"We're aye getting new things up at our place," he went on. "I heard my father telling Gibson the builder he must have everything of the best! Mother says it'll all be mine some day. I'll have the fine times when I leave the schule—and that winna be long now, for I'm clean sick o't; I'll no bide a day longer than I need! I'm to go into the business, and then I'll have the times. I'll dash about the country in a gig wi' two dogs wallopping ahin'. I'll have the great life o't."

"Ph-tt!" said Swipey Broon, and planted a gob of mud right in the middle of his brow.

"Hoh! hoh! hoh!" yelled the others. They hailed Swipey's action with delight because, to their minds, it exactly met the case. It was the one fit retort to his bouncing.

Beneath the wet plunk of the mud John started back, bumping his head against the wall behind him. The sticky pellet clung to his brow, and he brushed it angrily aside. The laughter of the others added to his wrath against Swipey.

"What are you after?" he bawled. "Don't try your tricks on me, Swipey Broon. Man, I could kill ye wi' a glower!"

In a twinkling Swipey's jacket was off, and he was dancing in his shirt sleeves, inviting Gourlay to come on and try't.

"G'way, man," said John, his face as white as the wall; "g'way, man! Don't have me getting up to ye, or I'll knock the fleas out of your duds!"

Now the father of Swipey—so called because he always swiped when batting at rounders—the father of Swipey was the rag and bone merchant of Barbie, and it was said (with what degree of truth I know not) that his home was verminous in consequence. John's taunt was calculated, therefore, to sting him to the quick.

The scion of the Broons, fired for the honour of his house, drove straight at the mouth of the insulter. But John jouked to the side, and Swipey skinned his knuckles on the wall.

For a moment he rocked to and fro, doubled up in pain, crying "Ooh!" with a rueful face, and squeezing his hand between his thighs to dull its sharper agonies. Then with redoubled wrath bold Swipey hurled him at the foe. He grabbed Gourlay's head, and shoving it down between his knees, proceeded to pommel his bent back, while John bellowed angrily (from between Swipey's legs), "Let me up, see!"

Swipey let him up. John came at him with whirling arms, but Swipey jouked and gave him one on the mouth that split his lip. In another moment Gourlay was grovelling on his hands and knees, and triumphant Swipey, astride his back, was bellowing "Hurroo!"—Swipey's father was an Irishman.

"Let him up, Broon!" cried Peter Wylie—"let him up, and meet each other square!"

"Oh, I'll let him up," cried Swipey, and leapt to his feet with magnificent pride. He danced round Gourlay with his fists sawing the air. "I could fight ten of him!—Come on, Gourlay!" he cried, "and I'll poultice the road wi' your brose."

John rose, glaring. But when Swipey rushed he turned and fled. The boys ran into the middle of the street, pointing after the coward and shouting, "Yeh! yeh! yeh!" with the infinite cruel derision of boyhood.

"Yeh! yeh! yeh!" the cries of execration and contempt pursued him as he ran.

* * * * *

Ere he had gone a hundred yards he heard the shrill whistle with which Mr. Gemmell summoned his scholars from their play.



CHAPTER VIII.

All the children had gone into school. The street was lonely in the sudden stillness. The joiner slanted across the road, brushing shavings and sawdust from his white apron. There was no other sign of life in the sunshine. Only from the smiddy, far away, came at times the tink of an anvil.

John crept on up the street, keeping close to the wall. It seemed unnatural being there at that hour; everything had a quiet, unfamiliar look. The white walls of the houses reproached the truant with their silent faces.

A strong smell of wallflowers oozed through the hot air. John thought it a lonely smell, and ran to get away.

"Johnny dear, what's wrong wi' ye?" cried his mother, when he stole in through the scullery at last. "Are ye ill, dear?"

"I wanted to come hame," he said. It was no defence; it was the sad and simple expression of his wish.

"What for, my sweet?"

"I hate the school," he said bitterly; "I aye want to be at hame."

His mother saw his cut mouth.

"Johnny," she cried in concern, "what's the matter with your lip, dear? Has ainybody been meddling ye?"

"It was Swipey Broon," he said.

"Did ever a body hear?" she cried. "Things have come to a fine pass when decent weans canna go to the school without a wheen rag-folk yoking on them! But what can a body ettle? Scotland's not what it used to be! It's owrerun wi' the dirty Eerish!"

In her anger she did not see the sloppy dishclout on the scullery chair, on which she sank exhausted by her rage.

"Oh, but I let him have it," swaggered John. "I threatened to knock the fleas off him. The other boys were on his side, or I would have walloped him."

"Atweel, they would a' be on his side," she cried. "But it's juist envy, Johnny. Never mind, dear; you'll soon be left the school, and there's not wan of them has the business that you have waiting ready to step intil."

"Mother," he pleaded, "let me bide here for the rest o' the day!"

"Oh, but your father, Johnny? If he saw ye!"

"If you gie me some o' your novelles to look at, I'll go up to the garret and hide, and ye can ask Jenny no to tell."

She gave him a hunk of nuncheon and a bundle of her novelettes, and he stole up to an empty garret and squatted on the bare boards. The sun streamed through the skylight window and lay, an oblong patch, in the centre of the floor. John noted the head of a nail that stuck gleaming up. He could hear the pigeons rooketty-cooing on the roof, and every now and then a slithering sound, as they lost their footing on the slates and went sliding downward to the rones. But for that, all was still, uncannily still. Once a zinc pail clanked in the yard, and he started with fear, wondering if that was his faither!

If young Gourlay had been the right kind of a boy he would have been in his glory, with books to read and a garret to read them in. For to snuggle close beneath the slates is as dear to the boy as the bard, if somewhat diverse their reasons for seclusion. Your garret is the true kingdom of the poet, neighbouring the stars; side-windows tether him to earth, but a skylight looks to the heavens. (That is why so many poets live in garrets, no doubt.) But it is the secrecy of a garret for him and his books that a boy loves; there he is lord of his imagination; there, when the impertinent world is hidden from his view, he rides with great Turpin at night beneath the glimmer of the moon. What boy of sense would read about Turpin in a mere respectable parlour? A hay-loft's the thing, where you can hide in a dusty corner, and watch through a chink the baffled minions of Bow Street, and hear Black Bess—good jade!—stamping in her secret stall, and be ready to descend when a friendly hostler cries, "Jericho!" But if there is no hay-loft at hand a mere garret will do very well. And so John should have been in his glory, as indeed for a while he was. But he showed his difference from the right kind of a boy by becoming lonely. He had inherited from his mother a silly kind of interest in silly books, but to him reading was a painful process, and he could never remember the plot. What he liked best (though he could not have told you about it) was a vivid physical picture. When the puffing steam of Black Bess's nostrils cleared away from the moonlit pool, and the white face of the dead man stared at Turpin through the water, John saw it and shivered, staring big-eyed at the staring horror. He was alive to it all; he heard the seep of the water through the mare's lips, and its hollow glug as it went down, and the creak of the saddle beneath Turpin's hip; he saw the smear of sweat roughening the hair on her slanting neck, and the great steaming breath she blew out when she rested from drinking, and then that awful face glaring from the pool.—Perhaps he was not so far from being the right kind of boy, after all, since that was the stuff that he liked. He wished he had some Turpin with him now, for his mother's periodicals were all about men with impossibly broad shoulders and impossibly curved waists who asked Angelina if she loved them. Once, it is true, a somewhat too florid sentence touched him on the visual nerve: "Through a chink in the Venetian blind a long pencil of yellow light pierced the beautiful dimness of the room and pointed straight to the dainty bronze slipper peeping from under Angelina's gown; it became a slipper of vivid gold amid the gloom." John saw that and brightened, but the next moment they began to talk about love and he was at sea immediately. "Dagon them and their love!" quoth he.

To him, indeed, reading was never more than a means of escape from something else; he never thought of a book so long as there were things to see. Some things were different from others, it is true. Things of the outer world, where he swaggered among his fellows and was thrashed, or bungled his lessons and was thrashed again, imprinted themselves vividly on his mind, and he hated the impressions. When Swipey Broon was hot the sweat pores always glistened distinctly on the end of his mottled nose—John, as he thought angrily of Swipey this afternoon, saw the glistening sweat pores before him and wanted to bash them. The varnishy smell of the desks, the smell of the wallflowers at Mrs. Manzie's on the way to school, the smell of the school itself—to all these he was morbidly alive, and he loathed them. But he loved the impressions of his home. His mind was full of perceptions of which he was unconscious, till he found one of them recorded in a book, and that was the book for him. The curious physical always drew his mind to hate it or to love. In summer he would crawl into the bottom of an old hedge, among the black mould and the withered sticks, and watch a red-ended beetle creep slowly up a bit of wood till near the top, and fall suddenly down, and creep patiently again—this he would watch with curious interest and remember always. "Johnny," said his mother once, "what do you breenge into the bushes to watch those nasty things for?"

"They're queer," he said musingly.

Even if he was a little dull wi' the book, she was sure he would come to something, for, eh, he was such a noticing boy.

But there was nothing to touch him in "The Wooing of Angeline;" he was moving in an alien world. It was a complicated plot, and, some of the numbers being lost, he was not sharp enough to catch the idea of the story. He read slowly and without interest. The sounds of the outer world reached him in his loneliness and annoyed him, because, while wondering what they were, he dared not look out to see. He heard the rattle of wheels entering the big yard; that would be Peter Riney back from Skeighan with the range. Once he heard the birr of his father's voice in the lobby and his mother speaking in shrill protest, and then—oh, horror!—his father came up the stair. Would he come into the garret? John, lying on his left side, felt his quickened heart thud against the boards, and he could not take his big frighted eyes from the bottom of the door. But the heavy step passed and went into another room. John's open mouth was dry, and his shirt was sticking to his back.

The heavy steps came back to the landing.

"Whaur's my gimlet?" yelled his father down the stair.

