Chapter 35 - Page 2

I can join
myself to that good Lord's company."

No one was quicker at catching a hint than Halbert Glendinning. He
said he himself had a desire to go westward. The pedlar looked at him
with a very doubtful air, when the old dame, who perhaps thought her
young guest resembled the umquhile Saunders, not only in his looks,
but in a certain pretty turn to sleight-of-hand, which the defunct was
supposed to have possessed, tipped him the wink, and assured the
pedlar he need have no doubt that her young cousin was a true man.

"Cousin!" said the pedlar, "I thought you said this youth had been a
stranger."

"Ill hearing makes ill rehearsing," said the landlady; "he is a
stranger to me by eye-sight, but that does not make him a stranger to
me by blood, more especially seeing his likeness to my son Saunders,
poor bairn."

The pedlar's scruples and jealousies being thus removed, or at least
silenced, the travellers agreed that they would proceed in company
together the next morning by daybreak, the pedlar acting as a guide to
Glendinning, and the youth as a guard to the pedlar, until they should
fall in with Murray's detachment of horse. It would appear that the
lady never doubted what was to be the event of this compact, for,
taking Glendinning aside, she charged him, "to be moderate with the
puir body, but at all events, not to forget to take a piece of black
say, to make the auld wife a new rokelay." Halbert laughed and took
his leave.

It did not a little appal the pedlar, when, in the midst of a black
heath, the young man told him the nature of the commission with which
their hostess had charged him. He took heart, however, upon seeing the
open, frank, and friendly demeanor of the youth, and vented his
exclamations on the ungrateful old traitress. "I gave her," he said,
"yesterday-e'en nae farther gane, a yard of that very black say, to
make her a couvre-chef; but I see it is ill done to teach the cat the
way to the kirn."

Thus set at ease on the intentions of his companion (for in those
happy days the worst was always to be expected from a stranger), the
pedlar acted as Halbert's guide over moss and moor, over hill and many
a dale, in such a direction as might best lead them towards the route
of Murray's party. At length they arrived upon the side of an
eminence, which commanded a distant prospect over a tract of savage
and desolate moorland, marshy and waste--an alternate change of
shingly hill and level morass, only varied by blue stagnant pools of
water. A road scarcely marked winded like a serpent through the
wilderness, and the pedlar, pointing to it, said--"The road from
Edinburgh to