Читать книгу The Leithen Stories - Buchan John - Страница 39

ON THE ROADS of the north of Scotland, any time after the last snow-wreaths have melted behind the dykes, you will meet a peculiar kind of tinker. They are not the copper-nosed scarecrows of the lowlands, sullen and cringing, attended by sad infants in ramshackle perambulators. Nor are they in any sense gipsies, for they have not the Romany speech or colouring. They travel the roads with an establishment, usually a covered cart and one or more lean horses, and you may find their encampments any day by any burnside. Of a rainy night you can see their queer little tents, shaped like a segment of sausage, with a fire hissing at the door, and the horses cropping the roadside grass; of a fine morning the women will be washing their duds on the loch shore and their young fighting like ferrets among the shingle. You will meet with them in the back streets of the little towns, and at the back doors of wayside inns, but mostly in sheltered hollows of the moor or green nooks among the birches, for they are artists in choosing camping-grounds. They are children of Esau who combine a dozen crafts – tinkering, fish-hawking, besom-making, and the like – with their natural trades of horse-coping and poaching. At once brazen and obsequious, they beg rather as an art than a necessity; they will whine to a keeper with pockets full of pheasants’ eggs, and seek permission to camp from a laird with a melting tale of hardships, while one of his salmon lies hidden in the bracken on their cart floor. The men are an upstanding race, keen-eyed, resourceful, with humour in their cunning; the women, till life bears too hardly on them, are handsome and soft-spoken; and the children are burned and weathered like imps of the desert. Their speech is neither lowland nor highland, but a sing-song Scots of their own, and if they show the Celt in their secret ways there is a hint of Norse blood in the tawny hair and blue eyes so common among them.

Ebenezer Bogle was born into this life, and for fifty-five years travelled the roads from the Reay country to the Mearns and from John o’Groats to the sea-lochs of Appin. Sickness overtook him one October when camped in the Black Isle, and, feeling the hand of death on him, he sent for two people. One was the nearest Free Kirk minister – for Ebenezer was theologically of the old school; the other was a banker from Muirtown. What he said to the minister I do not know; but what the banker said to him may be gathered from the fact that he informed his wife before he died that in the Muirtown bank there lay to his credit a sum of nearly three thousand pounds. Ebenezer had been a sober and careful man, and a genius at horse-coping. He had bought the little rough shelties of the North and the Isles, and sold them at lowland fairs, he had dabbled in black cattle, he had done big trade in sheep-skins when a snowstorm decimated the Sutherland flocks, and he had engaged, perhaps, in less reputable ventures, which might be forbidden by the law of the land, but were not contrary, so he believed, to the Bible. Year by year his bank balance had mounted, for he spent little, and now he had a fortune to bequeath. He made no will; all went to his wife, with the understanding that it would be kept intact for his son; and in this confidence Ebenezer closed his eyes.

The wife did not change her habit of life. The son Benjamin accompanied her as before in the long rounds between May and October, and in the winter abode in the fishing quarter of Muirtown, and intermittently attended school. Presently his mother took a second husband, a Catholic Macdonald from the West, for the road is a lonely occupation for a solitary woman. Her new man was a cheerful being – very little like the provident Ebenezer – much addicted to the bottle and a lover of all things but legitimate trade. But he respected the dead man’s wishes and made no attempt to touch the hoard in the Muirtown bank; he was kind, too, to the boy, and taught him many things that are not provided for in the educational system of Scotland. From him Benjie learned how to take a nesting grouse, how to snare a dozen things, from hares to roebuck, how to sniggle salmon in the clear pools, and how to poach a hind when the deer came down in hard weather to the meadows. He learned how to tell the hour by the sun, and to find his way by the stars, and what weather was foretold by the starlings packing at nightfall, or the crows sitting with their beaks to the wind, or a badger coming home after daylight. The boy knew how to make cunning whistles from ash and rowan with which to imitate a snipe’s bleat or the call of an otter, and he knew how at all times and in all weathers to fend for himself and find food and shelter. A tough little nomad he became under this tutelage, knowing no boys’ games, with scarcely an acquaintance of his age, but able to deal on equal terms with every fisherman, gillie, and tinker north of the Highland line.