"Oh, I lost the corkscrew, and took it to open a bottle," cried his mother wearily. "Here it is, man, in the kitchen drawer."

"Hah!" his father barked, and he knew he was infernal angry. If he should come in!

But he went tramping down the stair, and John, after waiting till his pulses were stilled, resumed his reading. He heard the masons in the kitchen, busy with the range, and he would have liked fine to watch them, but he dared not go down till after four. It was lonely up here by himself. A hot wind had sprung up, and it crooned through the keyhole drearily; "oo-woo-oo," it cried, and the sound drenched him in a vague depression. The splotch of yellow light had shifted round to the fireplace; Janet had kindled a fire there last winter, and the ashes had never been removed, and now the light lay, yellow and vivid, on a red clinker of coal and a charred piece of stick. A piece of glossy white paper had been flung in the untidy grate, and in the hollow curve of it a thin silt of black dust had gathered—the light showed it plainly. All these things the boy marked and was subtly aware of their unpleasantness. He was forced to read to escape the sense of them. But it was words, words, words, that he read; the subject mattered not at all. His head leaned heavy on his left hand and his mouth hung open, as his eye travelled dreamily along the lines. He succeeded in hypnotizing his brain at last, by the mere process of staring at the page.

At last he heard Janet in the lobby. That meant that school was over. He crept down the stair.

"You were playing the truant," said Janet, and she nodded her head in accusation. "I've a good mind to tell my faither."

"If ye wud——" he said, and shook his fist at her threateningly. She shrank away from him. They went into the kitchen together.

The range had been successfully installed, and Mr. Gourlay was showing it to Grant of Loranogie, the foremost farmer of the shire. Mrs. Gourlay, standing by the kitchen table, viewed her new possession with a faded simper of approval. She was pleased that Mr. Grant should see the grand new thing that they had gotten. She listened to the talk of the men with a faint smile about her weary lips, her eyes upon the sonsy range.

"Dod, it's a handsome piece of furniture," said Loranogie. "How did ye get it brought here, Mr. Gourlay?"

"I went to Glasgow and ordered it special. It came to Skeighan by the train, and my own beasts brought it owre. That fender's a feature," he added complacently; "it's onusual wi' a range."

The massive fender ran from end to end of the fireplace, projecting a little in front; its rim, a square bar of heavy steel, with bright, sharp edges.

"And that poker, too; man, there's a history wi' that. I made a point of the making o't. He was an ill-bred little whalp, the bodie in Glasgow. I happened to say till um I would like a poker-heid just the same size as the rim of the fender! 'What d'ye want wi' a heavy-heided poker?' says he; 'a' ye need's a bit sma' thing to rype the ribs wi'.' 'Is that so?' says I. 'How do you ken what I want?' I made short work o' him! The poker-heid's the identical size o' the rim; I had it made to fit."

Loranogie thought it a silly thing of Gourlay to concern himself about a poker. But that was just like him, of course. The moment the body in Glasgow opposed his whim, Gourlay, he knew, would make a point o't.

The grain merchant took the bar of heavy metal in his hand. "Dod, it's an awful weapon," he said, meaning to be jocose. "You could murder a man wi't."

"Deed you could," said Loranogie; "you could kill him wi' the one lick."

The elders, engaged with more important matters, paid no attention to the children, who had pushed between them to the front and were looking up at their faces, as they talked, with curious watching eyes. John, with his instinct to notice things, took the poker up when his father laid it down, to see if it was really the size of the rim. It was too heavy for him to raise by the handle; he had to lift it by the middle. Janet was at his elbow, watching him. "You could kill a man with that," he told her, importantly, though she had heard it for herself. Janet stared and shuddered. Then the boy laid the poker-head along the rim, fitting edge to edge with a nice precision.

"Mother," he cried, turning towards her in his interest, "mother, look here! It's exactly the same size!"

"Put it down, sir," said his father with a grim smile at Loranogie. "You'll be killing folk next."



CHAPTER IX.

"Are ye packit, Peter?" said Gourlay.

"Yes, sir," said Peter Riney, running round to the other side of a cart, to fasten a horse's bellyband to the shaft. "Yes, sir, we're a' ready."

"Have the carriers a big load?"

"Andy has just a wheen parcels, but Elshie's as fu' as he can haud. And there's a gey pickle stuff waiting at the Cross."

The hot wind of yesterday had brought lightning through the night, and this morning there was the gentle drizzle that sometimes follows a heavy thunderstorm. Hints of the farther blue showed themselves in a lofty sky of delicate and drifting gray. The blackbirds and thrushes welcomed the cooler air with a gush of musical piping, as if the liquid tenderness of the morning had actually got into their throats and made them softer.

"You had better snoove away then," said Gourlay. "Donnerton's five mile ayont Fleckie, and by the time you deliver the meal there, and load the ironwork, it'll be late ere you get back. Snoove away, Peter; snoove away!"

Peter shuffled uneasily, and his pale blue eyes blinked at Gourlay from beneath their grizzled crow nests of red hair.

"Are we a' to start thegither, sir?" he hesitated. "D'ye mean—d'ye mean the carriers too?"

"Atweel, Peter!" said Gourlay. "What for no?"

Peter took a great old watch, with a yellow case, from his fob, and, "It wants a while o' aicht, sir," he volunteered.

"Ay, man, Peter, and what of that?" said Gourlay.

There was almost a twinkle in his eye. Peter Riney was the only human being with whom he was ever really at his ease. It is only when a mind feels secure in itself that it can laugh unconcernedly at others. Peter was so simple that in his presence Gourlay felt secure; and he used to banter him.

"The folk at the Cross winna expect the carriers till aicht, sir," said Peter, "and I doubt their stuff won't be ready."

"Ay, man, Peter," Gourlay joked lazily, as if Peter was a little boy. "Ay, man, Peter. You think the folk at the Cross winna be prepared?"

"No, sir," said Peter, opening his eyes very solemnly, "they winna be prepared."

"It'll do them good to hurry a little for once," growled Gourlay, humour yielding to spite at the thought of his enemies. "It'll do them good to hurry a little for once. Be off, the lot of ye!"

After ordering his carriers to start, to back down and postpone their departure, just to suit the convenience of his neighbours, would derogate from his own importance. His men might think he was afraid of Barbie.

He strolled out to the big gate and watched his teams going down the brae.

There were only four carts this morning because the two that had gone to Fechars yesterday with the cheese would not be back till the afternoon; and another had already turned west to Auchterwheeze, to bring slates for the flesher's new house. Of the four that went down the street two were the usual carriers' carts, the other two were off to Fleckie with meal, and Gourlay had started them the sooner since they were to bring back the ironwork which Templandmuir needed for his new improvements. Though the Templar had reformed greatly since he married his birkie wife, he was still far from having his place in proper order, and he had often to depend on Gourlay for the carrying of stuff which a man in his position should have had horses of his own to bring.

As Gourlay stood at his gate he pondered with heavy cunning how much he might charge Templandmuir for bringing the ironwork from Fleckie. He decided to charge him for the whole day, though half of it would be spent in taking his own meal to Donnerton. In that he was carrying out his usual policy—which was to make each side of his business help the other.

As he stood puzzling his wits over Templandmuir's account, his lips worked in and out, to assist the slow process of his brain. His eyes narrowed between peering lids, and their light seemed to turn inward as he fixed them abstractedly on a stone in the middle of the road. His head was tilted that he might keep his eyes upon the stone; and every now and then, as he mused, he rubbed his chin slowly between the thumb and fingers of his left hand. Entirely given up to the thought of Templandmuir's account, he failed to see the figure advancing up the street.

At last the scrunch of a boot on the wet road struck his ear. He turned with his best glower on the man who was approaching; more of the "Wha-the-bleezes-are-you?" look than ever in his eyes—because he had been caught unawares.

The stranger wore a light yellow overcoat, and he had been walking a long time in the rain apparently, for the shoulders of the coat were quite black with the wet, these black patches showing in strong contrast with the dryer, therefore yellower, front of it. Coat and jacket were both hanging slightly open, and between was seen the slight bulge of a dirty white waistcoat. The newcomer's trousers were turned high at the bottom, and the muddy spats he wore looked big and ungainly in consequence. In this appearance there was an air of dirty and pretentious well-to-do-ness. It was not shabby gentility. It was like the gross attempt at dress of your well-to-do publican who looks down on his soiled white waistcoat with complacent and approving eye.

"It's a fine morning, Mr. Gourlay," simpered the stranger. His air was that of a forward tenant who thinks it a great thing to pass remarks on the weather with his laird.

Gourlay cast a look at the dropping heavens.

"Is that your opinion?" said he. "I fail to see't mysell."

It was not in Gourlay to see the beauty of that gray, wet dawn. A fine morning to him was one that burnt the back of your neck.

The stranger laughed: a little deprecating giggle. "I meant it was fine weather for the fields," he explained. He had meant nothing of the kind, of course; he had merely been talking at random in his wish to be civil to that important man, John Gourlay.

"Imphm," he pondered, looking round on the weather with a wise air; "imphm; it's fine weather for the fields."

"Are you a farmer, then?" Gourlay nipped him, with his eye on the white waistcoat.

"Oh—oh, Mr. Gourlay! A farmer, no. Hi—hi! I'm not a farmer. I dare say, now, you have no mind of me?"

"No," said Gourlay, regarding him very gravely and steadily with his dark eyes. "I cannot say, sir, that I have the pleasure of remembering you."

"Man, I'm a son of auld John Wilson of Brigabee."

"Oh, auld Wilson, the mole-catcher!" said contemptuous Gourlay. "What's this they christened him now? 'Toddling Johnnie,' was it noat?"

Wilson coloured. But he sniggered to gloss over the awkwardness of the remark. A coward always sniggers when insulted, pretending that the insult is only a joke of his opponent, and therefore to be laughed aside. So he escapes the quarrel which he fears a show of displeasure might provoke.

