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Salute to Adventurers By: John Buchan (1875-1940) |
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BY JOHN BUCHAN [Illustration: 1798 EDINBURGH] TO MAJOR GENERAL THE HON. SIR REGINALD TALBOT, K.C.B. I tell of old Virginian ways;
And who more fit my tale to scan
Than you, who knew in far off days
The eager horse of Sheridan;
Who saw the sullen meads of fate,
The tattered scrub, the blood drenched sod,
Where Lee, the greatest of the great,
Bent to the storm of God? I tell lost tales of savage wars;
And you have known the desert sands,
The camp beneath the silver stars,
The rush at dawn of Arab bands,
The fruitless toil, the hopeless dream,
The fainting feet, the faltering breath,
While Gordon by the ancient stream
Waited at ease on death. And now, aloof from camp and field,
You spend your sunny autumn hours
Where the green folds of Chiltern shield
The nooks of Thames amid the flowers:
You who have borne that name of pride,
In honour clean from fear or stain,
Which Talbot won by Henry's side
In vanquished Aquitaine. The reader is asked to believe that most of the characters in this
tale and many of the incidents have good historical warrant. The figure
of Muckle John Gib will be familiar to the readers of Patrick Walker .
CONTENTS. I. THE SWEET SINGERS
II. OF A HIGH HANDED LADY
III. THE CANONGATE TOLBOOTH
IV. OF A STAIRHEAD AND A SEA CAPTAIN
V. MY FIRST COMING TO VIRGINIA
VI. TELLS OF MY EDUCATION
VII. I BECOME AN UNPOPULAR CHARACTER
VIII. RED RINGAN
IX. VARIOUS DOINGS IN THE SAVANNAH
X. I HEAR AN OLD SONG
XI. GRAVITY OUT OF BED
XII. A WORD AT THE HARBOUR SIDE
XIII. I STUMBLE INTO A GREAT FOLLY
XIV. A WILD WAGER
XV. I GATHER THE CLANS
XVI. THE FORD OF THE RAPIDAN
XVII. I RETRACE MY STEPS
XVIII. OUR ADVENTURE RECEIVES A RECRUIT
XIX. CLEARWATER GLEN
XX. THE STOCKADE AMONG THE PINES
XXI. A HAWK SCREAMS IN THE EVENING
XXII. HOW A FOOL MUST GO HIS OWN ROAD
XXIII. THE HORN OF DIARMAID SOUNDS
XXIV. I SUFFER THE HEATHEN'S RAGE
XXV. EVENTS ON THE HILL SIDE
XXVI. SHALAH
XXVII. HOW I STROVE ALL NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL
XXVIII. HOW THREE SOULS FOUND THEIR HERITAGE
SALUTE TO ADVENTURERS. CHAPTER I. THE SWEET SINGERS. When I was a child in short coats a spaewife came to the town end, and
for a silver groat paid by my mother she riddled my fate. It came to
little, being no more than that I should miss love and fortune in
the sunlight and find them in the rain. The woman was a haggard,
black faced gipsy, and when my mother asked for more she turned on her
heel and spoke gibberish; for which she was presently driven out of the
place by Tarn Roberton, the baillie, and the village dogs. But the
thing stuck in my memory, and together with the fact that I was a
Thursday's bairn, and so, according to the old rhyme, "had far to go,"
convinced me long ere I had come to man's estate that wanderings and
surprises would be my portion. It is in the rain that this tale begins. I was just turned of eighteen,
and in the back end of a dripping September set out from our moorland
house of Auchencairn to complete my course at Edinburgh College. The
year was 1685, an ill year for our countryside; for the folk were at
odds with the King's Government, about religion, and the land was full
of covenants and repressions. Small wonder that I was backward with my
colleging, and at an age when most lads are buckled to a calling was
still attending the prelections of the Edinburgh masters. My father had
blown hot and cold in politics, for he was fiery and unstable by
nature, and swift to judge a cause by its latest professor. He had cast
out with the Hamilton gentry, and, having broken the head of a dragoon
in the change house of Lesmahagow, had his little estate mulcted in
fines. All of which, together with some natural curiosity and a family
love of fighting, sent him to the ill fated field of Bothwell Brig,
from which he was lucky to escape with a bullet in the shoulder... Continue reading book >>
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