It chanced that in the spring of this year Mrs Bogle had fallen ill for the first time in her life. It was influenza, and, being neglected, was followed by pneumonia, so that when May came she was in no condition to take the road. By ill luck her husband had been involved in a drunken row, when he had assaulted two of his companions with such violence and success that he was sent for six months to prison. In these circumstances there was nothing for it but that Benjie should set out alone with the cart, and it is a proof of the stoutheartedness of the family tradition that his mother never questioned the propriety of this arrangement. He departed with her blessing, and weekly despatched to her a much-blotted scrawl describing his doings. There was something of his father’s hard fibre in the child, for he was a keen bargainer and as wary as a fox against cajolery. He met friends of his family who let him camp beside them, and with their young he did battle, when they dared to threaten his dignity. Benjie fought in no orthodox way, but like a weasel, using every weapon of tooth and claw, but in his sobbing furies he was unconquerable, and was soon left in peace. Presently he found that he preferred to camp alone, so with his old cart and horse he made his way up and down the long glens of the West to the Larrig. There, he remembered, the fish trade had been profitable in past years, so he sat himself down by the roadside, to act as middleman between the fishing-cobles of Inverlarrig and the kitchens of the shooting lodges. It would be untrue to say that this was his only means of livelihood, and I fear that the contents of Benjie’s pot, as it bubbled of an evening in the Wood of Larrigmore, would not have borne inspection by any keeper who chanced to pass. The weekly scrawls went regularly to his now convalescent mother, and once a parcel arrived for him at the Inverlarrig post-office containing a gigantic new shirt, which he used as a blanket. For the rest, he lived as Robinson Crusoe lived, on the country-side around him, asking no news of the outer world.

On the morning of the 27th of August he might have been seen, a little after seven o’clock, driving his cart up the fine beech avenue which led to Glenraden Castle. It was part of his morning round, but hitherto he had left his cart at the lodge-gate, and carried his fish on foot to the house; wherefore he had some slight argument with the lodge-keeper before he was permitted to enter. He drove circumspectly to the back regions, left his fish at the kitchen door, and then proceeded to the cottage of the stalker, one Macpherson, which stood by itself in a clump of firs. There he waited for some time till Mrs Macpherson came to feed her hens. A string of haddocks changed hands, and Benjie was bidden indoors, where he was given a cup of tea, while old Macpherson smoked his early pipe and asked questions. Half an hour later Benjie left, with every sign of amity, and drove very slowly down the woodland road towards the haugh where the Raden, sweeping from the narrows of the glen, spreads into broad pools and shining shallows. There he left the cart and squatted inconspicuously in the heather in a place which commanded a prospect of the home woods. From his observations he was aware that one of the young ladies regularly took her morning walk in this quarter.

Meantime in the pleasant upstairs dining-room of the Castle breakfast had begun. Colonel Alastair Raden, having read prayers to a row of servants from a chair in the window – there was a family tradition that he once broke off in a petiton to call excitedly his Maker’s attention to a capercailzie on the lawn – and having finished his porridge, which he ate standing, with bulletins interjected about the weather, was doing good work on bacon and eggs. Breakfast, he used to declare, should consist of no kickshaws like kidneys and omelettes; only bacon and eggs, and plenty of ’em. The master of the house was a lean old gentleman dressed in an ancient loud-patterned tweed jacket and a very faded kilt. Still erect as a post, he had a barrack-square voice, a high-boned, aquiline face, and a kindly but irritable blue eye. His daughters were devoting what time was left to them from attending to the breakfasts of three terriers to an animated discussion of a letter which lay before them. The morning meal at Glenraden was rarely interrupted by correspondence, for the post did not arrive till the evening, but this missive had been delivered by hand.

‘He can’t come,’ the younger cried. ‘He says he’s seedy again. It may really be smallpox this time.’

‘Who can’t come, and who has smallpox?’ her father demanded.

‘Sir Archibald Roylance. I told you I met him and asked him to lunch here today. We really ought to get to know our nearest neighbour, and he seems a very pleasant young man.’