But though Wilson was not a hardy man, it was not timidity only that caused his tame submission to Gourlay.

He had come back after an absence of fifteen years, with a good deal of money in his pocket, and he had a fond desire that he, the son of the mole-catcher, should get some recognition of his prosperity from the most important man in the locality. If Gourlay had said, with solemn and fat-lipped approval, "Man, I'm glad to see that you have done so well," he would have swelled with gratified pride. For it is often the favourable estimate of their own little village—"What they'll think of me at home"—that matters most to Scotsmen who go out to make their way in the world. No doubt that is why so many of them go home and cut a dash when they have made their fortunes; they want the cronies of their youth to see the big men they have become. Wilson was not exempt from that weakness. As far back as he remembered Gourlay had been the big man of Barbie; as a boy he had viewed him with admiring awe; to be received by him now, as one of the well-to-do, were a sweet recognition of his greatness. It was a fawning desire for that recognition that caused his smirking approach to the grain merchant. So strong was the desire that, though he coloured and felt awkward at the contemptuous reference to his father, he sniggered and went on talking, as if nothing untoward had been said. He was one of the band impossible to snub, not because they are endowed with superior moral courage, but because their easy self-importance is so great that an insult rarely pierces it enough to divert them from their purpose. They walk through life wrapped comfortably round in the wool of their own conceit. Gourlay, though a dull man—perhaps because he was a dull man—suspected insult in a moment. But it rarely entered Wilson's brain (though he was cleverer than most) that the world could find anything to scoff at in such a fine fellow as James Wilson. A less ironic brute than Gourlay would never have pierced the thickness of his hide. It was because Gourlay succeeded in piercing it that morning that Wilson hated him for ever—with a hate the more bitter because he was rebuffed so seldom.

"Is business brisk?" he asked, irrepressible.

Business! Heavens, did ye hear him talking? What did Toddling Johnny's son know about business? What was the world coming to? To hear him setting up his face there, and asking the best merchant in the town whether business was brisk! It was high time to put him in his place, the conceited upstart, shoving himself forward like an equal!

For it was the assumption of equality implied by Wilson's manner that offended Gourlay—as if mole-catcher's son and monopolist were discussing, on equal terms, matters of interest to them both.

"Business!" he said gravely. "Well, I'm not well acquainted with your line, but I believe mole traps are cheap—if ye have any idea of taking up the oald trade."

Wilson's eyes flickered over him, hurt and dubious. His mouth opened—then shut—then he decided to speak after all. "Oh, I was thinking Barbie would be very quiet," said he, "compared wi' places where they have the railway. I was thinking it would need stirring up a bit."

"Oh, ye was thinking that, was ye?" birred Gourlay, with a stupid man's repetition of his jibe. "Well, I believe there's a grand opening in the moleskin line, so there's a chance for ye. My quarrymen wear out their breeks in no time."

Wilson's face, which had swelled with red shame, went a dead white. "Good-morning!" he said, and started rapidly away with a vicious dig of his stick upon the wet road.

"Goo-ood mor-r-ning, serr!" Gourlay birred after him; "goo-ood mor-r-ning, serr!" He felt he had been bright this morning. He had put the branks on Wilson!

Wilson was as furious at himself as at Gourlay. Why the devil had he said "Good-morning"? It had slipped out of him unawares, and Gourlay had taken it up with an ironic birr that rang in his ears now, poisoning his blood. He felt equal in fancy to a thousand Gourlays now—so strong was he in wrath against him. He had gone forward to pass pleasant remarks about the weather, and why should he noat?—he was no disgrace to Barbie, but a credit rather. It was not every working-man's son that came back with five hundred in the bank. And here Gourlay had treated him like a doag! Ah, well, he would maybe be upsides with Gourlay yet, so he might!



CHAPTER X.

"Such a rickle of furniture I never saw!" said the Provost.

"Whose is it?" said Brodie.

"Oh, have ye noat heard?" said the Head of the Town with eyebrows in air. "It beloangs to that fellow Wilson, doan't ye know? He's a son of oald Wilson, the mowdie-man of Brigabee. It seems we're to have him for a neighbour, or all's bye wi't. I declare I doan't know what this world's coming to!"

"Man, Provost," said Brodie, "d'ye tell me tha-at? I've been over at Fleckie for the last ten days—my brother Rab's dead and won away, as I dare say you have heard—oh yes, we must all go—so, ye see, I'm scarcely abreast o' the latest intelligence. What's Wilson doing here? I thought he had been a pawnbroker in Embro."

"Noat he! It's whispered indeed, that he left Brigabee to go and help in a pawmbroker's, but it seems he married an Aberdeen lass and sattled there after a while, the manager of a store, I have been given to understa-and. He has taken oald Rab Jamieson's barn at the bottom of the Cross—for what purpose it beats even me to tell! And that's his furniture——"

"I declare!" said the astonished Brodie. "He's a smart-looking boy that. Will that be a son of his?"

He pointed to a sharp-faced urchin of twelve who was busy carrying chairs round the corner of the barn, to the tiny house where Wilson meant to live. He was a red-haired boy with an upturned nose, dressed in shirt and knickerbockers only. The cross of his braces came comically near his neck—so short was the space of shirt between the top line of his breeches and his shoulders. His knickers were open at the knee, and the black stockings below them were wrinkled slackly down his thin legs, being tied loosely above the calf with dirty white strips of cloth instead of garters. He had no cap, and it was seen that his hair had a "cow-lick" in front; it slanted up from his brow, that is, in a sleek kind of tuft. There was a violent squint in one of his sharp gray eyes, so that it seemed to flash at the world across the bridge of his nose. He was so eager at his work that his clumsy-looking boots—they only looked clumsy because the legs they were stuck to were so thin—skidded on the cobbles as he whipped round the barn with a chair inverted on his poll. When he came back for another chair, he sometimes wheepled a tune of his own making, in shrill, disconnected jerks, and sometimes wiped his nose on his sleeve. And the bodies watched him.

"Faith, he's keen," said the Provost.

"But what on earth has Wilson ta'en auld Jamieson's house and barn for? They have stude empty since I kenna whan," quoth Alexander Toddle, forgetting his English in surprise.

"They say he means to start a business! He's made some bawbees in Aiberdeen, they're telling me, and he thinks he'll set Barbie in a lowe wi't."

"Ou, he means to work a perfect revolution," said Johnny Coe.

"In Barbie!" cried astounded Toddle.

"In Barbie e'en't," said the Provost.

"It would take a heap to revolutionize hit," said the baker, the ironic man.

"There's a chance in that hoose," Brodie burst out, ignoring the baker's gibe. "Dod, there's a chance, sirs. I wonder it never occurred to me before."

"Are ye thinking ye have missed a gude thing?" grinned the Deacon.

But Brodie's lips were working in the throes of commercial speculation, and he stared, heedless of the jibe. So Johnny Coe took up his sapient parable.

"Atweel," said he, "there's a chance, Mr. Brodie. That road round to the back's a handy thing. You could take a horse and cart brawly through an opening like that. And there's a gey bit ground at the back, too, when a body comes to think o't."

"What line's he meaning to purshoo?" queried Brodie, whose mind, quickened by the chance he saw at No. 1 The Cross, was hot on the hunt of its possibilities.

"He's been very close about that," said the Provost. "I asked Johnny Gibson—it was him had the selling o't—but he couldn't give me ainy satisfaction. All he could say was that Wilson had bought it and paid it. 'But, losh,' said I, 'he maun 'a' lat peep what he wanted the place for!' But na; it seems he was owre auld-farrant for the like of that. 'We'll let the folk wonder for a while, Mr. Gibson,' he had said. 'The less we tell them, the keener they'll be to ken; and they'll advertise me for noathing by speiring one another what I'm up till.'"

"Cunning!" said Brodie, breathing the word low in expressive admiration.

"Demned cute!" said Sandy Toddle.

"Very thmart!" said the Deacon.

"But the place has been falling down since ever I have mind o't," said Sandy Toddle. "He's a very clever man if he makes anything out of that."

"Well, well," said the Provost, "we'll soon see what he's meaning to be at. Now that his furniture's in, he surely canna keep us in the dark much loanger!"

Their curiosity was soon appeased. Within a week they were privileged to read the notice here appended:—

"Mr. James Wilson begs to announce to the inhabitants of Barbie and surrounding neighbourhood that he has taken these commodious premises, No. 1 The Cross, which he intends to open shortly as a Grocery, Ironmongery, and General Provision Store. J. W. is apprised that such an Emporium has long been a felt want in the locality. To meet this want is J. W.'s intention. He will try to do so, not by making large profits on a small business, but by making small profits on a large business. Indeed, owing to his long acquaintance with the trade, Mr. Wilson will be able to supply all commodities at a very little over cost price. For J. W. will use those improved methods of business which have been confined hitherto to the larger centres of population. At his Emporium you will be able, as the saying goes, to buy everything from a needle to an anchor. Moreover, to meet the convenience of his customers, J. W. will deliver goods at your own doors, distributing them with his own carts either in the town of Barbie or at any convenient distance from the same. Being a native of the district, his business hopes to secure a due share of your esteemed patronage. Thanking you, in anticipation, for the favour of an early visit,

"Believe me, Ladies and Gentlemen, "Yours faithfully, "JAMES WILSON."

Such was the poster with which "Barbie and surrounding neighbourhood" were besprinkled within a week of "J. W.'s" appearance on the scene. He was known as "J. W." ever after. To be known by your initials is sometimes a mark of affection, and sometimes a mark of disrespect. It was not a mark of affection in the case of our "J. W." When Donald Scott slapped him on the back and cried, "Hullo, J. W., how are the anchors selling?" Barbie had found a cue which it was not slow to make use of. Wilson even received letters addressed to "J. W., Anchor Merchant, No. 1 The Cross." Ours is a nippy locality.

