Title:      Castle Gay (1930)
Author:     John Buchan
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Castle Gay (1930)
Author:     John Buchan






TO

SIR ALEXANDER GRANT, Bart.,
OF LOGIE AND RELUGAS

THIS COMEDY IS INSCRIBED WITH
GRATITUDE AND AFFECTION




The earlier doings of Dougal, Jaikie, and Mr Dickson McCunn will be
found in a novel entitled "Huntingtower."

J.B.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER

I.  TELLS OF A RUGBY THREE-QUARTER

II.  INTRODUCES A GREAT MAN IN ADVERSITY

III.  THE BACK HOUSE OF THE GARROCH

IV.  THE RECONNAISSANCE OF CASTLE GAY

V.  INTRODUCES A LADY

VI.  THE TROUBLES OF A PRIVATE SECRETARY

VII.  BEGINNING OF A GREAT MAN'S EXILE

VIII.  CASIMIR

IX.  THE FIRST DAY OF THE HEJIRA--THE INN AT WATERMEETING

X.  THE SECOND DAY OF THE HEJIRA--THE FORD CAR

XI.  THE TROUBLES OF A JOURNALIST

XII.  PORTAWAY--THE GREEN TREE

XIII.  PORTAWAY--RED DAVIE

XIV.  PORTAWAY--ALISON

XV.  DISAPPEARANCE OF MR CRAW

XVI.  ENEMY'S COUNTRY

XVII.  JAIKIE OPENS HIS COMMUNICATIONS

XVIII.  SOLWAY SANDS

XIX.  MR CRAW IS MASTER IN HIS OWN HOUSE

XX.  VALEDICTORY




CHAPTER I

TELLS OF A RUGBY THREE-QUARTER


Mr Dickson McCunn laid down the newspaper, took his spectacles from
his nose, and polished them with a blue-and-white spotted
handkerchief.

"It will be a great match," he observed to his wife.  "I wish I was
there to see.  These Kangaroos must be a fearsome lot."  Then he
smiled reflectively.  "Our laddies are not turning out so bad,
Mamma.  Here's Jaikie, and him not yet twenty, and he has his name
blazing in the papers as if he was a Cabinet Minister."

Mrs McCunn, a placid lady of a comfortable figure, knitted
steadily.  She did not share her husband's enthusiasms.

"I know fine," she said, "that Jaikie will be coming back with a
bandaged head and his arm in a sling.  Rugby in my opinion is not a
game for Christians.  It's fair savagery."

"Hoots, toots!  It's a grand ploy for young folk.  You must pay a
price for fame, you know.  Besides, Jaikie hasn't got hurt this
long time back.  He's learning caution as he grows older, or maybe
he's getting better at the job.  You mind when he was at the school
we used to have the doctor to him every second Saturday night. . . .
He was always a terrible bold laddie, and when he was getting
dangerous his eyes used to run with tears.  He's quit of that habit
now, but they tell me that when he's real excited he turns as white
as paper.  Well, well! we've all got our queer ways.  Here's a
biography of him and the other players.  What's this it says?"

Mr McCunn resumed his spectacles.

"Here it is.  'J. Galt, born in Glasgow.  Educated at the Western
Academy and St Mark's College, Cambridge . . . played last year
against Oxford in the victorious Cambridge fifteen, when he scored
three tries. . . .  This is his first International . . . equally
distinguished in defence and attack. . . .  Perhaps the most
unpredictable of wing three-quarters now playing. . . .'  Oh, and
here's another bit in 'Gossip about the Teams.'"  He removed his
spectacles and laughed heartily.  "That's good.  It calls him a
'scholar and a gentleman.'  That's what they always say about
University players.  Well, I'll warrant he's as good a gentleman as
any, though he comes out of a back street in the Gorbals.  I'm not
so sure about the scholar.  But he can always do anything he sets
his mind to, and he's a worse glutton for books than me.  No man
can tell what may happen to Jaikie yet. . . .  We can take credit
for these laddies of ours, for they're all in the way of doing well
for themselves, but there's just the two of them that I feel are
like our own bairns.  Just Jaikie and Dougal--and goodness knows
what will be the end of that red-headed Dougal.  Jaikie's a douce
body, but there's a determined daftness about Dougal.  I wish he
wasn't so taken up with his misguided politics."

