keep Wade from closing in behind them, meet the Finchley Common thousands, come to the enemy’s capital of half a million souls?  Return where there were friends?  Go on where false-promising friends hugged safety?  Go on to London, still hoping, trusting still to the glamour and outcry that ran before them, to extraordinary events called miracles?  Hot was the debate!  But on the 6th of December the Jacobite army turned back toward Scotland.

It began its homeward march long before dawn.  Not all nor most had been told the decision.  Even the changed direction, eyes upon slow-descending not upon climbing stars, did not at first enlighten.  It might mean some detour, the Duke being out-maneuvered.  But at last rose the winter dawn and lit remembered scene after scene.  The news ran.  The army was in retreat.

Ian Rullock, riding with a kinsman, Gordon, heard, up and down, an angry lamenting sound.  “Little do the clans like turning back!”

“Hark!  The chieftains are telling them it is for the best.”

“Is it for the best?  I do not like this month or aught that is done in it!”

A week later they were at Lancaster; three days after that at Kendal.  Here Wade might have fallen upon them, but did not.  A day or two and the main column approached Penrith.  The no great amount of artillery was yet precious.  Heavy to drag over heavy roads, the guns and straining horses were left in the rear.  Four companies of Lowland infantry, Macdonald of Glengarry and his five hundred Highlanders, a few cavalrymen, and Lord George Murray himself tarried with the guns.  The main column disappeared, lost among mountains and hills; this detached number had the wild country, the forbidding road, the December day to themselves.  To get the guns and ammunition-wagons along proved a snail-and-tortoise business.  Guns and escort fell farther and farther behind.

Ian Rullock, acting still as aide, rode from the Prince nearing Penrith to Lord George Murray, now miles to the rear.  Why was the delay? and ’ware the Duke of Cumberland, certainly close at hand!  The delay was greater, the distance between farther, than the Prince had supposed.  Rullock rode through the late December afternoon by huge frozen waves of earth, under a roof of pallid blue, in his ears a small complaining wind like a wailing child.  He rode till nightfall, and only then came to his objective, finding needed rest in the village of Shap.  Here he sought Lord George Murray, gave information and was given it in turn, ate, drank, and then turned back through the December night to the Prince.

He rode and the huge winter stars seemed to watch him with at once a glittering intentness and a disdain of his pygmy being.  Once he looked up to them with a gesture of his head.  “Are we so far apart and so different?” he asked of Orion.