But Wilson, cosy and cocky in his own good opinion, was impervious to the chilly winds of scorn. His posters, in big blue letters, were on the smiddy door and on the sides of every brig within a circuit of five miles; they were pasted, in smaller letters, red on the gateposts of every farm; and Robin Tam, the bellman, handed them about from door to door. The folk could talk of nothing else.

"Dod!" said the Provost, when he read the bill, "we've a new departure here! This is an unco splutter, as the oald sow said when she tumbled in the gutter."

"Ay," said Sandy Toddle, "a fuff in the pan, I'm thinking. He promises owre muckle to last long! He lauchs owre loud to be merry at the end o't. For the loudest bummler's no the best bee, as my father, honest man, used to tell the minister."

"Ah-ah, I'm no so sure o' that," said Tam Brodie. "I forgathered wi' Wilson on Wednesday last, and I tell ye, sirs, he's worth the watching. They'll need to stand on a baikie that put the branks on him. He has the considering eye in his head—yon lang far-away glimmer at a thing from out the end of the eyebrow. He turned it on mysell twa-three times, the cunning devil, trying to keek into me, to see if he could use me. And look at the chance he has! There's two stores in Barbie, to be sure. But Kinnikum's a dirty beast, and folk have a scunner at his goods; and Catherwood's a drucken swine, and his place but sairly guided. That's a great stroke o' policy, too, promising to deliver folk's goods on their own doorstep to them. There's a whole jing-bang of outlying clachans round Barbie that he'll get the trade of by a dodge like that. The like was never tried hereaway before. I wadna wonder but it works wonders."

It did.

It was partly policy and partly accident that brought Wilson back to Barbie. He had been managing a wealthy old merchant's store for a long time in Aberdeen, and he had been blithely looking forward to the goodwill of it, when jink, at the old man's death, in stepped a nephew, and ousted the poo-oor fellow. He had bawled shrilly, but to no purpose; he had to be travelling. When he rose to greatness in Barbie it was whispered that the nephew discovered he was feathering his own nest, and that this was the reason of his sharp dismissal. But perhaps we should credit that report to Barbie's disposition rather than to Wilson's misdemeanour.

Wilson might have set up for himself in the nippy northern town. But it is an instinct with men who have met with a rebuff in a place to shake its dust from their shoes, and be off to seek their fortunes in the larger world. We take a scunner at the place that has ill-used us. Wilson took a scunner at Aberdeen, and decided to leave it and look around him. Scotland was opening up, and there were bound to be heaps of chances for a man like him! "A man like me," was a frequent phrase of Wilson's retired and solitary speculation. "Ay," he said, emerging from one of his business reveries, "there's bound to be heaps o' chances for a man like me, if I only look about me."

He was "looking about him" in Glasgow when he forgathered with his cousin William—the borer he! After many "How are ye, Jims's" and mutual speirings over a "bit mouthful of yill"—so they phrased it; but that was a meiosis, for they drank five quarts—they fell to a serious discussion of the commercial possibilities of Scotland. The borer was of the opinion that the Braes of Barbie had a future yet, "for a' the gaffer was so keen on keeping his men in the dark about the coal."

Now Wilson knew (as what Scotsman does not?) that in the middle 'fifties coal-boring in Scotland was not the honourable profession that it now is. More than once, speculators procured lying reports that there were no minerals, and after landowners had been ruined by their abortive preliminary experiments, stepped in, bought the land, and boomed it. In one notorious case a family, now great in the public eye, bribed a laird's own borers to conceal the truth, and then buying the Golconda from its impoverished owner, laid the basis of a vast fortune.

"D'ye mean—to tell—me, Weelyum Wilson," said James, giving him his full name in the solemnity of the moment, "d'ye mean—to tell—me, sir"—here he sank his voice to a whisper—"that there's joukery-pawkery at work?"

"A declare to God A div," said Weelyum, with equal solemnity, and he nodded with alarmed sapience across his beer jug.

"You believe there's plenty of coal up Barbie Valley, and that they're keeping it dark in the meantime for some purpose of their own?"

"I do," said Weelyum.

"God!" said James, gripping the table with both hands in his excitement—"God, if that's so, what a chance there's in Barbie! It has been a dead town for twenty year, and twenty to the end o't. A verra little would buy the hauf o't. But property 'ull rise in value like a puddock stool at dark, serr, if the pits come round it! It will that. If I was only sure o' your suspeecion, Weelyum, I'd invest every bawbee I have in't. You're going home the night, are ye not?"

"I was just on my road to the station when I met ye," said Weelyum.

"Send me a scrape of your pen to-morrow, man, if what you see on getting back keeps you still in the same mind o't. And directly I get your letter I'll run down and look about me."

The letter was encouraging, and Wilson went forth to spy the land and initiate the plan of campaign. It was an important day for him. He entered on his feud with Gourlay, and bought Rab Jamieson's house and barn (with the field behind it) for a trifle. He had five hundred of his own, and he knew where more could be had for the asking.

Rab Jamieson's barn was a curious building to be stranded in the midst of Barbie. In quaint villages and little towns of England you sometimes see a mellow red-tiled barn, with its rich yard, close upon the street; it seems to have been hemmed in by the houses round, while dozing, so that it could not escape with the fields fleeing from the town. There it remains and gives a ripeness to the place, matching fitly with the great horse-chestnut yellowing before the door, and the old inn further down, mantled in its blood-red creepers. But that autumnal warmth and cosiness is rarely seen in the barer streets of the north. How Rab Jamieson's barn came to be stuck in Barbie nobody could tell. It was a gaunt, gray building with never a window, but a bole high in one corner for the sheaves, and a door low in another corner for auld Rab Jamieson. There was no mill inside, and the place had not been used for years. But the roof was good, and the walls stout and thick, and Wilson soon got to work on his new possession. He had seen all that could be made of the place the moment he clapped an eye on it, and he knew that he had found a good thing, even if the pits should never come near Barbie. The bole and door next the street were walled up, and a fine new door opened in the middle, flanked on either side by a great window. The interior was fitted up with a couple of counters and a wooden floor; and above the new wood ceiling there was a long loft for a storeroom, lighted by skylights in the roof. That loft above the rafters, thought the provident Wilson, will come in braw and handy for storing things, so it will. And there, hey presto! the transformation was achieved, and Wilson's Emporium stood before you. It was crammed with merchandise. On the white flapping slant of a couple of awnings, one over each window, you might read in black letters, "JAMES WILSON: EMPORIUM." The letters of "James Wilson" made a triumphal arch, to which "Emporium" was the base. It seemed symbolical.

Now, the shops of Barbie (the drunken man's shop and the dirty man's shop always excepted, of course) had usually been low-browed little places with faded black scrolls above the door, on which you might read in dim gilt letters (or it might be in white)

"LICENS'D TO SELL TEA & TOBACCO."

"Licens'd" was on one corner of the ribboned scroll, "To Sell Tea &" occupied the flowing arch above, with "Tobacco" in the other corner. When you mounted two steps and opened the door, a bell of some kind went "ping" in the interior, and an old woman in a mutch, with big specs slipping down her nose, would come up a step from a dim little room behind, and wiping her sunken mouth with her apron—she had just left her tea—would say, "What's your wull the day, sir?" And if you said your "wull" was tobacco, she would answer, "Ou, sir, I dinna sell ocht now but the tape and sweeties." And then you went away, sadly.

With the exception of the dirty man's shop and the drunken man's shop, that kind of shop was the Barbie kind of shop. But Wilson changed all that. One side of the Emporium was crammed with pots, pans, pails, scythes, gardening implements, and saws, with a big barrel of paraffin partitioned off in a corner. The rafters on that side were bristling and hoary with brushes of all kinds dependent from the roof, so that the minister's wife (who was a six-footer) went off with a brush in her bonnet once. Behind the other counter were canisters in goodly rows, barrels of flour and bags of meal, and great yellow cheeses in the window. The rafters here were heavy with their wealth of hams, brown-skinned flitches of bacon interspersed with the white tight-corded home-cured—"Barbie's Best," as Wilson christened it. All along the back, in glass cases to keep them unsullied, were bales of cloth, layer on layer to the roof. It was a pleasure to go into the place, so big and bien was it, and to smell it on a frosty night set your teeth watering. There was always a big barrel of American apples just inside the door, and their homely fragrance wooed you from afar, the mellow savour cuddling round you half a mile off. Barbie boys had despised the provision trade, heretofore, as a mean and meagre occupation; but now the imagination of each gallant youth was fired and radiant—he meant to be a grocer.

Mrs. Wilson presided over the Emporium. Wilson had a treasure in his wife. She was Aberdeen born and bred, but her manner was the manner of the South and West. There is a broad difference of character between the peoples of East and West Scotland. The East throws a narrower and a nippier breed. In the West they take Burns for their exemplar, and affect the jovial and robustious—in some cases it is affectation only, and a mighty poor one at that. They claim to be bigger men and bigger fools than the Eastern billies. And the Eastern billies are very willing to yield one half of the contention.

Mrs. Wilson, though Eastie by nature, had the jovial manner that you find in Kyle; more jovial, indeed, than was common in nippy Barbie, which, in general character, seems to have been transplanted from some sand dune looking out upon the German Ocean. She was big of hip and bosom, with sloe-black hair and eyes, and a ruddy cheek, and when she flung back her head for the laugh her white teeth flashed splendid on the world. That laugh of hers became one of the well-known features of Barbie. "Lo'd-sake!" a startled visitor would cry, "whatna skirl's tha-at!" "Oh, dinna be alarmed," a native would comfort him, "it's only Wilson's wife lauchin at the Cross!"