"I hope they'll not miss their train," said the lady.  "Supper's at
eight, and they should be here by seven-thirty, unless Jaikie's in
the hospital."

"No fear," was the cheerful answer.  "More likely some of the
Kangaroos will be there.  We should get a telegram about the match
by six o'clock."

So after tea, while his wife departed on some domestic task, Mr
McCunn took his ease with a pipe in a wicker chair on the little
terrace which looked seaward.  He had found the hermitage for which
he had long sought, and was well content with it.  The six years
which had passed since he forsook the city of Glasgow and became a
countryman had done little to alter his appearance.  The hair had
indeed gone completely from the top of his head, and what was left
was greying, but there were few lines on his smooth, ruddy face,
and the pale eyes had still the innocence and ardour of youth.  His
figure had improved, for country exercise and a sparer diet had
checked the movement towards rotundity.  When not engaged in some
active enterprise, it was his habit to wear a tailed coat and
trousers of tweed, a garb which from his boyish recollection he
thought proper for a country laird, but which to the ordinary
observer suggested a bookmaker.  Gradually, a little self-
consciously, he had acquired what he considered to be the habits of
the class.  He walked in his garden with a spud; his capacious
pockets contained a pruning knife and twine; he could talk quite
learnedly of crops and stock, and, though he never shouldered a
gun, of the prospects of game; and a fat spaniel was rarely absent
from his heels.

The home he had chosen was on the spur of a Carrick moor, with the
sea to the west, and to south and east a distant prospect of the
blue Galloway hills.  After much thought he had rejected the
various country houses which were open to his purchase; he felt it
necessary to erect his own sanctuary, conformable to his modest but
peculiar tastes.  A farm of some five hundred acres had been
bought, most of it pasture-fields fenced by dry-stone dykes, but
with a considerable stretch of broom and heather, and one big
plantation of larch.  Much of this he let off, but he retained a
hundred acres where he and his grieve could make disastrous essays
in agriculture.  The old farm-house had been a whitewashed edifice
of eight rooms, with ample outbuildings, and this he had converted
into a commodious dwelling, with half a dozen spare bedrooms, and a
large chamber which was at once library, smoking-room, and
business-room.  I do not defend Mr McCunn's taste, for he had a
memory stored with bad precedents.  He hankered after little
pepper-box turrets, which he thought the badge of ancientry, and in
internal decoration he had an unhallowed longing for mahogany
panelling, like a ship's saloon.  Also he doted on his vast sweep
of gravel.  Yet he had on the whole made a pleasing thing of
Blaweary (it was the name which had first taken his fancy), for he
stuck to harled and whitewashed walls, and he had a passion for
green turf, so that, beyond the odious gravel, the lawns swept to
the meadows unbroken by formal flowerbeds.  These lawns were his
special hobby.  "There's not a yard of turf about the place," he
would say, "that's not as well kept as a putting-green."

The owner from his wicker chair looked over the said lawns to a
rough pasture where his cows were at graze, and then beyond a patch
of yellowing bracken to the tops of a fir plantation.  After that
the ground fell more steeply, so that the tree-tops were
silhouetted against the distant blue of the sea.  It was mid-
October, but the air was as balmy as June, and only the earlier
dusk told of the declining year.  Mr McCunn was under strict
domestic orders not to sit out of doors after sunset, but he had
dropped asleep and the twilight was falling when he was roused by a
maid with a telegram.

In his excitement he could not find his spectacles.  He tore open
the envelope and thrust the pink form into the maid's face.  "Read
it, lassie--read it," he cried, forgetting the decorum of the
master of a household.

"Coming seven-thirty," the girl read primly.  "Match won by single
point."  Mr McCunn upset his chair, and ran, whooping, in search of
his wife.



