“Wise or mad, my dear Everell,” said Will Roughwood, “I’d have taken it at any risk.”
“And wise or mad,” said Everell, gaily, “I’d have followed you at any risk—for company’s sake, to say no more. But indeed there’s less risk for me than you. Very few people in England know my face: ever since boyhood, my life has been spent abroad, until I joined the Prince. ’Tis different with you, who were brought up almost entirely within the two kingdoms. Egad, there’s the advantage I derive from my father having been the complete Jacobite—one of those who, for all their love of country, preferred exile in order to be at the centre of the plotting.” The young man smiled to think how all that plotting for a second Stuart restoration had come to naught.
“There’s chance of recognition for you, too,” said Roughwood. “Consider how many people saw you when we invaded these Northern counties last year. And consider those of our own party who have turned traitor, buying their lives by informing against their comrades. And we are in constant danger of encountering men who fought against us, like that fellow we dodged so narrowly yesterday.”
“Oh, he and I had our particular reasons for remembering each other,” said Everell, touching the scar on his cheek. “’Tis not in chance that we should run across him again. One such coincidence is remarkable enough.”
“Who can tell? In any case, he is not the only soldier of the enemy who would remember us. We are like to fall in with more; and ’tis of such, as all accounts agree, that most of the witnesses are, who have testified at Carlisle and York.”
“Well, then, such are to be looked for in Carlisle and York at present, except those who are in London for the like purpose. We have given Carlisle a wide berth, we will steer clear of York, and we’ll not go to London. And it may be that those of the enemy who remember us are still with the army in Scotland, hunting down our comrades.”
Roughwood smiled at his friend’s habitual power of seeing the favourable possibilities and ignoring the adverse; and could not help wondering that fortune had brought him unscathed through so many hazards in all the months of flight and concealment since that fatal day of defeat in the wind and snowfall on Culloden Moor.