Her manner had a hearty charm. She had a laugh and a joke for every customer, quick as a wink with her answer; her gibe was in you and out again before you knew you were wounded. Some, it is true, took exception to the loudness of her skirl—the Deacon, for instance, who "gave her a good one" the first time he went in for snuff. But "Tut!" quoth she; "a mim cat's never gude at the mice," and she lifted him out by the scruff of his neck, crying, "Run, mousie, or I'll catch ye!" On that day her popularity in Barbie was assured for ever. But she was as keen on the penny as a penurious weaver, for all her heartiness and laughing ways. She combined the commercial merits of the East and West. She could coax you to the buying like a Cumnock quean, and fleece you in the selling like the cadgers o' Kincardine. When Wilson was abroad on his affairs he had no need to be afraid that things were mismanaging at home. During his first year in Barbie Mrs. Wilson was his sole helper. She had the brawny arm of a giantess, and could toss a bag of meal like a baby; to see her twirl a big ham on the counter was to see a thing done as it should be. When Drucken Wabster came in and was offensive once, "Poo-oor fellow!" said she (with a wink to a customer), "I declare he's in a high fever," and she took him kicking to the pump and cooled him.

With a mate like that at the helm every sail of Wilson's craft was trimmed for prosperity. He began to "look about" him to increase the fleet.



CHAPTER XI.

That the Scot is largely endowed with the commercial imagination his foes will be ready to acknowledge. Imagination may consecrate the world to a man, or it may merely be a visualizing faculty which sees that as already perfect which is still lying in the raw material. The Scot has the lower faculty in full degree; he has the forecasting leap of the mind which sees what to make of things—more, sees them made and in vivid operation. To him there is a railway through the desert where no railway exists, and mills along the quiet stream. And his perfervidum ingenium is quick to attempt the realizing of his dreams. That is why he makes the best of colonists. Galt is his type—Galt, dreaming in boyhood of the fine water power a fellow could bring round the hill, from the stream where he went a-fishing (they have done it since), dreaming in manhood of the cities yet to rise amid Ontario's woods (they are there to witness to his foresight). Indeed, so flushed and riotous can the Scottish mind become over a commercial prospect that it sometimes sends native caution by the board, and a man's really fine idea becomes an empty balloon, to carry him off to the limbo of vanities. There is a megalomaniac in every parish of Scotland. Well, not so much as that; they're owre canny for that to be said of them. But in every district almost you may find a poor creature who for thirty years has cherished a great scheme by which he means to revolutionize the world's commerce, and amass a fortune in monstrous degree. He is generally to be seen shivering at the Cross, and (if you are a nippy man) you shout carelessly in going by, "Good-morning, Tamson; how's the scheme?" And he would be very willing to tell you, if only you would wait to listen. "Man," he will cry eagerly behind you, "if I only had anither wee wheel in my invention—she would do, the besom! I'll sune have her ready noo." Poor Tamson!

But these are the exceptions. Scotsmen, more than other men perhaps, have the three great essentials of commercial success—imagination to conceive schemes, common sense to correct them, and energy to push them through. Common sense, indeed, so far from being wanting, is in most cases too much in evidence, perhaps, crippling the soaring mind and robbing the idea of its early radiance; in quieter language, she makes the average Scotsman to be over-cautious. His combinations are rarely Napoleonic until he becomes an American. In his native dales he seldom ventures on a daring policy. And yet his forecasting mind is always detecting "possibeelities." So he contents himself by creeping cautiously from point to point, ignoring big, reckless schemes and using the safe and small, till he arrives at a florid opulence. He has expressed his love of festina lente in business in a score of proverbs—"Bit-by-bit's the better horse, though big-by-big's the baulder;" "Ca' canny, or ye'll cowp;" "Many a little makes a mickle;" and "Creep before ye gang." This mingling of caution and imagination is the cause of his stable prosperity. And its characteristic is a sure progressiveness. That sure progressiveness was the characteristic of Wilson's prosperity in Barbie. In him, too, imagination and caution were equally developed. He was always foreseeing "chances" and using them, gripping the good and rejecting the dangerous (had he not gripped the chance of auld Rab Jamieson's barn? There was caution in that, for it was worth the money whatever happened; and there was imagination in the whole scheme, for he had a vision of Barbie as a populous centre and streets of houses in his holm). And every "chance" he seized led to a better one, till almost every "chance" in Barbie was engrossed by him alone. This is how he went to work. Note the "bit-by-bitness" of his great career.

When Mrs. Wilson was behind the counter, Wilson was out "distributing." He was not always out, of course—his volume of trade at first was not big enough for that; but in the mornings, and the long summer dusks, he made his way to the many outlying places of which Barbie was the centre. There, in one and the same visit, he distributed goods and collected orders for the future. Though his bill had spoken of "carts," as if he had several, that was only a bit of splurge on his part; his one conveyance at the first was a stout spring cart, with a good brown cob between the shafts. But with this he did such a trade as had never been known in Barbie. The Provost said it was "shtupendous."

When Wilson was jogging homeward in the balmy evenings of his first summer at Barbie, no eye had he for the large evening star, tremulous above the woods, or for the dreaming sprays against the yellow west. It wasn't his business; he had other things to mind. Yet Wilson was a dreamer too. His close, musing eye, peering at the dusky-brown nodge of his pony's hip through the gloom, saw not that, but visions of chances, opportunities, occasions. When the lights of Barbie twinkled before him in the dusk, he used to start from a pleasant dream of some commercial enterprise suggested by the country round. "Yon holm would make a fine bleaching green—pure water, fine air, labour cheap, and everything handy. Or the Lintie's Linn among the woods—water power running to waste yonder—surely something could be made of that." He would follow his idea through all its mazes and developments, oblivious of the passing miles. His delight in his visions was exactly the same as the author's delight in the figments of his brain. They were the same good company along the twilight roads. The author, happy with his thronging thoughts (when they are kind enough to throng), is no happier than Wilson was on nights like these.

He had not been a week on his rounds when he saw a "chance" waiting for development. When out "delivering" he used to visit the upland farms to buy butter and eggs for the Emporium. He got them cheaper so. But more eggs and butter could be had than were required in the neighbourhood of Barbie. Here was a chance for Wilson! He became a collector for merchants at a distance. Barbie, before it got the railway, had only a silly little market once a fortnight, which was a very poor outlet for stuff. Wilson provided a better one. Another thing played into his hands, too, in that connection. It is a cheese-making countryside about Barbie, and the less butter produced at a cheese-making place, the better for the cheese. Still, a good many pounds are often churned on the sly. What need the cheese merchant ken? it keepit the gudewife in bawbees frae week to week; and if she took a little cream frae the cheese now and than they werena a pin the waur o't, for she aye did it wi' decency and caution! Still, it is as well to dispose of this kind of butter quietly, to avoid gabble among ill-speakers. Wilson, slithering up the back road with his spring cart in the gloaming, was the man to dispose of it quietly. And he got it dirt cheap, of course, seeing it was a kind of contraband. All that he made in this way was not much to be sure—threepence a dozen on the eggs, perhaps, and fourpence on the pound of butter—still, you know, every little makes a mickle, and hained gear helps weel.[4] And more important than the immediate profit was the ultimate result. For Wilson in this way established with merchants, in far-off Fechars and Poltandie, a connection for the sale of country produce which meant a great deal to him in future, when he launched out as cheese-buyer in opposition to Gourlay.

It "occurred" to him also (things were always occurring to Wilson) that the "Scotch cuddy" business had as fine a chance in "Barbie and surrounding neighbourhood" as ever it had in North and Middle England. The "Scotch cuddy" is so called because he is a beast of burden, and not from the nature of his wits. He is a travelling packman, who infests communities of working-men, and disposes of his goods on the credit system, receiving payment in instalments. You go into a working-man's house (when he is away from home for preference), and laying a swatch of cloth across his wife's knee, "What do you think of that, mistress?" you inquire, watching the effect keenly. Instantly all her covetous heart is in her eye, and, thinks she to herself, "Oh, but John would look well in that at the kirk on Sunday!" She has no ready money, and would never have the cheek to go into a draper's and order the suit; but when she sees it lying there across her knee, she just cannot resist it. (And fine you knew that when you clinked it down before her!) Now that the goods are in the house, she cannot bear to let them out the door again. But she hints a scarcity of cash. "Tut, woman!" quoth you, bounteous and kind, "there's no obstacle in that! You can pay me in instalments!" How much would the instalments be, she inquires. "Oh, a mere trifle—half a crown a week, say." She hesitates and hankers. "John's Sunday coat's getting quite shabby, so it is, and Tam Macalister has a new suit, she was noticing—the Macalisters are always flaunting in their braws! And, there's that Paisley shawl for herself, too; eh, but they would be the canty pair, cocking down the road on Sunday in that rig! they would take the licht frae Meg Macalister's een—thae Macalisters are always so en-vy-fu'!" Love, vanity, covetousness, present opportunity, are all at work upon the poor body. She succumbs. But the half-crown weekly payments have a habit of lengthening themselves out till the packman has made fifty per cent. by the business. And why not? a man must have some interest on his money! Then there's the risk of bad debts, too—that falls to be considered. But there was little risk of bad debts when Wilson took to cloth-distributing. For success in that game depends on pertinacity in pursuit of your victim, and Wilson was the man for that.

He was jogging home from Brigabee, where he had been distributing groceries at a score of wee houses, when there flashed on his mind a whole scheme for cloth-distribution on a large scale; for mining villages were clustering in about Barbie by this time, and he saw his way to a big thing.

He was thinking of Sandy Toddle, who had been a Scotch cuddy in the Midlands, and had retired to Barbie on a snug bit fortune—he was thinking of Sandy when the plan rose generous on his mind. He would soon have more horses than one on the road; why shouldn't they carry swatches of cloth as well as groceries? If he had responsible men under him, it would be their own interest, for a small commission on the profits, to see that payments were levied correctly every week. And those colliers were reckless with their cash, far readier to commit themselves to buying than the cannier country bodies round. Lord! there was money in the scheme. No sooner thought of than put in practice. Wilson gave up the cloth-peddling after five or six years—he had other fish to fry by that time—but while he was at it he made money hand over fist at the job.