The historian must return upon his tracks in order to tell of the
great event thus baldly announced.  That year the Antipodes had
despatched to Britain such a constellation of Rugby stars that the
hearts of the home enthusiasts became as water and their joints
were loosened.  For years they had known and suffered from the
quality of those tall young men from the South, whom the sun
had toughened and tautened--their superb physique, their
resourcefulness, their uncanny combination.  Hitherto, while the
fame of one or two players had reached these shores, the teams had
been in the main a batch of dark horses, and there had been no
exact knowledge to set a bar to hope.  But now Australia had
gathered herself together for a mighty effort, and had sent to the
field a fifteen most of whose members were known only too well.
She had collected her sons wherever they were to be found.  Four
had already played for British Universities; three had won a
formidable repute in international matches in which their country
of ultimate origin had entitled them to play.  What club, county,
or nation could resist so well equipped an enemy?  And, as luck
decided, it fell to Scotland, which had been having a series of
disastrous seasons, to take the first shock.

That ancient land seemed for the moment to have forgotten her
prowess.  She could produce a strong, hard-working and effective
pack, but her great three-quarter line had gone, and she had lost
the scrum-half who the year before had been her chief support.
Most of her fifteen were new to an international game, and had
never played together.  The danger lay in the enemy halves and
three-quarters.  The Kangaroos had two halves possessed of
miraculous hands and a perfect knowledge of the game.  They might
be trusted to get the ball to their three-quarters, who were
reputed the most formidable combination that ever played on turf.
On the left wing was the mighty Charvill, an Oxford Blue and an
English International; on the right Martineau, who had won fame on
the cinder-track as well as on the football-field.  The centres
were two cunning brothers, Clauson by name, who played in a unison
like Siamese twins.  Against such a four Scotland could scrape up
only a quartet of possibles, men of promise but not yet of
performance.  The hosts of Tuscany seemed strong out of all
proportion to the puny defenders of Rome.  And as the Scottish
right-wing three-quarter, to frustrate the terrible Charvill, stood
the tiny figure of J. Galt, Cambridge University, five foot six
inches in height and slim as a wagtail.

To the crowd of sixty thousand and more that waited for the teams
to enter the field there was vouchsafed one slender comfort.  The
weather, which at Blaweary was clear and sunny, was abominable in
the Scottish midlands.  It had rained all the preceding night, and
it was hoped that the ground might be soft, inclining to mud--mud
dear to the heart of our islanders but hateful to men accustomed to
the firm soil of the South.

The game began in a light drizzle, and for Scotland it began
disastrously.  The first scrimmage was in the centre of the ground,
and the ball came out to the Kangaroo scrum-half, who sent it to
his stand-off.  From him it went to Clauson, and then to Martineau,
who ran round his opposing wing, dodged the Scottish full-back, and
scored a try, which was converted.  After five minutes the
Kangaroos led by five points.

After that the Scottish forwards woke up, and there was a spell of
stubborn defence.  The Scottish full-back had a long shot at goal
from a free kick, and missed, but for the rest most of the play was
in the Scottish twenty-five.  The Scottish pack strove their
hardest, but they did no more than hold their opponents.  Then once
more came a quick heel out, which went to one of the Clausons, a
smart cut-through, a try secured between the posts and easily
converted.  The score was now ten points to nil.

Depression settled upon the crowd as deep as the weather, which had
stopped raining but had developed into a sour haar.  Followed a
period of constant kicking into touch, a dull game which the
Kangaroos were supposed to eschew.  Just before half-time there was
a thin ray of comfort.  The Scottish left-wing three-quarter, one
Smail, a Borderer, intercepted a Kangaroo pass and reached the
enemy twenty-five before he was brought down from behind by
Martineau's marvellous sprinting.  He had been within sight of
success, and half-time came with a faint hope that there was still
a chance of averting a runaway defeat.

The second half began with three points to Scotland, secured from a
penalty kick.  Also the Scottish forwards seemed to have got a new
lease of life.  They carried the game well into the enemy
territory, dribbling irresistibly in their loose rushes, and
hooking and heeling in the grand manner from the scrums.  The white
uniforms of the Kangaroos were now plentifully soiled, and the dark
blue of the Scots made them look the less bedraggled side.  All but
J. Galt.  His duty had been that of desperate defence conducted
with a resolute ferocity, and he had suffered in it.  His jersey
was half torn off his back, and his shorts were in ribbons: he
limped heavily, and his small face looked as if it had been ground
into the mud of his native land.  He felt dull and stupid, as if he
had been slightly concussed.  His gift had hitherto been for
invisibility; his fame had been made as a will-o'-the-wisp; now he
seemed to be cast for the part of that Arnold von Winkelreid who
drew all the spears to his bosom.