‘I think he is hiding a dark secret,’ said the elder Miss Raden. ‘Nobody who calls there ever finds him in – except Lady Claybody, and then he told her he had smallpox. Old Mr Bandicott said he went up the long hill to Crask yesterday, and found nobody at home, though he was perfectly certain he saw one figure slinking into the wood and another moving away from a window. I wonder if Sir Archibald is really all right. We don’t know anything about him, do we?’

‘Of course he’s all right – bound to be – dashed gallant, sporting fellow. Sorry he’s not coming to luncheon – I want to meet him. He’s probably afraid of Nettie, and I don’t blame him, for she’s a brazen hussy, and he does well to be shy of old Bandicott. I’m scared to death by the old fellow myself.’

‘You know you’ve promised to let him dig in the Piper’s Ring, papa.’

‘I know I have, and I would have promised to let him dig up my lawn to keep him quiet. Never met a man with such a flow of incomprehensible talk. He had the audacity to tell me that I was no more Celtic than he was, but sprung from some blackguard Norse raiders a thousand years back. Judging by the sketch he gave me of their habits, I’d sooner the Radens were descended from Polish Jews.’

‘I thought him a darling,’ said his elder daughter, ‘and with such a beautiful face.’

‘He may be a darling for all I know, but his head is stuffed with maggots. If you admired him so much, why didn’t you take him off my hands? I liked the look of the young fellow and wanted to have a word with him. More by token’ – the Colonel was hunting about for the marmalade – ‘what were you two plotting with him in the corner after dinner?’

‘We were talking about John Macnab.’

The Colonel’s face became wrathful.

‘Then I call it dashed unfilial conduct of you not to have brought me in. There was I, deafened with the old man’s chatter – all about a fellow called Harald Blacktooth or Bottle-nose or some such name, that he swears is buried in my grounds and means to dig up – when I might have been having a really fruitful conversation. What was young Bandicott’s notion of John Macnab?’

‘Mr Junius thinks he is a lunatic,’ said the elder Miss Raden. She was in every way her sister’s opposite, dark of hair and eye where Janet was fair, tall where Janet was little, slow and quiet of voice where Janet was quick and gusty.

‘I entirely differ from him. I think John Macnab is perfectly sane, and probably a good fellow, though a dashed insolent one. What’s Bandicott doing about his river?’

‘Patrolling it day and night between the 1st and 3rd of September. He says he’s taking no chances, though he’d bet Wall Street to a nickel that the poor poop hasn’t the frozenest outside.’

‘Nettie, he said nothing of the kind!’ Miss Agatha was indignant. ‘He talks beautiful English, with no trace of an accent – all Bostonians do, he told me.’

‘Anyhow, he asked what steps we were taking and advised us to get busy. We come before him, you know … Heavens, papa, it begins tomorrow night! Oh, and I did so want to consult Sir Archibald. I’m sure he could help.’

Colonel Raden, having made a satisfactory breakfast, was lighting a pipe.

‘You need not worry, my dear. I’m an old campaigner and have planned out the thing thoroughly. I’ve been in frequent consultation with Macpherson, and yesterday we had Alan and James Fraser in, and they entirely agreed.’

He produced from his pocket a sheet of foolscap on which had been roughly drawn a map of the estate.

‘Now, listen to me. We must assume this fellow Macnab to be in possession of his senses, and to have more or less reconnoitred the ground – though I don’t know how the devil he can have managed it, for the gillies have kept their eyes open, and nobody’s been seen near the place. Well, here are the three beats. Unless young Bandicott is right and the man’s a lunatic, he won’t try the Home beat, for the simple reason that a shot there would be heard by twenty people and he could not move a beast twenty yards without being caught. There remains Carnmore and Carnbeg. Macpherson was clear that he would try Carnmore, as being farthest away from the house. But I, with my old campaigning experience’ – here Colonel Raden looked remarkably cunning – ‘pointed out at once that such reasoning was rudimentary. I said “He’ll bluff us, and just because he thinks that we think he’ll try Carnmore, he’ll try Carnbeg. Therefore, since we can only afford to watch one beat thoroughly, we’ll watch Carnbeg.” What do you think of that, my dears?’

‘I think you’re very clever, papa,’ said Agatha. ‘I’m sure you’re right.’

‘And you, Nettie?’

Janet was knitting her brows and looking thoughtful.