But what boots it to tell of all his schemes? He had the lucky eye, and everything he looked on prospered.

Before he had been a week in Barbie he met Gourlay, just at the Bend o' the Brae, in full presence of the bodies. Remembering their first encounter, the grocer tried to outstare him; but Gourlay hardened his glower, and the grocer blinked. When the two passed, "I declare!" said the bodies, "did ye see yon?—they're not on speaking terms!" And they hotched with glee to think that Gourlay had another enemy.

Judge of their delight when they saw one day about a month later, just as Gourlay was passing up the street, Wilson come down it with a load of coals for a customer! For he was often out Auchterwheeze road in the early morning, and what was the use of an empty journey back again, especially as he had plenty of time in the middle of the day to attend to other folk's affairs? So here he was, started as a carrier, in full opposition to Gourlay.

"Did you see Gourlay's face?" chuckled the bodies when the cart went by. "Yon was a bash in the eye to him. Ha, ha! he's not to have it all his own way now!"

Wilson had slid into the carrying in the natural development of business. It was another of the possibilities which he saw and turned to his advantage. The two other chief grocers in the place, Cunningham the dirty and Calderwood the drunken, having no carts or horses of their own, were dependent on Gourlay for conveyance of their goods from Skeighan. But Wilson brought his own. Naturally, he was asked by his customers to bring a parcel now and then, and naturally, being the man he was, he made them pay for the privilege. With that for a start the rest was soon accomplished. Gourlay had to pay now for his years of insolence and tyranny; all who had irked beneath his domineering ways got their carrying done by Wilson. Ere long that prosperous gentleman had three carts on the road, and two men under him to help in his various affairs.

Carting was only one of several new developments in the business of J. W. When the navvies came in about the town and accommodation was ill to find, Wilson rigged up an old shed in the corner of his holm as a hostelry for ten of them—and they had to pay through the nose for their night's lodging. Their food they obtained from the Emporium, and thus the Wilsons bled them both ways. Then there was the scheme for supplying milk—another of the "possibeelities." Hitherto in winter, Barbie was dependent for its milk supply on heavy farm-carts that came lumbering down the street, about half-past seven in the morning, jangling bells to waken sleepy customers, and carrying lanterns that carved circles of fairy yellow out the raw air. But Mrs. Wilson got four cows, back-calvers who would be milking strong in December, and supplied milk to all the folk about the Cross.

She had a lass to help her in the house now, and the red-headed boy was always to be seen, jinking round corners like a weasel, running messages hot-foot, errand boy to the "bisness" in general. Yet, though everybody was busy and skelping at it, such a stress of work was accompanied with much disarray. Wilson's yard was the strangest contrast to Gourlay's. Gourlay's was a pleasure to the eye, everything of the best and everything in order, since the master's pride would not allow it to be other. But though Wilson's Emporium was clean, his back yard was littered with dirty straw, broken boxes, old barrels, stable refuse, and the sky-pointing shafts of carts, uptilted in between. When boxes and barrels were flung out of the Emporium they were generally allowed to lie on the dunghill until they were converted into firewood. "Mistress, you're a trifle mixed," said the Provost in grave reproof, when he went round to the back to see Wilson on a matter of business. But "Tut," cried Mrs. Wilson, as she threw down a plank, to make a path for him across a dub—"Tut," she laughed, "the clartier the cosier!" And it was as true as she said it. The thing went forward splendidly in spite of its confusion.

Though trade was brisker in Barbie than it had ever been before, Wilson had already done injury to Gourlay's business as general conveyor. But, hitherto, he had not infringed on the gurly one's other monopolies. His chance came at last.

He appeared on a market-day in front of the Red Lion, a piece of pinky brown paper in his hand. That was the first telegram ever seen in Barbie, and it had been brought by special messenger from Skeighan. It was short and to the point. It ran: "Will buy 300 stone cheese 8 shillings stone[5] delivery at once," and was signed by a merchant in Poltandie.

Gourlay was talking to old Tarmillan of Irrendavie, when Wilson pushed in and addressed Tarmillan, without a glance at the grain-merchant.

"Have you a kane o' cheese to sell, Irrendavie?" was his blithe salutation.

"I have," said Irrendavie, and he eyed him suspiciously. For what was Wilson speiring for? He wasna a cheese-merchant.

"How much the stane are ye seeking for't?" said Wilson.

"I have just been asking Mr. Gourlay here for seven-and-six," said Irrendavie, "but he winna rise a penny on the seven!"

"I'll gi'e ye seven-and-six," said Wilson, and slapped his long thin flexible bank-book far too ostentatiously against the knuckles of his left hand.

"But—but," stammered Irrendavie, suspicious still, but melting at the offer, "you have no means of storing cheese."

"Oh," said Wilson, getting in a fine one at Gourlay, "there's no drawback in that! The ways o' business have changed greatly since steam came close to our doors. It's nothing but vanity nowadays when a country merchant wastes money on a ramshackle of buildings for storing—there's no need for that if he only had brains to develop quick deliveries. Some folk, no doubt, like to build monuments to their own pride, but I'm not one of that kind; there's not enough sense in that to satisfy a man like me. My offer doesna hold, you understand, unless you deliver the cheese at Skeighan Station. Do you accept the condition?"

"Oh yes," said Irrendavie, "I'm willing to agree to that."

"C'way into the Red Lion then," said Wilson, "and we'll wet the bargain with a drink to make it hold the tighter!"

Then a strange thing happened. Gourlay had a curious stick of foreign wood (one of the trifles he fed his pride on) the crook of which curved back to the stem and inhered, leaving space only for the fingers. The wood was of wonderful toughness, and Gourlay had been known to bet that no man could break the handle of his stick by a single grip over the crook and under it. Yet now, as he saw his bargain whisked away from him and listened to Wilson's jibe, the thing snapped in his grip like a rotten twig. He stared down at the broken pieces for a while, as if wondering how they came there, then dashed them on the ground while Wilson stood smiling by. And then he strode—with a look on his face that made the folk fall away.

"He's hellish angry," they grinned to each other when their foe was gone, and laughed when they heard the cause of it. "Ha, ha, Wilson's the boy to diddle him!" And yet they looked queer when told that the famous stick had snapped in his grasp like a worm-eaten larch-twig. "Lord!" cried the baker in admiring awe, "did he break it with the ae chirt! It's been tried by scores of fellows for the last twenty years, and never a man of them was up till't! Lads, there's something splendid about Gourlay's wrath. What a man he is when the paw-sion grups him!"

"Thplendid, d'ye ca't?" said the Deacon. "He may thwing in a towe for his thplendid wrath yet."

From that day Wilson and Gourlay were a pair of gladiators for whom the people of Barbie made a ring. They pitted the protagonists against each other and hounded them on to rivalry by their comments and remarks, taking the side of the newcomer, less from partiality to him than from hatred of their ancient enemy. It was strange that a thing so impalpable as gossip should influence so strong a man as John Gourlay to his ruin. But it did. The bodies of Barbie became not only the chorus to Gourlay's tragedy, buzzing it abroad and discussing his downfall; they became also, merely by their maddening tattle, a villain of the piece and an active cause of the catastrophe. Their gossip seemed to materialize into a single entity, a something propelling, that spurred Gourlay on to the schemes that ruined him. He was not to be done, he said; he would show the dogs what he thought of them. And so he plunged headlong, while the wary Wilson watched him, smiling at the sight.

There was a pretty hell-broth brewing in the little town.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Hained gear, saved money.

[5] That is for the stone of fourteen pounds. At that time Scotch cheese was selling, roughly, at from fifty to sixty shillings the hundred-weight.



CHAPTER XII.

"Ay, man, Templandmuir, it's you!" said Gourlay, coming forward with great heartiness. "Ay, man, and how are ye? C'way into the parlour!"

"Good-evening, Mr. Gourlay," said the Templar. His manner was curiously subdued.

Since his marriage there was a great change in the rubicund squireen. Hitherto he had lived in sluttish comfort on his own land, content with the little it brought in, and proud to be the friend of Gourlay, whom everybody feared. If it ever dawned on his befuddled mind that Gourlay turned the friendship to his own account, his vanity was flattered by the prestige he acquired because of it. Like many another robustious big toper, the Templar was a chicken at heart, and "to be in with Gourlay" lent him a consequence that covered his deficiency. "Yes, I'm sleepy," he would yawn in Skeighan Mart; "I had a sederunt yestreen wi' John Gourlay," and he would slap his boot with his riding-switch and feel like a hero. "I know how it is, I know how it is!" Provost Connal of Barbie used to cry; "Gourlay both courts and cowes him—first he courts and then he cowes—and the Templar hasn't the courage to break it off!" The Provost hit the mark.

But when the Templar married the miller's daughter of the Mill o' Blink (a sad come-down, said foolish neighbours, for a Halliday of Templandmuir) there was a sudden change about the laird. In our good Scots proverb, "A miller's daughter has a shrill voice," and the new leddy of Templandmuir ("a leddy she is!" said the frightened housekeeper) justified the proverb. Her voice went with the skirl of an east wind through the rat-riddled mansion of the Hallidays. She was nine-and-twenty, and a birkie woman of nine-and-twenty can make a good husband out of very unpromising material. The Templar wore a scared look in those days and went home betimes. His cronies knew the fun was over when they heard what happened to the great punchbowl—she made it a swine-trough. It was the heirloom of a hundred years, and as much as a man could carry with his arms out, a massive curio in stone; but to her husband's plaint about its degradation, "Oh," she cried, "it'll never know the difference! It's been used to swine!"

But she was not content with the cessation of the old; she was determined on bringing in the new. For a twelvemonth now she had urged her husband to be rid of Gourlay. The country was opening up, she said, and the quarry ought to be their own. A dozen times he had promised her to warn Gourlay that he must yield the quarry when his tack ran out at the end of the year, and a dozen times he had shrunk from the encounter.

"I'll write," he said feebly.

