Kidnapped

Lured aboard the brig Covenant, knocked senseless, and carried off to be sold overseas, David wakes into a world of storm and rough men: the cold Captain Hoseason, the green-eyed second mate who is kind only when drunk, the abused cabin boy Ransome. Then a small boat is run down in the fog, and its sole survivor comes aboard, a proud Jacobite outlaw named Alan Breck Stewart, carrying money to his exiled chief and wearing his enmities as plainly as his sword. From that meeting, the two throw in their lot together, back to back in a smoke-filled roundhouse and then afoot across the Highlands with a price on both their heads.

Stevenson writes it earnestly, in David's own voice, a boy learning the cost of loyalty on burnt black moors, among dead firs standing like skeletons, in hidden cages clinging to the cliffside like a wasp's nest. But mostly there is the pull of the road and the question of who can be trusted on it. Alan puts it best: "To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man."

It is a friendship as much as an adventure — two unlikely companions, one canny and reckless, the other stubborn and principled, bound across a divide of politics and temperament. What David is walking toward, and what such a friendship finally asks of both men, is the door left standing open here.