He ran into the house, and went to his mother.
“Oh, mother,” he said, “I have seen father! He was riding all alone, and he would not look at me. _Sir Hugh_ was lame!”
“Where has he gone?” said Lady Ker, in a strange voice.
“He went away out of sight,” said Randal. “I could not see where he went.”
Then his mother told him it could not be, that his father would not have come back alone. He would not leave his men behind him in the war.
But Randal was so sure, that she did not scold him. She knew he believed what he said.
All that night, which was the Fourth of September, in the year 1513, the day of Flodden fight, Randal’s mother did not go to bed. She kept moving about the house. Now she would look from the tower window up Tweed; and now she would go along the gallery and look down Tweed from the other tower. She had lights burning in all the windows. All next day she was never still. She climbed, with two of her maids, to the top of the hill above Yair, on the other side of the river, and she watched the roads down Ettrick and Yarrow. Next night she slept little, and rose early. About noon, Randal saw three or four men riding wearily, with tired horses. They could scarcely cross the ford of Tweed, the horses were so tired. The men were Simon Grieve the butler, and some of the tenants. They looked very pale; some of them had their heads tied up, and there was blood on their faces. Lady Ker and Randal ran to meet them.
Simon Grieve lighted from his horse, and whispered to Randal’s mother.
Randal did not hear what he said, but his mother cried, “I knew it! I knew it!” and turned quite white.
Simon pointed across the hill. “They are bringing the corp,” he said. Randal knew the “corp” meant the dead body.
He began to cry. “Where is my father?” he said, “where is my father?”
His mother led him into the house. She gave him to the old nurse, who cried over him, and kissed him, and offered him cakes, and made him a whistle with a branch of plane tree, So in a short while Randal only felt puzzled. Then he forgot, and began to play. He was a very little boy.
Lady Ker shut herself up in her own room--her “bower,” the servants called it.
Soon Randal heard heavy steps on the stairs, and whispering. He wanted to run out, and his nurse caught hold of him, and would not have let him go, but he slipped out of her hand, and looked over the staircase.