"Write!" said she, lowered in her pride to think her husband was a coward. "Write, indeed! Man, have ye no spunk? Think what he has made out o' ye! Think o' the money that has gone to him that should have come to you! You should be glad o' the chance to tell him o't. My certy, if I was you I wouldn't miss it for the world—just to let him know of his cheatry! Oh, it's very right that I"—she sounded the I big and brave—"it's very right that I should live in this tumbledown hole while he builds a palace from your plunder! It's right that I should put up with this"—she flung hands of contempt at her dwelling—"it's right that I should put up with this, while yon trollop has a splendid mansion on the top o' the brae! And every bawbee of his fortune has come out of you—the fool makes nothing from his other business—he would have been a pauper if he hadn't met a softie like you that he could do what he liked with. Write, indeed! I have no patience with a wheen sumphs of men! Them do the work o' the world! They may wear the breeks, but the women wear the brains, I trow. I'll have it out with the black brute myself," screamed the hardy dame, "if you're feared of his glower. If you havena the pluck for it, I have. Write, indeed! In you go to the meeting that oald ass of a Provost has convened, and don't show your face in Templandmuir till you have had it out with Gourlay!"

No wonder the Templar looked subdued.

When Gourlay came forward with his usual calculated heartiness, the laird remembered his wife and felt very uncomfortable. It was ill to round on a man who always imposed on him a hearty and hardy good-fellowship. Gourlay, greeting him so warmly, gave him no excuse for an outburst. In his dilemma he turned to the children, to postpone the evil hour.

"Ay, man, John!" he said heavily, "you're there!" Heavy Scotsmen are fond of telling folk that they are where they are. "You're there!" said Templandmuir.

"Ay," said John, the simpleton, "I'm here."

In the grime of the boy's face there were large white circles round the eyes, showing where his fists had rubbed off the tears through the day.

"How are you doing at the school?" said the Templar.

"Oh, he's an ass!" said Gourlay. "He takes after his mother in that! The lassie's more smart—she favours our side o' the house! Eh, Jenny?" he inquired, and tugged her pigtail, smiling down at her in grim fondness.

"Yes," nodded Janet, encouraged by the petting, "John's always at the bottom of the class. Jimmy Wilson's always at the top, and the dominie set him to teach John his 'counts the day—after he had thrashed him!"

She cried out at a sudden tug on her pigtail, and looked up, with tears in her eyes, to meet her father's scowl.

"You eediot!" said Gourlay, gazing at his son with a savage contempt, "have you no pride to let Wilson's son be your master?"

John slunk from the room.

"Bide where you are, Templandmuir," said Gourlay after a little. "I'll be back directly."

He went through to the kitchen and took a crystal jug from the dresser. He "made a point" of bringing the water for his whisky. "I like to pump it up cold," he used to say, "cold and cold, ye know, till there's a mist on the outside of the glass like the bloom on a plum, and then, by Goad, ye have the fine drinking! Oh no—ye needn't tell me, I wouldn't lip drink if the water wasna ice-cold." He never varied from the tipple he approved. In his long sederunts with Templandmuir he would slip out to the pump, before every brew, to get water of sufficient coldness.

To-night he would birl the bottle with Templandmuir as usual, till the fuddled laird should think himself a fine big fellow as being the intimate of John Gourlay—and then, sober as a judge himself, he would drive him home in the small hours. And when next they met, the pot-valiant squireen would chuckle proudly, "Faith, yon was a night." By a crude cunning of the kind Gourlay had maintained his ascendancy for years, and to-night he would maintain it still. He went out to the pump to fetch water with his own hands for their first libation.

But when he came back and set out the big decanter Templandmuir started to his feet.

"Noat to-night, Mr. Gourlay," he stammered—and his unusual flutter of refusal might have warned Gourlay—"noat to-night, if you please; noat to-night, if you please. As a matter of fact—eh—what I really came into the town for, doan't you see, was—eh—to attend the meeting the Provost has convened about the railway. You'll come down to the meeting, will ye noat?"

He wanted to get Gourlay away from the House with the Green Shutters. It would be easier to quarrel with him out of doors.

But Gourlay gaped at him across the table, his eyes big with surprise and disapproval.

"Huh!" he growled, "I wonder at a man like you giving your head to that! It's a wheen damned nonsense."

"Oh, I'm no so sure of that," drawled the Templar. "I think the railway means to come."

The whole country was agog about the new railway. The question agitating solemn minds was whether it should join the main line at Fechars, thirty miles ahead, or pass to the right, through Fleckie and Barbie, to a junction up at Skeighan Drone. Many were the reasons spluttered in vehement debate for one route or the other. "On the one side, ye see, Skeighan was a big place a'readys, and look what a centre it would be if it had three lines of rail running out and in! Eh, my, what a centre! Then there was Fleckie and Barbie—they would be the big towns! Up the valley, too, was the shortest road; it would be a daft-like thing to build thirty mile of rail, when fifteen was enough to establish the connection! And was it likely—I put it to ainy man of sense—was it likely the Coal Company wouldn't do everything in their power to get the railway up the valley, seeing that if it didn't come that airt they would need to build a line of their own?"—"Ah, but then, ye see, Fechars was a big place too, and there was lots of mineral up there as well! And though it was a longer road to Fechars and part of it lay across the moors, there were several wee towns that airt just waiting for a chance of growth! I can tell ye, sirs, this was going to be a close question!"

Such was the talk in pot-house and parlour, at kirk and mart and tryst and fair, and wherever potentates did gather and abound. The partisans on either side began to canvass the country in support of their contentions. They might have kept their breath to cool their porridge, for these matters, we know, are settled in the great Witenagemot. But petitions were prepared and meetings were convened. In those days Provost Connal of Barbie was in constant communion with the "Pow-ers." "Yass," he nodded gravely—only "nod" is a word too swift for the grave inclining of that mighty pow—"yass, ye know, the great thing in matters like this is to get at the Pow-ers, doan't you see? Oh yass, yass; we must get at the Pow-ers!" and he looked as if none but he were equal to the job. He even went to London (to interrogate the "Pow-ers"), and simple bodies, gathered at the Cross for their Saturday at e'en, told each other with bated breath that the Provost was away to the "seat of Goaver'ment to see about the railway." When he came back and shook his head, hope drained from his fellows and left them hollow in an empty world. But when he smacked his lips on receiving an important letter, the heavens were brightened and the landscapes smiled.

The Provost walked about the town nowadays with the air of a man on whose shoulders the weight of empires did depend. But for all his airs it was not the Head o' the Town who was the ablest advocate of the route up the Water of Barbie. It was that public-spirited citizen, Mr. James Wilson of the Cross! Wilson championed the cause of Barbie with an ardour that did infinite credit to his civic heart. For one thing, it was a grand way of recommending himself to his new townsfolk, as he told his wife, "and so increasing the circle of our present trade, don't ye understand?"—for another, he was as keen as the keenest that the railway should come and enhance the value of his property. "We must agitate," he cried, when Sandy Toddle murmured a doubt whether anything they could do would be of much avail. "It's not settled yet what road the line's to follow, and who knows but a trifle may turn the scale in our behalf? Local opinion ought to be expressed! They're sending a monster petition from the Fechars side; we'll send the Company a bigger one from ours! Look at Skeighan and Fleckie and Barbie—three towns at our back, and the new Coal Company forbye! A public opinion of that size ought to have a great weight—if put forward properly! We must agitate, sirs, we must agitate; we maun scour the country for names in our support. Look what a number of things there are to recommend our route. It's the shortest, and there's no need for heavy cuttings such as are needed on the other side; the road's there a'ready—Barbie Water has cut it through the hills. It's the manifest design of Providence that there should be a line up Barbie Valley! What a position for't!—And, oh," thought Wilson, "what a site for building houses in my holm!—Let a meeting be convened at wunst!"

The meeting was convened, with Provost Connal in the chair and Wilson as general factotum.

"You'll come down to the meeting?" said Templandmuir to Gourlay.

Go to a meeting for which Wilson had sent out the bills! At another, Gourlay would have hurled his usual objurgation that he would see him condemned to eternal agonies ere he granted his request! But Templandmuir was different. Gourlay had always flattered this man (whom he inwardly despised) by a companionship which made proud the other. He had always yielded to Templandmuir in small things, for the sake of the quarry, which was a great thing. He yielded to him now.

"Verra well," he said shortly, and rose to get his hat.

When Gourlay put on his hat the shallow meanness of his brow was hid, and nothing was seen to impair his dark, strong gravity of face. He was a man you would have turned to look at as he marched in silence by the side of Templandmuir. Though taller than the laird, he looked shorter because of his enormous breadth. He had a chest like the heave of a hill. Templandmuir was afraid of him. And fretting at the necessity he felt to quarrel with a man of whom he was afraid, he had an unreasonable hatred of Gourlay, whose conduct made this quarrel necessary at the same time that his character made it to be feared; and he brooded on his growing rage that, with it for a stimulus, he might work his cowardly nature to the point of quarrelling. Conscious of the coming row, then, he felt awkward in the present, and was ignorant what to say. Gourlay was silent too. He felt it an insult to the House with the Green Shutters that the laird should refuse its proffered hospitality. He hated to be dragged to a meeting he despised. Never before was such irritation between them.

When they came to the hall where the meeting was convened, there were knots of bodies grouped about the floor. Wilson fluttered from group to group, an important man, with a roll of papers in his hand. Gourlay, quick for once in his dislike, took in every feature of the man he loathed.

