Jean nodded slightly.

"Does their father know?" Patsy whispered back. Jean preserved a grave face.

"Not any one of us, his own family, can guess what Diarmid Garland knows and does not know. He had his time of the Free Trading. He was at the head of it, and if the boys head a clean run from the Dutch coast or the Isle of Man—why, if father is ignorant of the business, it is because he wishes to be."

"But there is nothing new in all that," said Patsy; "there have always been smugglers and shore lads who helped them—always King's cutters and preventive men to chase and lose them—what danger do the boys run more than at other times?"

"This," said Jean Garland, very gravely, "there is a new superintendent of enlistments at Stranraer. He is just a spy, one Eben McClure from Stonykirk, a man of our own country. He works with the preventive superintendent, and when they cannot or dare not meddle with the cargo-runners, as they dare not with my brothers, they set the press upon them—and the soldiers' press is the worst by far."

No more was said. The girls worked quietly for an hour till all was finished. The hedges and clothes-lines were cleared of their burden, and with a whisper of "Shall we go down to the cove—the tide is nearly full," the girls slipped each a cotton gown and a towel apiece into Patsy's little reticule and made off to the bathing cove, a well-hidden nook of sand, half cavern, half high shell-bank, which bygone tides had excavated in the huge flank of the Black Head. Fergus and his brothers knew about it, of course, and saw to it that none about the farm interfered with the girls at their play.

In a minute their young figures were lost among the birches of the valley, a wider and an opener one than that of the Abbey Burn, the banks higher and farther off, and from their ridges giving glimpses of the distant Mull of Galloway and the blue shores of Ireland.

They kept in the bottom of the glen, splashing and springing from stone to stone, with mirthful enjoyment of each other's slips. Far off on a heathery knoll Diarmid watched them go. He had noted the swift intaking of the white cleading on the hedges, the disappearance of fluttering garmentry from the clothes-lines. He approved of young people enjoying themselves, after their work was done—Diarmid's emphasis on the "after" was strong.

As they went Jean Garland pointed out a pony track high on the fells. "Careless 

 Prev. P 14/232 next