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The Black Douglas by S. R. (Samuel Rutherford) Crockett
page 62 of 499 (12%)
hasty or local one. It was not, indeed, a "rising of the countryside,"
such as took place when the English were reported to be over the
border, when the beacon fires were thrown west from Criffel to Screel,
from Screel to Cairnharrow, and then tossed northward by the three
Cairnsmuirs and topmost Merrick far over the uplands of Kyle, till
from the sullen brow of Brown Carrick the bale fire set the town drum
of Ayr beating its alarming note. Still this muster was a day on
which every Douglas vassal must ride in mail with all his spears
behind him--or bide at home and take the consequences.

All the night from distant parishes and outlying valleys horsemen had
been riding, clothed in complete panoply of mail. These were the
knights, barons, freeholders, who owned allegiance to the house of
Douglas. Each lord was followed by his appointed tail of esquires and
men-at-arms; behind these dense clusters of heavily armed spearmen
marched steadily along the easiest paths by the waterside and over the
lower hill passes. Light running footmen slung their swords over their
backs by leathern bandoliers and pricked it briskly southwards over
the bent so brown. Archers there were from the border towards the
Solway side--lithe men, accustomed to spring from tussock to tuft of
shaking grass, whose long strides and odd spasmodic side leapings
betrayed even on the plain and unyielding pasture lands the place of
their amphibious nativity.

"The Jack herons of Lochar," these were named by the men of Galloway.
But there was no jeering to their faces, for not one of those
Maxwells, Sims, Patersons, and Dicksons would have thought twice of
leaping behind a tree stump to wing a cloth-yard shaft into a
scoffer's ribs at thirty yards, taking his chance of the dule tree and
the hempen cord thereafter for the honour of Lochar.
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