Kings Pinnacle (3 page)

Alex was all of that; he was
madly in love with Elizabeth Murray, and he was very wily and very
fast on foot and on horseback. So, as it turned out, the nickname
stuck, and it wasn’t long before everyone was calling him the March
Hare.

Alex was pretty skinny, he
had to admit, and he did ride like the wind. He was also very fleet
of foot; he had outrun everyone he had ever raced, whether the
distance was long or short. He weighed about ten stone and stood
slightly less than six feet tall. Alex had green eyes and blond
hair with a reddish cast. He wore it combed straight back from his
forehead and over his ears, but it mostly fell forward into his
eyes when he wasn’t riding. He was constantly brushing his hair
back out of his eyes with his left hand.

He carried a seventy-five
caliber musket that looked a lot like the Brown Bess carried by the
British Army. Alex had named his musket “Slayer”. The Brown Bess
musket had first been issued as the standard rifle of the British
Army about ten years earlier. Alex told everyone that he had
purchased his musket, but he had really acquired it while he was
riding with his outlaw band.

Muskets were normally a
smooth bore rifle, but Alex had jammed a musket ball in his
original barrel and couldn’t knock it loose. So he finally took his
musket to a Scottish gunsmith who had examined the jam and told him
that it was impossible to clear, and that the barrel would have to
be replaced. Alex still remembered the conversation with the
gunsmith about the new barrel.

“Can you build me a new
barrel?” asked Alex.

“Aye, I could lad, if I had
a strip of gun steel long enough to make you a proper barrel for a
rifle like this one,” replied the gunsmith.

“What have you got right
now?”

“The only steel strips I
have in stock right now are too short. Would ye be willing to make
do with a shorter barrel?”

Alex knew that a shorter
barrel meant reduced range, as well as reduced accuracy.

“
Nae,” replied Alex. “How
long would I have to wait for the longer strips of
steel?”

“It could be several weeks.
Good gun barrel steel is in very short supply right
now.”

“Are there any other
alternatives?”

“Not that I ken,” replied
the gunsmith.

“Could you nae weld two
short strips together to make one strip long enough for a proper
barrel?”

“I could lad, but the weld
would run perpendicular to the length of the barrel creating a weak
spot that might not stand up to the muzzle blast when the rifle was
fired.”

“But don’t you have to weld
the barrel anyway?”

“I do lad, but the normal
weld runs lengthwise along the barrel, which spreads out the weak
spot all along the entire length of the barrel.”

“What if you took the two
strips of steel and welded them together to make one extra-long
strip of barrel steel and then forge them in a spiral around the
barrel mandrel, just like the red stripes of a barber pole wrap
around the tube? That way the weld of the two strips of steel would
run nearly lengthwise along the length of the barrel.”

“
I have never been asked
to forge a barrel in that manner, but I suppose that it could be
done,” replied the gunsmith.

Alex had insisted, offering
to pay additional for it, and the gunsmith had finally agreed to
make it. One unexpected benefit of making a musket barrel in this
fashion, which Alex and the gunsmith had not known would happen,
was that the weld line inside the barrel formed a spiral groove
rather than a straight groove. This spiral groove caused the musket
ball to spin as it traveled down the length of the barrel when it
was fired. The musket ball continued to spin after it left the
barrel on its way to the target.

Most smooth bore muskets
were accurate up to a range of about a hundred yards but Alex’s
musket was accurate to a range of almost three hundred yards. This
was true because of the increased stability of the spinning musket
ball that it fired through the longer than normal barrel. Alex had
also worked with the gunsmith to add a rear slot sight and a front
bead to his rifle, providing him a better aiming mechanism than
just sighting along the barrel.

Along with the musket, Alex
carried a wicked dirk, and sometimes a sword. The transition from
swords to firearms was already well underway and fewer and fewer of
the riders were depending on swords these days. But Alex was as
deadly with a knife, dirk, and sword as he was with his
rifle.

Alex’s father John was a
shoemaker by trade and training. He still maintained a small
cobbler’s shop in the rear of their small house in Hathkirk, where
he made shoes and boots for family and friends when he wasn’t
raiding. John had made his sons each a pair of boots with a special
knife sheath built into the rear of the upper leather boot shaft
where it couldn’t be easily seen under long trousers. But
shoemaking was no longer the family’s primary source of income;
they prospered by raiding the English side of the
lowlands.

Alex’s mother had been named
Anne, but she had been killed during a conflict when Alex was a
baby. This all happened before John became an outlaw and was the
primary reason he turned to raiding. A large group of British
raiders had swept into their small Scottish village during the
night to loot and pillage. Anne objected to the looting and was
shot, and John now limped slightly as a result of the confrontation
with the outlaws. A small painting of Anne still hung in the front
room of their house. When Alex was very young, he often sat and
gazed at the picture on the wall and wondered what his mother had
been like.

It took John several months
to recover his health, both physically and emotionally, after the
raid that killed his wife. He found that he didn’t have much
interest in shoemaking anymore and was consumed by the desire for
revenge. In retaliation for the raid and its consequences, John had
formed a small band of Scottish outlaws who operated along the
border. He had avenged the death of his wife many times over during
raids against the English across the border. John was a natural
leader of what he called the last band of Reivers. He possessed a
cunning mind that all his sons had inherited and he planned his
raids meticulously. His band of outlaws was ruthless to the English
that they raided.

