In the second half of the seventeenth century, the Scottish Kirk was in direct conflict with the King of England. By 1666, the king s soldiers were given lists of the names of the Scottish Covenanters by the curates, who then hunted them down and persecuted them. This is the story of Will Wallace, a young man in the service of the King who is tasked with searching for Andrew Black, a defiant Protestant. But Will soon joins Black as a follower of Christ and becomes one of the hunted and harried himself.
On a brilliant summer morning in the last quarter of the seventeenth century a small troop of horsemen crossed the ford of the river Cairn, in Dumfriesshire, not far from the spot where stands the little church of Irongray, and, gaining the road on the western bank of the stream, wended their way towards the moors and uplands which lie in the neighbourhood of Skeoch Hill. The dragoons, for such they were, trotted rapidly along the road that led into the solitudes of the hills, with all the careless dash of men whose interests are centred chiefly on the excitements of the passing hour, yet with the unflagging perseverance of those who have a fixed purpose in view—their somewhat worn aspect and the mud with which they were bespattered, from jack–boot to iron headpiece, telling of a long ride over rugged ground. The officer in command of the party rode a little in advance. Close behind him followed two troopers, one of whom was a burly middle–aged man with a stern, swarthy countenance; the other a youth whose tall frame was scarcely, if at all, less powerful than that of his comrade–in–arms, though much more elegant in form, while his youthful and ruddy, yet masculine, countenance suggested that he must at that time have been but a novice in the art of war.