Wilson was what the sentimental women of the neighbourhood called a "bonny man." His features were remarkably regular, and his complexion was remarkably fair. His brow was so delicate of hue that the blue veins running down his temples could be traced distinctly beneath the whiteness of the skin. Unluckily for him, he was so fair that in a strong light (as now beneath the gas) the suspicion of his unwashedness became a certainty—"as if he got a bit idle slaik now and than, and never a good rub," thought Gourlay in a clean disgust. Full lips showed themselves bright red in the middle between the two wings of a very blonde and very symmetrical moustache. The ugly feature of the face was the blue calculating eyes. They were tender round the lids, so that the white lashes stuck out in little peaks. And in conversation he had a habit of peering out of these eyes as if he were constantly spying for something to emerge that he might twist to his advantage. As he talked to a man close by and glimmered (not at the man beside him, but far away in the distance of his mind at some chance of gain suggested by the other's words) Gourlay heard him say musingly, "Imphm, imphm, imphm! there might be something in that!" nodding his head and stroking his moustache as he uttered each meditative "imphm."

It was Wilson's unconscious revelation that his mind was busy with a commercial hint which he had stolen from his neighbour's talk. "The damned sneck-drawer!" thought Gourlay, enlightened by his hate; "he's sucking Tam Finlay's brains, to steal some idea for himsell!" And still as Wilson listened he murmured swiftly, "Imphm! I see, Mr. Finlay; imphm! imphm! imphm!" nodding his head and pulling his moustache and glimmering at his new "opportunity."

Our insight is often deepest into those we hate, because annoyance fixes our thought on them to probe. We cannot keep our minds off them. "Why do they do it?" we snarl, and wondering why, we find out their character. Gourlay was not an observant man, but every man is in any man somewhere, and hate to-night driving his mind into Wilson, helped him to read him like an open book. He recognized with a vague uneasiness—not with fear, for Gourlay did not know what it meant, but with uneasy anger—the superior cunning of his rival. Gourlay, a strong block of a man cut off from the world by impotence of speech, could never have got out of Finlay what Wilson drew from him in two minutes' easy conversation.

Wilson ignored Gourlay, but he was very blithe with Templandmuir, and inveigled him off to a corner. They talked together very briskly, and Wilson laughed once with uplifted head, glancing across at Gourlay as he laughed. Curse them, were they speaking of him?

The hall was crammed at last, and the important bodies took their seats upon the front benches. Gourlay refused to be seated with the rest, but stood near the platform, with his back to the wall, by the side of Templandmuir.

After what the Provost described "as a few preliminary remarks"—they lasted half an hour—he called on Mr. Wilson to address the meeting. Wilson descanted on the benefits that would accrue to Barbie if it got the railway, and on the needcessity for a "long pull, and a strong pull, and a pull all together"—a phrase which he repeated many times in the course of his address. He sat down at last amid thunders of applause.

"There's no needcessity for me to make a loang speech," said the Provost.

"Hear, hear!" said Gourlay, and the meeting was unkind enough to laugh.

"Order, order!" cried Wilson perkily.

"As I was saying when I was grossly interrupted," fumed the Provost, "there's no needcessity for me to make a loang speech. I had thoat we were a-all agreed on the desirabeelity of the rileway coming in our direction. I had thoat, after the able—I must say the very able—speech of Mr. Wilson, that there wasn't a man in this room so shtupid as to utter a word of dishapproval. I had thoat we might prosheed at woance to elect a deputation. I had thoat we would get the name of everybody here for the great petition we mean to send the Pow-ers. I had thoat it was all, so to shpeak, a foregone conclusion. But it seems I was mistaken, ladies and gentlemen—or rather, I oat to say gentlemen, for I believe there are no ladies present. Yass, it seems I was mistaken. It may be there are some who would like to keep Barbie going on in the oald way which they found so much to their advantage. It may be there are some who regret a change that will put an end to their chances of tyraneezin'. It may be there are some who know themselves so shtupid that they fear the new condeetions of trade the railway's bound to bring."—Here Wilson rose and whispered in his ear, and the people watched them, wondering what hint J. W. was passing to the Provost. The Provost leaned with pompous gravity toward his monitor, hand at ear to catch the treasured words. He nodded and resumed.—"Now, gentlemen, as Mr. Wilson said, this is a case that needs a loang pull, and a stroang pull, and a pull all together. We must be unanimous. It will noat do to show ourselves divided among ourselves. Therefore I think we oat to have expressions of opinion from some of our leading townsmen. That will show how far we are unanimous. I had thoat there could be only one opinion, and that we might prosheed at once with the petition. But it seems I was wroang. It is best to inquire first exactly where we stand. So I call upon Mr. John Gourlay, who has been the foremost man in the town for mainy years—at least he used to be that—I call upon Mr. Gourlay as the first to express an opinion on the subjeck."

Wilson's hint to the Provost placed Gourlay in a fine dilemma. Stupid as he was, he was not so stupid as not to perceive the general advantage of the railway. If he approved it, however, he would seem to support Wilson and the Provost, whom he loathed. If he disapproved, his opposition would be set down to a selfish consideration for his own trade, and he would incur the anger of the meeting, which was all for the coming of the railway, Wilson had seized the chance to put him in a false position. He knew Gourlay could not put forty words together in public, and that in his dilemma he would blunder and give himself away.

Gourlay evaded the question.

"It would be better to convene a meeting," he bawled to the Provost, "to consider the state of some folk's back doors."—That was a nipper to Wilson!—"There's a stink at the Cross that's enough to kill a cuddy!"

"Evidently not," yelled Wilson, "since you're still alive!"

A roar went up against Gourlay. All he could do was to scowl before him, with hard-set mouth and gleaming eyes, while they bellowed him to scorn.

"I would like to hear what Templandmuir has to say on the subject," said Wilson, getting up. "But no doubt he'll follow his friend Mr. Gourlay."

"No, I don't follow Mr. Gourlay," bawled Templandmuir with unnecessary loudness. The reason of his vehemence was twofold. He was nettled (as Wilson meant he should) by the suggestion that he was nothing but Gourlay's henchman. And being eager to oppose Gourlay, yet a coward, he yelled to supply in noise what he lacked in resolution.

"I don't follow Mr. Gourlay at all," he roared; "I follow nobody but myself! Every man in the district's in support of this petition. It would be absurd to suppose anything else. I'll be glad to sign't among the first, and do everything I can in its support."

"Verra well," said the Provost; "it seems we're agreed after all. We'll get some of our foremost men to sign the petition at this end of the hall, and then it'll be placed in the anteroom for the rest to sign as they go out."

"Take it across to Gourlay," whispered Wilson to the two men who were carrying the enormous tome. They took it over to the grain merchant, and one of them handed him an inkhorn. He dashed it to the ground.

The meeting hissed like a cellarful of snakes. But Gourlay turned and glowered at them, and somehow the hisses died away. His was the high courage that feeds on hate, and welcomes rather than shrinks from its expression. He was smiling as he faced them.

"Let me pass," he said, and shouldered his way to the door, the bystanders falling back to make room. Templandmuir followed him out.

"I'll walk to the head o' the brae," said the Templar.

He must have it out with Gourlay at once, or else go home to meet the anger of his wife. Having opposed Gourlay already, he felt that now was the time to break with him for good. Only a little was needed to complete the rupture. And he was the more impelled to declare himself to-night because he had just seen Gourlay discomfited, and was beginning to despise the man he had formerly admired. Why, the whole meeting had laughed at his expense! In quarrelling with Gourlay, moreover, he would have the whole locality behind him. He would range himself on the popular side. Every impulse of mind and body pushed him forward to the brink of speech; he would never get a better occasion to bring out his grievance.

They trudged together in a burning silence. Though nothing was said between them, each was in wrathful contact with the other's mind. Gourlay blamed everything that had happened on Templandmuir, who had dragged him to the meeting and deserted him. And Templandmuir was longing to begin about the quarry, but afraid to start.

That was why he began at last with false, unnecessary loudness. It was partly to encourage himself (as a bull bellows to increase his rage), and partly because his spite had been so long controlled. It burst the louder for its pent fury.

"Mr. Gourlay!" he bawled suddenly, when they came opposite the House with the Green Shutters, "I've had a crow to pick with you for more than a year."

It came on Gourlay with a flash that Templandmuir was slipping away from him. But he must answer him civilly for the sake of the quarry.

"Ay, man," he said quietly, "and what may that be?"

"I'll damned soon tell you what it is," said the Templar. "Yon was a monstrous overcharge for bringing my ironwork from Fleckie. I'll be damned if I put up with that!"

And yet it was only a trifle. He had put up with fifty worse impositions and never said a word. But when a man is bent on a quarrel any spark will do for an explosion.

"How do ye make that out?" said Gourlay, still very quietly, lest he should alienate the quarry laird.

"Damned fine do I make that out," yelled Templandmuir, and louder than ever was the yell. He was the brave man now, with his bellow to hearten him. "Damned fine do I make that out. You charged me for a whole day, though half o't was spent upon your own concerns. I'm tired o' you and your cheatry. You've made a braw penny out o' me in your time. But curse me if I endure it loanger. I give you notice this verra night that your tack o' the quarry must end at Martinmas."

He was off, glad to have it out and glad to escape the consequence, leaving Gourlay a cauldron of wrath in the darkness. It was not merely the material loss that maddened him. But for the first time in his life he had taken a rebuff without a word or a blow in return. In his desire to conciliate he had let Templandmuir get away unscathed. His blood rocked him where he stood.

He walked blindly to the kitchen door, never knowing how he reached it. It was locked—at this early hour!—and the simple inconvenience let loose the fury of his wrath. He struck the door with his clenched fist till the blood streamed on his knuckles.

It was Mrs. Gourlay who opened the door to him. She started back before his awful eyes.

"John!" she cried, "what's wrong wi' ye?"

The sight of the she-tatterdemalion there before him, whom he had endured so long and must endure for ever, was the crowning burden of his night. Damn her, why didn't she get out of the way? why did she stand there in her dirt and ask silly questions? He struck her on the bosom with his great fist, and sent her spinning on the dirty table.

She rose from among the broken dishes and came towards him, with slack lips and great startled eyes. "John," she panted, like a pitiful frightened child, "what have I been doing?... Man, what did you hit me for?"