‘I’m … not … so … sure. You see we must assume that John Macnabis very ingenious. Heprobably made his fortune in the colonies by every kind of dodge. He’s sure to be very clever.’

‘Well but, my dear,’ said her father, ‘it’s just that cleverness that I propose to match.’

‘But do you think you have quite matched it? You have tried to imagine what John Macnab would be thinking, and he will have done just the same by you. Why shouldn’t he have guessed the conclusion you have reached and be deciding to go one better?’

‘How do you mean, Nettie?’ asked her puzzled parent. He was inclined to be annoyed, but experience had taught him that his younger daughter’s wits were not to be lightly disregarded.

Nettie took the estate map from his hand and found a stump of pencil in the pocket of her jumper.

‘Please look at this, papa. Here is A and B. B offers a better chance, so Macpherson says John Macnab will take B. You say, acutely, that John Macnab is not a fool, and will try to bluff us by taking A. I say that John Macnab will have anticipated your acumen.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said her father impatiently. ‘And then?’

‘And will take B after all.’

The Colonel stood rapt in unpleasant meditation for the space of five seconds.

‘God bless my soul!’ he cried. ‘I see what you mean. Confound it, of course he’ll go for Carnmore. Lord, this is a puzzle. I must see Macpherson at once. Are you sure you’re right, Nettie?’

‘I’m not in the least sure. We’ve only a choice of uncertainties, and must gamble. But, as far as I see, if we must plump for one we should plump for Carnmore.’

Colonel Raden departed from his study, after summoning Macpherson to that shrine of the higher thought, and Janet Raden, after one or two brief domestic interviews, collected her two terriers and set out for her morning walk. The morning was as fresh and bright as April, the rain in the night had set every burn singing, and the thickets and lawns were still damp where the sun had not penetrated. Her morning walk was wont to be a scamper, a thing of hops, skips, and jumps, rather than a sedate progress; but on this occasion, though two dogs and the whole earth invited to hilarity, she walked slowly and thoughtfully. The mossy broken tops of Carnbeg showed above a wood of young firs, and to the right rose the high blue peaks of the Carnmore ground. On which of these on the morrow would John Macnab begin his depredations? He had two days for his exploit; probably he would make his effort on the second day, and devote the first to confusing the minds of the defence. That meant that the problem would have to be thought out anew each day, for the alert intelligence of John Macnab – she now pictured him as a sort of Sherlock Holmes in knickerbockers – would not stand still. The prospect exhilarated, but it also alarmed her; the desire to win a new hunter was now a fixed resolution; but she wished she had a colleague. Agatha was no use, and her father, while admirable in tactics, was weak in strategy; she longed more than ever for the help of that frail vessel, Sir Archie.

Her road led her by a brawling torrent through the famous Glenraden beechwood to the spongy meadows of the haugh, beyond which could be seen the shining tides of the Raden sweeping to the high-backed bridge across which ran the road to Carnmore. The haugh was all bog-myrtle and heather and bracken, sprinkled with great boulders which the river during the ages had brought down from the hills. Half a mile up it stood the odd tumulus called the Piper’s Ring, crowned with an ancient gnarled fir, where reposed, according to the elder Bandicott, the dust of that dark progenitor, Harald Blacktooth. If Mr Bandicott proposed to excavate there he had his work cut out; the place was encumbered with giant stones since a thousand floods had washed its sides since it first received the dead Viking. Great birch woods from both sides of the valley descended to the stream, thereby making the excellence of the Home beat, for the woodland stag is a heavier beast than his brother of the high tops.

Close to the road, in a small hollow where one of the rivulets from the woods cut its way though the haugh, she came on an ancient cart resting on its shafts, an ancient horse grazing on a patch of turf among the peat, and a small boy diligently whittling his way through a pile of heather roots. The urchin sprang to his feet and saluted like a soldier.

‘Please, lady,’ he explained in a high falsetto whine, ‘I’ve gotten permission from Mr Macpherson to make heather besoms on this muir. He’s aye been awfu’ kind to me, lady.’

‘You’re the boy who sells fish? I’ve seen you on the road.’

‘Aye, lady, I’m Fish Benjie. I sell my fish in the mornin’s and evenin’s, and I’ve a’ the day for other jobs. I’ve aye wanted to come here, for it’s the grandest heather i’ the countryside; and Mr Macpherson, he kens I’ll do nae harm, and I’ve promised no to kindle a fire.’

