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Amongst his retainers was Kinmont Willie, and as Willie rode from the Wardens' meeting, along the banks of the Liddel, in company with only three or four men, a body of two hundred English horsemen, commanded by Salkeld, Warden of the Eastern March, marked him from across the water. Truce or no truce, the chance seemed to them one that was too good to lose.
"And have they e'en ta'en him, Kinmont Willie, Withouten either dread or fear, And forgotten that the bauld Buccleugh Can back a steed or shake a spear?" Zerubbabel Chirk fairly danced up and down in his excitement "Oh! but begin again at the beginning, please, Miss Hildy," he cried.
The remembrance of Kinmont Willie still rankled in that most unforgiving of royal breasts. "How dared you," she imperiously demanded, "undertake an enterprise so desperate and presumptuous?" "Dared?" answered Buccleuch; "what is it that a man dares not do?" Elizabeth turned impetuously to a lord-in-waiting.
While Buccleuch himself kept watch at the postern, two dozen stout moss-troopers now rushed to the castle gaol, a hundred yards from the postern gate, forced the door of Kinmont Willie's prison, and found him there chained to the wall, and carried him out, fetters and all, on the back of "the starkest man in Teviotdale."
"And Bridget, who was feared herself, said, 'Whist, for God's sake, do not bring a curse on the house! "And then he just cursed the house from flooring to roof-tree, and so went to his own place! "Dead? Well, yes dead and buried is old Dickie Wilkes. But poor Israel Kinmont is quite brokenhearted.
Speedily some of them pushed on ahead, and an ambush was laid for Kinmont Willie. He and his friends were naturally totally unprepared for such a dastardly attack, but it took them but little time to gather their wits, and Willie gave them a good run for their money. For nearly four miles they chased him, but ran him down at length.
But with Elizabeth still on the English throne, and with Queen Mary, and afterwards her son, reigning in Scotland, the dance could go merrily on, and when we look at those days in retrospect it seems to us that the last bars of the music, the last turns in the dance, went more rapidly than any that had gone before. In Kinmont Willie's lifetime the Wardens of the Marches had but little leisure.
It made me feel very loyal to Scotland hearing stories like this though I was proud of the Castle too. And I loved the tale of Willie Armstrong, Kinmont Willie, treacherously given up to Lord Scrope, for the worst dungeon of all, by troopers who in taking him violated a border truce. His escape was a real romance; and I am glad Lord Buccleugh, who saved him, was an ancestor of Sir Walter Scott.
Such was Logan of Restalrig, ‘Old Rugged and Dangerous.’ In 1601, May 30, we find him appearing as surety for Philip Mowbray, one of the Mowbrays of Barnbogle, whose sister stood by Queen Mary at the scaffold, and whose brother Francis was with the bold Buccleuch, when he swam ‘that wan water’ of Esk, and rescued Kinmont Willie from Carlisle Castle.
But by some mysterious divine law of compensation, no sooner had she Baby in her arms, than she forgot all about the sulky boy, sitting moping among his books in the wood parlour, looking out on the red-boled firs of Marnhoul forest. Israel Kinmont used to frequent us a good deal about this time.
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