his friends and kinsmen, to meet some hundred and fifty or so of other
chosen men. Scotts, Elliots, Armstrongs, and Grahams were there, and
although Buccleuch had requested that only younger sons were to risk
their lives in the forlorn hope that night, Auld Wat o' Harden and many
another landowner rode with their chief. "Valiant men, they would not
bide," says Scott of Satchells, whose own father was one of the number.
Kinmont Willie's own tower of Morton, on the water of Sark, about ten
miles north of Carlisle, was their rallying point. Buccleuch had
arranged every detail most carefully at a horse-race held at Langholm a
few days before, and one of the Grahams, an Englishman whose countrymen
were not yet aware that the Graham clan had allied themselves to that of
the Scotts, had conveyed his ring to Kinmont Willie to show him that he
was not forgotten by his feudal lord. One and all, the reivers were well
armed, "with spur on heel, and splent on spauld," and with them they
carried scaling ladders, picks, axes, and iron crowbars. The Esk and
Eden were in furious flood, but no force of nature or of man could stay
the reivers' horses that night.

"We go to catch a rank reiver
Has broken faith wi' the bauld Buccleuch."

That was the burden of their thoughts, and although they well knew that
ere the dawning each one of them might be claiming the hospitality of
six feet of English sod, their hearts were light. To them a message that
the fray was up was like the sound of the huntsman's horn in the ears of
a thoroughbred hunter.

"'Where are ye gaun, ye mason lads,
Wi' a' your ladders, lang and hie?'
'We gang to berry a corbie's nest,