The child with the beggar’s voice looked at her with such sage and solemn eyes that Janet, who had a hopeless weakness for small boys, sat down on a sun-warmed hillock and stared at him, while he turned resolutely to business.

‘If you’re hungry, Benjie,’ she said, ‘and they won’t let you make a fire, you can come up to the Castle and get tea from Mrs Fraser. Tell her I sent you.’

‘Thank you, lady, but if you please, I was gaun to my tea at Mrs Macpherson’s. She’s fell fond o’my haddies, and she tell’t me to tak a look in when I stoppit work. I’m ettlin’ to be here for a guid while.’

‘Will you come every day?’

‘Aye, every day about eight o’clock, and bide till maybe five in the afternoon when I go down to the cobles at Inverlarrig.’

‘Now, look here, Benjie. When you’re sitting quietly working here I want you to keep your eyes open, and if you see any strange man, tell Mr Macpherson. By strange man I mean somebody who doesn’t belong to the place. We’re rather troubled by poachers just now.’

Benjie raised a ruminant eye from his besom.

‘Aye, lady. I seen a queer man already this mornin’. He cam up the road and syne started off over the bog. He was sweatin’ sore, and there was twa men from Strathlarrig wi’ him carryin’ picks and shovels … Losh, there he is comin’ back.’

Following Benjie’s pointing finger Janet saw, approaching her from the direction of the Piper’s Ring, a solitary figure which laboured heavily among the peat-bogs. Presently it was revealed as an elderly man wearing a broad grey wide-awake and a suit of flannel knickerbockers. His enormous horn spectacles clearly did not help his eyesight, for he had almost fallen over the shafts of the fish-cart before he perceived Janet Raden. He removed his hat, bowed with an antique courtesy, and asked permission to recover his breath.

‘I was on my way to see your father,’ he said at length. ‘This morning I have prospected the barrow of Harald Blacktooth, and it is clear to me that I can make no progress unless I have Colonel Raden’s permission to use explosives. Only the very slightest use, I promise you. I have located, I think, the ceremonial entrance, but it is blocked with boulders which it would take a gang of navvies to raise with crowbars. A discreet application of dynamite would do the work in half an hour. I cannot think that Colonel Raden would object to my using it when I encounter such obstacles. I assure you it will not spoil the look of the barrow.’

‘I’m sure papa will be delighted. You’re certain the noise won’t frighten the deer? You know the Piper’s Ring is in the forest.’

‘Not in the least, my dear young lady. The reports will be very slight, scarcely louder than a rifle-shot. I ought to tell you that I am an old hand at explosives, for in my young days I mined in Colorado, and recently I have employed them in my Alaska researches …’

‘If we go home now,’ said Janet, rising, ‘we’ll just catch papa before he goes out. You’re very warm, Mr Bandicott, and I think you would be the better for a rest and a drink.’

‘I certainly should, my dear. I was so eager to begin that I bolted my breakfast, and started off before Junius was ready. He proposes to meet me here.’

Benjie, left alone, wrought diligently at his heather roots, whistling softly to himself, and every now and then raising his head to scan the haugh and the lower glen. Presently a tall young man appeared, who was identified as the younger American, and who was duly directed to follow his father to the Castle. The two returned in a little while, accompanied by Agatha Raden, and, while the elder Mr Bandicott hastened to the Piper’s Ring, the young people sauntered to the Raden bridge and appeared to be deep in converse. ‘Thae twa’s weel agreed,’ was Benjie’s comment. A little before one o’clock the party adjourned to the Castle, presumably for luncheon, and Benjie, whose noon-tide meal was always sparing, nibbled a crust of bread and a rind of cheese. In the afternoon Macpherson and one of the gillies strolled past, and the head-stalker proved wonderfully gracious, adjuring him, as Janet had done, to keep his eyes open and report the presence of any stranger. ‘There’ll be the three folk from Strathlarrig howkin’ awa there, but if ye see anybody else, away up to the house and tell the wife. They’ll no be here for any good.’ Benjie promised fervently. ‘I’ve grand een, Mr Macpherson, sir, and though they was to be crawlin’ like a serpent I’d be on them.’ The head-stalker observed that he was a ‘gleg one,’ and went his ways.

