Page 4 of A Scot on the Rocks

“How many?” Ewan asked, voice low.

Jamie listened for another moment before he caught the first faint glow of a lantern through the trees below. A second appeared farther back, and something metal glittered in the moonlight.

“Four, I think.”

Ewan muttered a curse. “Mayhap they are riding home and willna bother us.”

“At midnight?”

“Some men are peculiar, especially the king’s men.”

Ewan snorted and rolled his eyes, but Jamie was already studying the slope.

The excisemen would take the road toward the bridge unless they had someone with them who knew the glen, and even then they’d be reluctant to leave the path in weather like this. The peat had gone soft in the lower ground. One bad step and a horse could sink to the knee, which would ruin a man’s evening even before he discovered there was no whisky waiting for him at the end of it.

Jamie turned his mare toward the heather.

“This way.”

They left the road without another word. He knew the ground well enough to ride it in darkness, knew where granite ran beneath the moss, where the hillside looked firm but wasn’t, and where an old deer path curled behind the ridge before dropping toward the crofters’ track. Jamie knew which burns could be crossed after a hard rain and which ones would have enough force to take a careless rider off his feet.

Mostly, he knew where the king’s men would expect smugglers to go, so he went elsewhere.

The ponies followed in single file, their tack plain and quiet, the casks lashed low beneath rough wool covers so they wouldn’t knock together as the men picked their way across the hillside. They’d all learned long ago that whisky smuggling was less about speed than knowing when to disappear.

When they reached the far side of the ridge, Jamie stopped beneath an outcrop of rock and looked back to see the lanterns were still moving along the lower road.

“Take the crofters’ path,” he told Ewan. “Stay high until you’re beyond the bridge.”

Ewan looked at him. “What will you be doing?”

“Making certain they keep to the road.”

Jamie handed him the mare’s reins and slipped back toward the ridge and into the shadows.

There was a stone shelf above the road where boys from the village sometimes sat in summer and threw pebbles at passing carts. Jamie had been one of those boys once, though old Morag would probably say he’d never grown out of it.

He crouched behind the gorse and waited as the excisemen came into view one by one.

Four of them, as he’d thought. Two carried lanterns. One had a musket balanced across his saddle, and the man riding behind him was complaining about the rain in a voice loud enough to wake the chickens.

“Tracks disappear here,” the first man said.

“They’re still ahead of us.”

Another coughed and said, “They could’ve left the road.”

“And ride through that?” The complaining man gestured toward the black hillside. “They’d break their bloody necks.”

Jamie listened to the reasonable fellow, then he picked up a stone and tossed it well beyond the road, grinning as it struck the rocks below with a crack.

All four men turned. “What was that?”

Jamie waited until the lanterns lifted, then he scraped the heel of his boot along the stone, knowing how sounds carried across the hollow.

One of the horses sidestepped as its rider called out. “Who’s there?”

Jamie kept quiet and scraped the stone again.