The ball was now coming out to the Scottish halves, but they
mishandled it.  It seemed impossible to get their three-quarters
going.  The ball either went loose, or was intercepted, or the
holder was promptly tackled, and whenever there seemed a chance of
a run there was always either a forward pass or a knock-on.  At
this period of the game the Scottish forwards were carrying
everything on their shoulders, and their backs seemed hopeless.
Any moment, too, might see the deadly echelon of the Kangaroo
three-quarters ripple down the field.

And then came one of those sudden gifts of fortune which make Rugby
an image of life.  The ball came out from a heel in a scrum not far
from the Kangaroo twenty-five, and went to the Kangaroo stand-off
half.  He dropped it, and, before he could recover, it was gathered
by the Scottish stand-off.  He sent it to Smail, who passed back to
the Scottish left-centre, one Morrison, an Academical from Oxford
who had hitherto been pretty much of a passenger.  Morrison had the
good luck to have a clear avenue before him, and he had a gift of
pace.  Dodging the Kangaroo full-back with a neat swerve, he scored
in the corner of the goal-line amid a pandemonium of cheers.  The
try was miraculously converted, and the score stood at ten points
to eight, with fifteen minutes to play.

Now began an epic struggle, not the least dramatic in the history
of the game since a century ago the Rugby schoolboy William Webb
Ellis first "took the ball in his arms and ran with it."  The
Kangaroos had no mind to let victory slip from their grasp, and,
working like one man, they set themselves to assure it.  For a
little their magnificent three-quarter line seemed to have dropped
out of the picture, but now most theatrically it returned to it.
From a scrimmage in the Kangaroo half of the field, the ball went
to their stand-off and from him to Martineau.  At the moment the
Scottish players were badly placed, for their three-quarters were
standing wide in order to overlap the faster enemy line.  It was a
perfect occasion for one of Martineau's deadly runs.  He was,
however, well tackled by Morrison and passed back to his scrum-
half, who kicked ahead towards the left wing to Charvill.  The
latter gathered the ball at top-speed, and went racing down the
touch-line with nothing before him but the Scottish right-wing
three-quarter.  It seemed a certain score, and there fell on the
spectators a sudden hush.  That small figure, not hitherto renowned
for pace, could never match the Australian's long, loping, deadly
stride.

Had Jaikie had six more inches of height he would have failed.  But
a resolute small man who tackles low is the hardest defence to get
round.  Jaikie hurled himself at Charvill, and was handed off by a
mighty palm.  But he staggered back in the direction of his own
goal, and there was just one fraction of a second for him to make
another attempt.  This time he succeeded.  Charvill's great figure
seemed to dive forward on the top of his tiny assailant, and the
ball rolled into touch.  For a minute, while the heavens echoed
with the shouting, Jaikie lay on the ground bruised and winded.
Then he got up, shook himself, like a heroic, bedraggled sparrow,
and hobbled back to his place.

There were still five minutes before the whistle, and these minutes
were that electric testing time, when one side is intent to
consolidate a victory and the other resolute to avert too crushing
a defeat.  Scotland had never hoped to win; she had already done
far better than her expectations, and she gathered herself together
for a mighty effort to hold what she had gained.  Her hopes lay
still in her forwards.  Her backs had far surpassed their form, but
they were now almost at their last gasp.

But in one of them there was a touch of that genius which can
triumph over fatigue.  Jaikie had never in his life played so
gruelling a game.  He was accustomed to being maltreated, but now
he seemed to have been pounded and smothered and kicked and flung
about till he doubted whether he had a single bone undamaged.  His
whole body was one huge ache.  Only the brain under his thatch of
hair was still working well. . . .  The Kangaroo pack had gone down
field with a mighty rush, and there was a scrum close to the
Scottish twenty-five.  The ball went out cleanly to one of the
Clausons, but it was now very greasy, and the light was bad, and he
missed his catch.  More, he stumbled after it and fell, for he had
had a punishing game.  Jaikie on the wing suddenly saw his chance.
He darted in and gathered the ball, dodging Clauson's weary tackle.
There was no other man of his side at hand to take a pass, but
there seemed just a slender chance for a cut-through.  He himself
of course would be downed by Charvill, but there was a fraction of
a hope, if he could gain a dozen yards, that he might be able to
pass to Smail, who was not so closely marked.