Despite his industry Benjie was remarkably observant that day, but he was not looking for poachers. He had suddenly developed an acute interest in the deer. His unaided eyes were as good as the ordinary man’s telescope, and he kept a keen watch on the fringes of the great birch woods. The excavation at the Piper’s Ring kept away any beasts from the east side of the haugh, but on the west bank of the stream he saw two lots of hinds grazing, with one or two young stags among them, and even on the east bank, close in to the edge of the river, he saw hinds with calves. He concluded that on the fringes of the Raden the feeding must be extra good, and, as a steady west wind was blowing, the deer there would not be alarmed by Mr Bandicott’s quest. Just after he had finished his bread and cheese he was rewarded with the spectacle of a hummel, a great fellow of fully twenty stone, who rolled in a peat hole and then stood blowing in the shallow water as unconcerned as if he had been on the top of Carnmore. Later in the afternoon he saw a good ten-pointer in the same place, and a little later an eight-pointer with a damaged horn. He concluded that that particular hag was a favourite mud-bath for stags, and that with the wind in the west it was no way interfered with by the activities at the Piper’s Ring.

About four o’clock Benjie backed the old horse into the shafts, and jogged up the beech-avenue to Mrs Macpherson’s, where he was stayed with tea and scones. There was a gathering outside the door of Macpherson himself and the two gillies, and a strange excitement seemed to have fallen on that stolid community. Benjie could not avoid – indeed, I am not sure that he tried to avoid – hearing scraps of their talk. ‘I’ve been a’ round Carnmore,’ said Alan, ‘and I seen some fine beasts. They’re mostly in a howe atween the two tops, and a man at the Grey Beallach could keep an eye on all the good ground.’ ‘Aye, but there’s the Carn Moss, and the burnheads – there will be beasts there too,’ said James Fraser. ‘There will have to be a man there, for him at the Grey Beallach would not ken what was happening.’ ‘And what about Corrie Gall?’ asked Macpherson fiercely. ‘Ye canna post men on Carnmore – they will have to keep moving; it is that awful broken ground.’ Well, there’s you and me and James,’ said Alan, ‘and there’s Himself.’ ‘And that’s the lot of us, and every man wanted,’ said Macpherson. ‘It’s what I was always saying – ye will need every man for Carnmore, and must let Carnbeg alone, or ye can watch Carnbeg and not go near Carnmore. We’re far ower few.’ ‘I wass thinking,’ said James Fraser, ‘that the youngest leddy might be watching Carnbeg.’ ‘Aye, James’ – this satirically from Macpherson – ‘and how would the young leddy be keeping a wild man from killing a stag and getting him away?’ ‘ ’Deed, I don’t ken,’ said the puzzled James, ‘without she took a gun with her and had a shot at him.’

Benjie drove quietly to Inverlarrig for his supply of fish, and did not return to his head-quarters in the Wood of Larrigmore till nearly seven o’clock. At eight, having cooked and eaten his supper, he made a simple toilet, which consisted in washing the fish-scales and the stains of peat from his hands, holding his head in the river, parting his damp hair with a broken comb, and putting over his shoulders a waterproof cape, which had dropped from some passing conveyance and had been found by him on the road. Thus accoutred, he crossed the river and by devious paths ascended to Crask.

He ensconced himself in the stable, where he was greeted sourly by the Bluidy Mackenzie, who was tied up in one of the stalls. There he occupied himself in whistling strathspeys and stuffing a foul clay pipe with the stump of a cigar which he had picked up in the yard. Benjie smoked not for pleasure, but from a sense of duty, and a few whiffs were all he could manage with comfort. The gloaming had fallen before he heard his name called, and Wattie Lithgow appeared. ‘Ye’re there, ye monkey? The gentlemen are askin’ for ye. Quick and follow me. They’re in an awfu’ ill key the nicht and maunna be keepit waitin’.’

There certainly seemed trouble in the smoking-room when Benjie was ushered in. Lamancha was standing on the hearth-rug with a letter crumpled in his hand, and Sir Archie, waving a missive, was excitedly confronting him. The other two sat in arm-chairs with an air of protest and dejection.

