"I was in no danger: when it is my fate to love a man, it is I, Patsy Ferris, who shall run away with him!"
But he was a wise lad and had lived too long among the Will-o'-the-Wisps on the Wild of Blairmore to be easily led astray by them. So he took Patsy's speech as merely her way and thought no more about it--at least not more than he could help.
It was already high day, brisk and clean-blowing, when they reached the little herring smack which lay waiting for them out in the bay. Godfrey McCulloch went with them, dark-browed, silent. When he lifted his eyes he could see, across the plain of the middle Rhynns, the reek of the accursed prison-house of Stranryan still going up to heaven. Then he laughed a little, also silently.
"They will have to shift," he said: "John Knox was in the right o't. 'Pull down the nests and the craws will fly away.' No more cells for lads from the ploughtail and the heather. No more bloody whipping-posts, where one or two are killed out of every draft to put the fear of death into the others! All gone up in yon puff of smoke!" Then he subsided into silence and his hard features relaxed as his mind fell upon other thoughts.
Stair and he were working the little boat while Patsy steered. They were going up the Solway and the wind behind them was strong and equal. Still no indication of their destination had been made to Stair. At five of the afternoon they had passed all the familiar landmarks known to him, but by the alertness of young McCulloch he judged that they must be near the haunts allotted to his part of the Band.
The Isle of Man lay faintly blue far to the south, and the hills about Skiddaw and Helvellyn began to uplift themselves in amethystine ridges. Towns and villages ran white along the Cumberland coast, and once it seemed to Stair as if they might be going to land somewhere to the east of St. Bees. But they were only keeping well out till the twilight of the evening drew down. They came about in mid-channel and lay some hours with lowered sail in the lee of a cliffy island. During all this time Patsy watched the shore intently, and did not speak to him at all. She held what colloquy was necessary with Godfrey McCulloch, on whose face there was a quite inscrutable smile. He seemed to be turning over in his mind some jest known only to himself, perhaps no more than the burning of the Castle of Stranryan and how well MacJannet's firewood blazed up when he put the torch to it. But ever and anon he glanced at the unconscious Stair Garland, when he was looking another way, with an expression so humorsome that it was evident he considered that in some way the joke was against him.