His first obstacle was the Kangaroo scrum-half, who had come across
the field.  To him he adroitly sold the dummy, and ran towards the
right touch-line, since there was no sign of Smail.  He had little
hope of success, for it must be only a question of seconds before
he was brought down.  He did not hear the roar from the spectators
as he appeared in the open, for he was thinking of Charvill waiting
for his revenge, and he was conscious that his heart was behaving
violently quite outside its proper place.  But he was also
conscious that in some mysterious way he had got a second wind, and
that his body seemed a trifle less leaden.

He was now past the half-way line, a little distance ahead of one
of the Clausons, with no colleague near him, and with Charvill
racing to intercept him.  For one of Jaikie's inches there could be
no hand-off, but he had learned in his extreme youth certain arts
not commonly familiar to Rugby players.  He was a most cunning
dodger.  To the yelling crowd he appeared to be aiming at a direct
collision with the Kangaroo left-wing.  But just as it looked as if
a two-seater must meet a Rolls-Royce head-on at full speed, the
two-seater swerved and Jaikie wriggled somehow below Charvill's
arm.  Then sixty thousand people stood on their seats, waving caps
and umbrellas and shouting like lunatics, for Charvill was prone on
the ground, and Jaikie was stolidly cantering on.

He was now at the twenty-five line, and the Kangaroo full-back
awaited him.  This was a small man, very little taller than Jaikie,
but immensely broad and solid, and a superlative place-kick.  A
different physique would have easily stopped the runner, now at the
very limits of his strength, but the Kangaroo was too slow in his
tackle to meet Jaikie's swerve.  He retained indeed in his massive
fist a considerable part of Jaikie's jersey, but the half-naked
wearer managed to stumble on just ahead of him, and secured a try
in the extreme corner.  There he lay with his nose in the mud,
utterly breathless, but obscurely happy.  He was still dazed and
panting when a minute later the whistle blew, and a noise like the
Last Trump told him that by a single point he had won the match for
his country.

There was a long table below the Grand Stand, a table reserved for
the Press.  On it might have been observed a wild figure with red
hair dancing a war dance of triumph.  Presently the table collapsed
under him, and the rending of timber and the recriminations of
journalists were added to the apocalyptic din.



At eight o'clock sharp a party of four sat down to supper at
Blaweary.  The McCunns did not dine in the evening, for Dickson
declared that dinner was a stiff, unfriendly repast, associated in
his mind with the genteel in cities.  He clung to the fashions of
his youth--ate a large meal at one o'clock, and a heavy tea about
half-past four, and had supper at eight from October to May, and in
the long summer days whenever he chose to come indoors.  Mrs McCunn
had grumbled at first, having dim social aspirations, but it was
useless to resist her husband's stout conservatism.  For the
evening meal she was in the habit of arraying herself in black silk
and many ornaments, and Dickson on occasions of ceremony was
persuaded to put on a dinner jacket; but to-night he had declined
to change, on the ground that the guests were only Dougal and
Jaikie.

There were candles on the table in the pleasant dining-room, and
one large lamp on the sideboard.  Dickson had been stubborn about
electric light, holding that a faint odour of paraffin was part of
the amenities of a country house.  A bright fire crackled on the
hearth, for the October evenings at Blaweary were chilly.

The host was in the best of humours.  "Here's the kind of food for
hungry folk.  Ham and eggs--and a bit of the salmon I catched
yesterday!  Did you hear that I fell in, and Adam had to gaff me
before he gaffed the fish?  Everything except the loaf is our own
providing--the eggs are our hens', the ham's my own rearing and
curing, the salmon is my catching, and the scones are Mamma's
baking.  There's a bottle of champagne to drink Jaikie's health.
Man, Jaikie, it's an extraordinary thing you've taken so little
hurt.  We were expecting to see you a complete lameter, with your
head in bandages."