‘I forgot all about the infernal thing till I got Montgomery’s letter. The 4th of September! Hang it, my assault on old Claybody is timed to start on the 5th. How on earth can I get to Muirtown and back and deliver a speech, and be ready for the 5th? Besides, it betrays my presence in this part of the world. It simply can’t be done … and yet I don’t know how on earth to get out of it? Apparently the thing was arranged months ago.’

‘You’re for it all right, my son,’ cried Sir Archie, ‘and so am I. Here’s the beastly announcement. “A Great Conservative Meeting will be held in the Town Hall, Muirtown, on Thursday, September 4th, to be addressed by the Right Hon. the Earl of Lamancha, M.P., His Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Dominions. The chair will be taken at 3 p.m. by His Grace the Duke of Angus, K. G. Among the speakers will be Colonel Wavertree, M.P., the Hon. W.J. Murdoch, Ex-Premier of New Caledonia, and Captain Sir Archibald Roylance, D.S.O., prospective Conservative candidate for Wester Ross.” Oh, will he? Not by a long chalk! Catch me going to such a fiasco, with Charles hidin’ here and the show left to the tender mercies of two rotten bad speakers and a prosy chairman.’

‘Did you forget about it too?’ Leithen asked.

‘ ’Course I did,’ said Archie wildly. ‘How could I think of anything with you fellows turnin’ my house into a den of thieves? I forgot about it just as completely as Charles, only it doesn’t matter about me, and it matters the devil of a lot about him. I don’t stand an earthly chance of winnin’ the seat, if, first of all, I mustn’t canvass because of smallpox, and, second, my big meetin’, on which all my fellows counted, is wrecked by Charles playin’ the fool.’

Lamancha’s dark face broke into a smile.

‘Don’t worry, old chap. I won’t let you down. But it looks as if I must let down John Macnab, and just when I was gettin’ keen about him … Hang it, no! There must be a way. I’m not going to be beaten either by Claybody or this damned Tory rally. Ned, you slacker, what’s your advice?’

‘Have a try at the double event,’ Leithen drawled. ‘You’ll probably make a mess of both, but it’s a sporting proposition.’

Archie’s face brightened. ‘You don’t realise how sportin’ a proposition it is. The Claybodys will be there, and they’ll be all over you – brother nobleman, you know, and you goin’ to poach their stags next day! Hang it, why shouldn’t you turn the affair into camouflage? “Out of my stony griefs Bethel I’ll raise,” says the hymn … We’ll have to think the thing out very carefully. – Anyway, Charles, you’ve got to help me with my speech. I don’t mind so much lyin’ doggo here if I can put in a bit of good work on the 5th … Now, Benjie my lad, for your report.’

Benjie, not without a certain shyness, cleared his throat and began. He narrated how, following his instructions, he had secured Macpherson’s permission to cut heather for besoms on the Raden haugh. He had duly taken up his post there, had remained till four o’clock, and had seen such and such people and heard this and that talk. He recounted what he could remember of the speeches of Macpherson and the gillies.

‘They’ve got accustomed to the sight of you, I suppose,’ Palliser-Yeates said at length.

‘Aye, they’re accustomed right enough. Both the young lady and Macpherson was tellin’ me to keep a look-out for poachers.’ Benjie chuckled.

‘Then tomorrow you begin to move up to the high ground by the Carnmore peat-road. Still keep busy at your besoms. You understand what I want you for, Benjie? If I kill a stag I have to get it off Glenraden land, and your old fish-cart won’t be suspected.’

‘Aye, I see that fine. But I’ve been thinkin’ that there’s maybe a better way.’

‘Go ahead, and let’s have it.’

Benjie began his speech nervously, but he soon warmed to it, and borrowed a cigar-box and the fire-irons to explain his case. The interest of his hearers kindled, until all four men were hanging on his words. When he concluded and had answered sundry questions, Sir Archie drew a deep breath and laughed excitedly.

‘I suppose there’s nothing in that that isn’t quite cricket … I thought I knew something about bluff, but this – this absolutely vanquishes the band. Benjie, I’m goin’ to have you taught poker. You’ve the right kind of mind for it.’