Introduction
During the preparation of the 4-Sight Edition of the Catholic Authors Series for Grades 7 to 10, our staff was engaged in selecting authentic literature that clothes truth in the splendor of beauty and, by its inherent perfection, purifies the heart of man, impels the will, and exalts to action.

We read practically all the books by Catholic authors for the junior high school level. We were hard put to find enough artistically valid books for a full-blown reading program. It is incontrovertible that we have a growing number of Catholic authors invincible in their Faith and increasingly indisputable in their art who do not invent escapes from reality but dramatize the seizure of it. We gave their work complete and grateful treatment in 4-Sight.

But these books were oases. Hundreds of others were unalleviated sand. The number of books that should not have been written is staggering. Laid end to end they should lead from wherever they are to an attic.

In desperation, we dug into our bag of out-of-print books. We remembered Outlaws of Ravenhurst from our recent youth. To our delight, we could recall plot, characters, incidents. Now, we opened it again.

Here was manna in our desert. The men were manly, the women womanly. And the boys were not self-righteous Horners sitting in corners-sugarplums pulling other sugarplums out of a pie and eating them without relish. Here were clean, poignant parallels of Tarsicius and Sebastian and Campion; here were other Christs and other crucifixions-and, yes, here was Judas.

Clearly, this was not the work of a hagiographer turned storyteller and perpetrating vicious portraits of the saints as people born with holy water in their veins that immunized them to concupiscence.

Here was struggle between good and evil, beginning in the center of men's hearts and spreading out in concentric, enveloping circles. In miniature was the recurring and current conflict of the world: Christ against antichrist, and the Mother of God recognized in her practiced historic role of saving men in the imminence of their peril and making them strong out of weakness.

What a contrast to the many books full of pasteboard boys and girls threatened by transparent plots of butter-milk villains! What a relief it was to find no invertebrate heroines simpering in synthetic halos, enumerating their novenas to assorted saints with the sweet stoicism of dowagers unveiling their operations, and negotiating lachrymose conversions right and left.

Here were boy and man standing in the full stature of body-spirit, choosing between good and evil and coming to grips with the devil. No secularism here, relegating God to the periphery of grace before big meals. Here Christ in the heart of His Mother was the center-the Catholic center of living. These were total Christians living their Faith to the hilt of their claymores. What an exhilarating departure from "how Joe and Harry spent their vacation" circumscribed by a canoe, several unconvincing catfish, and abominable prose-running the emotional gamut from A to B with a narrative temperature that couldn't incubate the egg of a wren.

Furthermore, we had always been saying that a man becomes what he reads: he reads mush and you can pour him through a keyhole; he wrestles with giants and becomes a king. Here, reading a book within a book, the hero meets God's nobility and grows to the stature of early Christians who stood heaven-high in the Colosseum.

The plot cascaded down the jagged rocks of the Highlands, suspense was keyed like a fiddle string, and the people didn't talk like characters in novels. The story had a heart that was warm, palpitating, compassionate, and capable of refreshing indignation.

This was high adventure, indeed. This was a book. We contacted the author, Sister Imelda. Where could we procure copies of Outlaws of Ravenhurst? We were told we couldn't. The book was not in print. Why hadn't it been reprinted? Publishers had been asked to reprint it but refused to.

But it must be reprinted! We'd publish it ourselves -all right? Certainly, delighted, decidedly delighted! Would she simplify the dialect for youngsters who read while they run the bases, but retain the good smack of Scotch ( dialect) ? Yes, she had already done that.

Had she considered telescoping several chapters and poising that twelfth climax on a precipice edge? Very well.

Would she delete a few things that might irritate fastidious critics who write with scalpels? Yes.

Could the story be dropped like a hot iron at the finish? Certainly.

Could we begin at once? At once.

Sister Imelda is delightful.

Here is Outlaws of Ravenhurst, revised, reset, illustrated-"for God and Our Lady!"

Truth is compelling when it is real-ized. It is realized when seen. It is seen when it is em-bodied, incarnated, act-ualized. Literature at its best is truth clothed in the splendor of beauty, capable of impelling vacillation from ('Not yet, O Lord," to "Now!" We believe this book to be truth in raiment becoming it.

GEORGE N. SCHUSTER, S.M.

