspicion, then with interest, lastly with admiration. It was very well for the elders of the tribe to be impressed with his Latin. But these were men of his own age and younger. He must show himself no spoil-sport.
So to win them he kept his strongest card till after supper. He looked about for an instrument – anything from an organ to a penny whistle would serve. Peter had the gift. He knew no theory, but the music which set voices chanting and feet dancing flowed from anything he touched.
Had anyone a guitar?
Alas! They were poor mountaineers. They had nothing but the pipes.
‘The pipes! Let us have them,’ cried Peter delighted.
But when the poor apologies for the noble pipes of his own country were presented to him he hung his head for a moment almost discouraged.
‘O for an hour of my uncle Sandy’s fiddle!’ he groaned; ‘How I could make a jota go to the tune of ‘Tullochgorum’ or ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley’.
He handled the pipes a little contemptuously.
‘Well this is not Robin Oich, nor yet Macrimmon, but I daresay they will do well enough for my stupid Lowland fingers.’
But he need not have troubled himself. From the first shrill skirl of the drones and the lilt of a dance tune tentatively played, there was no doubt of Peter’s success.
Heads began to nod in unison, feet jigged on the beaten earth, where, in front of the great lean-to stable, was their dancing floor. The girls danced shyly in the direction of the young men. The men silently but with expressive eyes challenged each his querido, till with a snap of fingers and thumbs and a simultaneous rush Feliçé and Cardoños were alike under the spell of their master and at his bidding forgot all the pinch of misery, their deserted village, whitewashed and tree-shaded, in the Mero Valley. The joy of life sang in their ears. Faster and faster went the dance, till with a shout of ‘Twenty Thousand Devils’, Don Severo himself plunged into the dance and the aged wise women of the campo, tucking up their dismal robes of Isabellino flannel, legged it with the best.
Peter’s tune was ‘Mistress McLeod of Rääsay’ and he played it as no tune had ever been played on the small pipes of Gallicia. The piper himself could by no means keep still, but walked up and down as his teacher, Pipe-Major Ewan of the Black Watch, had recommended, ‘wagging his rump like a wild goat upon the mountains of Bether.’
The music died out in the long wail of the drones as the piper checked his quarter-deck promenade.
Peter went to bed and slept soundly that night. He knew that he had entered into a new incarnation. He was no longer ex-Scout Master Blake in danger of a firing party, but El Capitan Peter, chief of the new band of guerrillas, better armed, better disciplined, better led than any other, a power anywhere between Portugal and the Pyrenees.
Best of all, better than warmth, safety, friends, captainship, there was Froyla – Froyla of the dark hair and the lips scarlet as a June pomegranate flower.
Peter the renegade fell asleep thinking about her. Were her eyes dark sea-green or only hazel?
He must find out tomorrow.
And above the stars shone and silence fell, while Captain Peter Blake, soldier of fortune and gentleman adventurer, said over the Lord’s Prayer and the twenty-third Psalm because of the promise he had made to his mother as they cowered awhile in the shelter of the march dyke the night he left Galloway fourteen years ago.
About the Author
S. R. Crockett was born in Balmaghie, Galloway, in 1859 and died in France on April 16th, 1914. During his life, he had over 60 novels published (many of them serialised) and hundreds of short stories/sketches appeared in the popular magazines. He was one of Scotland’s bestselling and best known authors in his day, but now is barely known of. To commemorate the 100th anniversary of his death, The Galloway Raiders has been set up and a major collection of 32 of his Galloway-based fictional works has been republished by Ayton Publishing Limited.
To find out more about S. R. Crockett, you can join The Galloway Raiders for FREE at www.gallowayraiders.co.uk
To find out more about S. R. Crockett, you can join The Galloway Raiders for FREE at www.gallowayraiders.co.uk