Jaikie laughed.  "I was in more danger from the crowd at the end
than from the Kangaroos.  It's Dougal that's lame.  He fell through
the reporters' table."

He spoke with the slight sing-song which is ineradicable in one
born in the west of Scotland, but otherwise he spoke pure English,
for he had an imitative ear and unconsciously acquired the speech
of a new environment.  One did not think of Jaikie as short, but as
slight, for he was admirably proportioned and balanced.  His hair
was soft and light and unruly, and the small wedge of face beneath
the thatch had an air of curious refinement and delicacy, almost of
wistfulness.  This was partly due to a neat pointed chin and a
cherubic mouth, but chiefly to large grey eyes which were as
appealing as a spaniel's.  He was the incarnation of gentleness,
with a hint of pathos, so that old ladies longed to mother him, and
fools occasionally despised him--to their undoing.  He had the look
of one continually surprised at life, and a little lost in it.  To-
night his face from much contact with mother earth had something of
the blue, battered appearance of a pugilist's, so that he seemed to
be a cherub, but a damaged cherub, who had been violently ejected
from his celestial home.

The fourth at the table, Dougal Crombie, made a strong contrast to
Jaikie's elegance.  The aforetime chieftain of the Gorbals Die-
hards had grown into a powerful young man, about five feet ten
inches in height, with massive shoulders and a fist like a
blacksmith's.  Adolescence had revised the disproportions of
boyhood.  His head no longer appeared to be too big for his body;
it was massive, not monstrous.  The fiery red of his hair had toned
down to a deeper shade.  The art of the dentist had repaired the
irregularities of his teeth.  His features were rugged but not
unpleasing.  But the eyes remained the same, grey-green, deep-set,
sullen, smouldering with a fierce vitality.  To a stranger there
was something about him which held the fancy, as if a door had been
opened into the past.  Even so must have looked some Pictish
warrior, who brewed heather-ale, and was beaten back from Hadrian's
Wall; even so some Highland cateran who fired the barns of the
Lennox; even so many a saturnine judge of Session and heavy-handed
Border laird.  Dougal in appearance was what our grandfathers
called a "Gothic survival."  His manner to the world was apt to be
assertive and cynical; he seemed to be everlastingly in a hurry,
and apt to jostle others off the footpath.  It was unpleasant, many
found, to argue with him, for his eye expressed a surly contempt;
but they were wrong--it was only interest.  Dougal was absorbed in
life, and since his absorption was fiercer than other people's, it
was misunderstood.  Therefore he had few friends; but to those few--
the McCunns, Jaikie, and perhaps two others--he was attached with
a dog-like fidelity.  With them he was at his ease and no longer
farouche; he talked less, and would smile happily to himself, as if
their presence made him content.  They gave him the only home life
he had ever known.



Mr McCunn spoke of those who had years before acknowledged Dougal's
sway.

"You'll want to have the last news," he said.  "Bill's getting on
grand in Australia.  He's on his own wee farm in what they call a
group settlement, and his last letter says that he's gotten all the
roots grubbed up and is starting his first ploughing, and that he's
doing fine with his hens and his dairy cows.  That's the kind of
job for Bill--there was always more muscle than brains in him, but
there's a heap of common sense. . . .  Napoleon's in a bank in
Montreal--went there from the London office last July.  He'll rise
in the world no doubt, for he has a great head for figures.  Peter
Paterson is just coming out for a doctor, and he has lifted a
tremendous bursary--I don't mind the name of it, but it will see
him through his last year in the hospitals.  Who would have said
that Peter would turn out scientific, and him such a through-other
laddie? . . .  But Thomas Yownie is the big surprise.  Thomas, you
mind, was all for being a pirate.  Well, he'll soon be a minister.
He had aye a grand voice, and they tell me his sermons would wile
the birds from the trees. . . .  That's the lot, except for you and
Jaikie.  Man, as Chief Die-hard, I'm proud of my command."

