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The road runs past Moffat and up something like five miles of very heavy gradient to the Devil's Beef Tub, ascending in that distance nearly nine hundred feet; from the Tub it crosses the lonely, desolate watershed which divides Tweed from Annan, then by easy slope drops past Tweedshaws and Badlieu, and so by Tweedsmuir and the old Crook Inn with Broad Law upheaving his massive shoulder on the right slips gradually into country less unkind in days of storm than are those bleak upper regions.
That night men with lanterns and snow-poles fought their way to Tweedshaws, only to learn there what all had feared neither guard nor coachman had come through. Therefore, if by remote chance they still lived, the men must lie buried in the snow, perhaps within very few yards of the high-road.
It was but four miles to Tweedshaws, yet before they had struggled through half the distance the horses had come to a standstill, utterly blown and exhausted; nothing could get them to stir forward, or longer to face the drift. Marchbanks suggested that now at length they might reasonably turn and fight their way back. Goodfellow hesitated. "What say ye, Jamie?" he asked of MacGeorge.
It was but the other year that a lonely shepherd's wife near Tweedshaws, one stormy evening when snow drove wildly across the moor, thought that she heard the cry of a human voice come down the gale. Again and again, as she sat by her cosy fire of glowing peat she imagined that some one called for help.
Snow still fell in the morning, but the worst of the storm seemed over when Marchbanks again started to try for Tweedshaws to ascertain if MacGeorge and Goodfellow had won their way through.
Some were sent back to Moffat in charge of the lads who rode the extra tracers used in snowy weather for the few miles of heavy collar-work out of Moffat; of the rest, loaded with the mail-bags, MacGeorge led one, Goodfellow, the coachman, another; and the two set off for Tweedshaws, accompanied by a man named Marchbanks, the Moffat roadman, who had been a passenger on the coach.
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