John’s hatred of the English
had rubbed off on his sons. They admired John greatly and wanted to
please him. They would gladly die for him if the opportunity
presented itself.

“Och, that tears it; it’s
all gang agley” said Alex’s father. “Ye are going to hae to set aff
from Scotland for a wee bit, Alex, laddie.”

“
Where should I
go?”

“Ireland,” said John. “Ye
can find wark at the Plantation of Ulster and get back on yer feet
there. Ye might hae t’ stay in Ireland quite a spell until this all
blows oer.”

“How am I going to get
there?”

“Weel,” Hugh chimed in, “the
distance from Scotland to Ireland is less than fourteen miles at
the closest point. We can probably swim o’er there, just like
swimming across a loch,” said Hugh with a grin and a gleam in his
eye.

“We?” said Alex. “Who
invited you along?”

“Ye don’t think Robber and I
would let ye go o’er the Sheuch alane, do ye, laddie?” replied
Hugh.

* * * *

* * * *

Robert and Hugh

“
Robber, do ye think this
skinny wee March Hare can bear to be away from his bonny wee lassie
for a few months?” asked Hugh of his older brother Robert, while
looking at and grinning at Alex, trying to get a rise out of
him.

Robert just nodded and
kicked his horse into a little faster gait.

Where Hugh was a talker,
Robert was an introvert who was usually silent and stoic. He didn’t
waste words, but he was wicked smart and both of his younger
brothers respected him greatly. If there was a crisis, Robert was
usually the one who came up with a plan or solved the problem. The
dark haired Robert was the brains, the leader and the one they
depended on, and Hugh was the muscle. Alex, well, they didn’t
really know what Alex was yet, other than their younger brother who
now had a warrant out for his arrest in the lowlands of
Scotland.

The three brothers were
riding side-by-side west along the Wigtown Road from Dumfries to
Stranraer in the southwest of Scotland on their way to Portpatrick
where they intended to take an ocean ferry to Ireland. They had
decided, after some conversation with their father, that it would
be best for all three brothers to leave Scotland for a while. They
had packed up what few belongings they could carry on their horses
and ridden west from the lowlands across Scotland.

The ferry ran an ocean route
from Portpatrick on the Scottish coast to Donaghadee in Ireland.
This twenty-one mile crossing could take as little as two hours
under sail with a fair wind, but often “The Sheuch” as the strait
between Scotland and Ireland was called by the Scots, became a
longer and more perilous passage. This narrow strait was well known
for turbulent waters. It was exposed to the southwesterly gales of
the Irish Sea as well as the fury of the North Atlantic
Ocean.

It was a fine spring day,
and the weather was dry and hot. The wind was blowing gently out of
the southwest as the three brothers rode down the shaded
trail.

“Robber, how much will it
cost us to cross the Sheuch on the ocean ferry?” asked Hugh as they
rode into the outskirts of Portpatrick.

“It doesn’t really matter,”
answered Robert.

“
Why is that?”

“Because we don’t have any
money,” said Robert flatly.

Robert led them through the
little village port of Portpatrick and almost all the way to the
coast, where he turned south and rode toward the cattle
pens.

When they reined their
horses by the pens and stopped, Hugh said, “Robber, I think that
the passenger ferry boat is north of here up by the docks,”
pointing back up the coast where the piers jutted out into the
water.

Robert didn’t reply but
scanned the area around the cattle pens looking for someone who was
in charge or someone who might know something. He spied a likely
candidate in a short while, dismounted, and walked over to the
elderly Scot.

Robert had hatched a plan to
get them across to Ireland before they had entered Portpatrick. He
had let his nose guide them to the cattle pens. He could actually
smell the cattle odor before he had ridden into the small port
village and had come up with the idea as soon as he smelled
them.

There were two ways to cross
the Sheuch. One way was to sail over riding in the hold of a packet
vessel, which was the preferred way. The other more economical way
was to sail aboard the cattle boats and ride with the
cattle.

“Guid Sir, would ye be
looking to hire drovers?” Robert asked.

“Nae, laddie, not here,”
replied the old Scot, “but drovers be needed o’er the Sheuch, do ye
ken?”

“Aye, I do. We three lads
are looking to cross over and hire out as drovers. Do ye have any
interest in the other side, Sir?”

“Aye lad, I own the pens on
this side and on the Irish side as well as a cattle station o’er
there. If ye three will agree to sign on with me as drovers, I’ll
take you across for nil. The cattle boat is on its way back now and
we’ll be unloading and heading back out as soon as she arrives. If
ye three lads will bide a bit, ye can help unload the
cattle.”

“Aye, we’ll be happy take
the jobs and here’s my hand on it,” said Robert reaching out his
hand and shaking hands with the old Scot.

“My name is Robert Mackenzie
and those are my two brothers, Hugh and Alex,” he said pointing at
Hugh and Alex who were still sitting on horseback.

“I’m Angus MacDonald,”
replied the old Scot. “Yer wages be sixpence a week each plus room
and board. If ye lads will round up a few calves that have gotten
out of the pens and wandered o’er by the burn there, I would be
much obliged.”

“Aye, Sir, we’d be happy to
do it,” replied Robert.