Contents

INTRODUCTION VII

Chapter I. THE GRAY-CLOAKED STRANGER I

Chapter 2. BROWN-HEAD GOES FISHING 5

Chapter 3. UNCLE ROGER 16
Chapter 4. WHEN MEN PLAY MARBLES 22
Chapter 5. CASTLE RAVENHURST 33
Chapter 6. BY THE OLD FIREPLACE 44
Chapter 7. MY FRIEND GODFREY 58
Chapter 8. THE RUIN IN THE WOOD 70
Chapter 9 .THE MERCY OF A COWARD 84
Chapter 10. SECRET OF THE FIREPLACE 95
Chapter I I. RETURN OF LANG-SWORD 105
Chapter I2. LAST STAND OF THE OLD EARL 117
Chapter I3. GUARDIANS OF THE KING 129
Chapter I4. GLORY OF THE BITTER END 143
Chapter I5 .SPLINTER OF THE LANG-SWORD 155
Chapter I6. ESCAPE 160
Chapter I7. SECRET PASSAGES 166
Chapter I8. SIR JAMES OF GORDON 172
Chapter I9. MUCKLE JOHN 188
Chapter 20. GORDON FOR GOD AND OUR LADY 195
Chapter 2I .ROCK RAVEN NO MORE 206
Chapter 22. IN THE HOLLOW OF GOD'S HAND 212
Chapter 23. OUR LADY'S HOME 224

Chapter I

THE GRAY - CLOAKED STRANGER

NIGHT LAY on the long swelling waves of the Chesapeake Bay: no wind, no star, a murky darkness. The spars of an unlighted ship loomed through the fog and sank into fog again. Stealthily, from the bulky gloom of the deck, a dory slid on oiled ropes to the somber waters. Two seamen followed. Then down the ropes came an object which seemed to be a man with a bundle, wrapped in a long gray cloak. The dory pulled off and was swallowed by the fog.

For an hour the ship swung at anchor, still no light aloft or alow, and no sound save the dull lapping of the waves. Then from the stern a bell began to toll. One slow, booming tone rolled off and died away before the next followed. As if drawn out of the fog by the bellts deep calling, the dory came gliding back again. Two seamen were at the oars. The anchor sobbed up from the sea's grip. The tide was offshore and the ship floated out with the current, unlighted, silent, back into the white smother from which it had come.

Keen and marrow-searching, the morning wind rose along the shore of Maryland. Dense fog became a fine, drizzling rain turning to sleet. Breasting it along lonely ways among the sand dunes, hurried a lean, bent man carrying a bundle under his cloak - a long, muddied, threadbare garment as gray as rain-soaked ashes.

The bundle was hard to manage. It seemed to move of its own accord. Once in a while a sound came out of it, a wailing cry, "Dunkie Teewee! Take Dordie out."

"Sh!" the man would whisper. His tone was a stern command, but his eyes glowed with great love. The bundle would sniffle a moment or two, then grow quiet. After hours of tramping, the man found a nook where the forest met the last sand dunes. Here, crouched between a low bank and a tree, with his own body shielding the bundle from the sleet, the man opened his cloak and loosened the sailcloth and the plaid shawl within. A fat fist slipped out of the opening, then a i tousle of brown curls, a gurgling laugh, and a piping voice, "Dood Dunkie Teewee! Take it all off!"

"Hush!" came the man's low command in atone that would have been menacing except that it was so deeply kind. "Drink." He drew a flask from his cloak.

The child drank, but all the while he stared over the bottle's rim at the man-a wise, wide, baby stare. His eyes were blue and deep as the sea, with a flash in their depths that in the turning of an instant might be fun or fury; just now the eyes shone with a puzzled and half-angry trust.

Even in this short time the little fist which guided the flask was growing blue though it gripped with deft strength-a swordsman's right hand still in the making. The stranger hastened to enclose the baby in his warm coverings. He wound the cloak about himself and his bundle, left the shelter, and hurried on through the stinging sleet.

By midafternoon they had reached the top of a rough knob. Here the man seemed to be expecting someone. Placing himself in a spot well screened by the under- brush, he kept a constant eye on a little path which wound around the base of the hill.

It was almost sundown before the expected one arrived, a gentle old man on a steady-going bay horse. His round, low-crowned hat, sober clothing, and great saddlebags gave him the appearance of a missionary passing from one Mass station to another. If the man of the gray cloak was expecting the meeting, this other person evidently was not; yet the stranger studied the missionary's face with a look of recognition and relief. Then, turning sharply, he slipped off in an opposite direction across the hill and down the other side until he reached the path at a point where the horseman must soon pass.

Here the stranger took his queer bundle from beneath his cloak and propped it up against a stump. He loosened the wrappings from the baby's face and pressed upon the Ilittle brow one long, long kiss. The child awoke and cried out to him. The gray-cloaked figure whirled and darted up the hill into a thicket. Perhaps he feared the horseman would come before time. Perhaps he could not trust himself further lest he fail to carry out his plan.

The child, left suddenly alone, cried out at first as if it were some game; then, cross from weariness, he screamed and struggled with his coverings. At last, as if too weary to battle longer, his voice dropped to a convulsed sobbing, "Dunkie! Dunkie Teewee!"

Far up the slope the stranger knelt between a ledge and a twisted mass of brush and vine. His clenched hands were outstretched on the rock, gripped upon each other till the fingernails bit into the lean flesh. His hollow, weather-furrowed face was set by the clenched will behind it, but his eyes were wet with an agony of love and longing.