Dickson beamed on them affectionately, and they listened with a
show of interest, but they did not share his paternal pride.  Youth
at twenty is full of hard patches.  Already to the two young men
the world of six years ago and its denizens had become hazy.  They
were remotely interested in the fates of their old comrades, but no
more.  The day would come when they would dwell sentimentally on
the past: now they thought chiefly of the present, of the future,
and of themselves.

"And how are you getting on yourself, Dougal?" Dickson asked.  "We
read your things in the paper, and we whiles read about you.  I see
you're running for Parliament."

"I'm running, but I won't get in.  Not yet."

"Man, I wish you were on a better side.  You've got into an ill
nest.  I was reading this very morning a speech by yon Tombs--he's
one of your big men, isn't he?--blazing away about the sins of the
boorjoysee.  That's just Mamma and me."

"It's not you.  And Tombs, anyway, is a trumpery body.  I have no
use for the intellectual on the make, for there's nothing in him
but vanity.  But see here, Mr McCunn.  The common people of this
land are coming to their own nowadays.  I know what they need and I
know what they're thinking, for I come out of them myself.  They
want interpreting and they want guiding.  Is it not right that a
man like me should take a hand in it?"

Dickson looked wise.  "Yes, if you keep your head.  But you know
fine, Dougal, that those who set out to lead the mob are apt to end
by following.  You're in a kittle trade, my man.  And how do you
manage to reconcile your views with your profession?  You've got a
good job with the Craw papers.  You'll be aspiring some day to edit
one of them.  But what does Mr Craw say to your politics?"

The speaker's eye had a twinkle in it, but Dougal's face, hitherto
as urbane as its rugged features permitted, suddenly became grim.

"Craw!" he cried.  "Yon's the worst fatted calf of them all.  Yon's
the old wife.  There's no bigger humbug walking on God's earth to-
day than Thomas Carlyle Craw.  I take his wages, because I give
good value for them.  I can make up a paper with any man, and I've
a knack of descriptive writing.  But thank God!  I've nothing to do
with his shoddy politics.  I put nothing of myself into his rotten
papers.  I keep that for the Outward every second Saturday."

"You do," said Dickson dryly.  "I've been reading some queer things
there.  What ails you at what you call 'modern Scotland'?  By your
way of it we've sold our souls to the English and the Irish."

"So we have."  Dougal had relapsed again into comparative meekness.
It was as if he felt that what he had to say was not in keeping
with a firelit room and a bountiful table.  He had the air of being
a repository of dark things which were not yet ready for the light.

"Anyway, Scotland did fine the day.  It's time to drink Jaikie's
health."

This ceremony over, Dickson remained with his glass uplifted.

"We'll drink to your good health, Dougal, and pray Heaven, as the
Bible says, to keep your feet from falling.  It would be a sad day
for your friends if you were to end in jyle. . . .  And now I want
to hear what you two are proposing to do with yourselves.  You say
you have a week's holiday, and it's a fortnight before Jaikie goes
back to Cambridge."

"We're going into the Canonry," said Jaikie.

"Well, it's a fine countryside, the Canonry.  Many a grand day I've
had on its hill burns.  But it's too late for the fishing. . . .  I
see from the papers that there's a by-election on now.  Is Dougal
going to sow tares by the roadside?"

"He would like to," said Jaikie, "but he won't be allowed.  We'll
keep to the hills, and our headquarters will be the Back House of
the Garroch.  It's an old haunt of ours."

"Fine I know it.  Many a time when I've been fishing Loch Garroch
I've gone in there for my tea.  What's the wife's name now?
Catterick?  Aye, it was Catterick, and her man came from Sanquhar
way.  We'll get out a map after supper and you'll show me your
road.  The next best thing to tramping the hills yourself is to
plan out another man's travels.  There's grand hills round the
Garroch--the Muneraw and the Yirnie and the Calmarton and the
Caldron. . . .  Stop a minute.  Doesn't Mr Craw bide somewhere in
the Canonry?  Are you going to give him a call in, Dougal?"

"That's a long way down Glen Callowa," said Jaikie.  "We mean to
keep to the high tops.  If the weather holds, there's nothing to
beat a Canonry October."

