Half an hour later, Adam Armstrong came out of the cottage where his son was lying.

His mood had changed.

He had gathered hope from Meg Margetson's confident assurances that there was ground for it.
"Now, let us talk of what had best be done, Oswald," he said, as he led the way into the next cottage, where the woman at once turned her children out, and cleared a room for him.
"What force could you gather, Uncle ?" "In my grandfather's time," he said, "two hundred Armstrongs, and their followers, could gather in case of need; but the family was grievously thinned, in the days when Edward carried fire and sword through Scotland; and for the last fifty years Roxburgh and these parts have been mostly under English rule, and in that time we have never gathered as a family.

Still, all my kin would, I know, take up this quarrel; and I should say that, in twelve hours, we could gather fifty or sixty stout fighting men.
"But the Bairds would be expecting us, and can put, with the families allied to them and their retainers, nigh three hundred men under arms.
Their hold is so strong a one that it took fifteen hundred Englishmen, under Umfraville, three weeks to capture it.

It was destroyed then, but it is stronger now than ever.
"Could we get aid from Roxburgh, think you ?" "I fear not, Uncle.