"You're a pair of desperate characters," said Dickson jocosely.
"You're going to a place which is thrang with a by-election, and
for ordinary you'll not keep Dougal away from politics any more
than a tyke from an ash-bucket.  But you say you're not heeding the
election.  It's the high hills for you--but it's past the time for
fishing, and young legs like yours will cover every top in a couple
of days.  I wish you mayna get into mischief.  I'm afraid of Dougal
with his daftness.  He'll be for starting a new Jacobite rebellion.
'Kenmure's on and awa', Willie.'"

Mr McCunn whistled a stave of the song.  His spirits were soaring.

"Well, I'll be at hand to bail you out. . . .  And remember that
I'm old, but not dead-old.  If you set up the Standard on Garroch
side, send me word and I'll on with my boots and join you."



CHAPTER II

INTRODUCES A GREAT MAN IN ADVERSITY


Fifty-eight years before the date of this tale a child was born in
the school-house of the landward parish of Kilmaclavers in the
Kingdom of Fife.  The schoolmaster was one Campbell Craw, who at
the age of forty-five had espoused the widow of the provost of the
adjacent seaport of Partankirk, a lady his junior by a single
summer.  Mr Craw was a Scots dominie of the old style, capable of
sending boys direct to the middle class of Humanity at St Andrews,
one who esteemed his profession, and wore in the presence of his
fellows an almost episcopal dignity.  He was recognised in the
parish and far beyond it as a "deep student," and, when questions
of debate were referred to his arbitrament, he would give his
verdict with a weight of polysyllables which at once awed and
convinced his hearers.  The natural suspicion which might have
attached to such profundity was countered by the fact that Mr Craw
was an elder of the Free Kirk and in politics a sound Gladstonian.
His wife was a kindred spirit, but, in her, religion of a kind took
the place of philosophy.  She was a noted connoisseur of sermons,
who would travel miles to hear some select preacher, and her voice
had acquired something of the pulpit monotone.  Her world was the
Church, in which she hoped that her solitary child would some day
be a polished pillar.

The infant was baptised by the name of Thomas Carlyle, after the
sage whom his father chiefly venerated; Mrs Craw had graciously
resigned her own preference, which was Robert Rainy, after the
leader of her communion.  Never was a son the object of higher
expectations or more deeply pondered plans.  He had come to them
unexpectedly; the late Provost of Partankirk had left no offspring;
he was at once the child of their old age, and the sole hope of
their house.  Both parents agreed that he must be a minister, and
he spent his early years in an atmosphere of dedication.  Some day
he would be a great man, and the episodes of his youth must be such
as would impress the readers of his ultimate biography.  Every
letter he wrote was treasured by a fond mother.  Each New Year's
Day his father presented him with a lengthy epistle, in the style
of an evangelical Lord Chesterfield, which put on record the
schoolmaster's more recent reflections on life: a copy was
carefully filed for the future biographer.  His studies were
minutely regulated.  At five, though he was still shaky in English
grammar, he had mastered the Greek alphabet.  At eight he had begun
Hebrew.  At nine he had read Paradise Lost, Young's Night Thoughts,
and most of Mr Robert Pollok's Course of Time.  At eleven he had
himself, to his parents' delight, begun the first canto of an epic
on the subject of Eternity.

It was the way to produce a complete prig, but somehow Thomas
Carlyle was not the ordinary prig.  For one thing, he was clearly
not born for high scholastic attainments.  There was a chronic
inaccuracy in him which vexed his father's soul.  He was made to
dabble in many branches of learning, but he seemed incapable of
exact proficiency in any.  When he had finished with the school of
Kilmaclavers, he attended for two years the famous academy of
Partankirk, which had many times won the first place in the college
bursaries.  But he was never head boy, or near it, and the bursary
which he ultimately won (at Edinburgh) was only a small one, fitted
to his place of twenty-seventh in the list.  But he was noted for
his mental activity.  He read everything he could lay his hand on,
and remembered a good deal of it.  He was highly susceptible to new
ideas, which he frequently misunderstood.  At first he was
unpopular among his contemporaries, because of his incapacity for
any game and his disinclination to use his fists, but in each
circle he entered he won his way eventually to tolerance if not to
popularity.  For he was fruitful of notions; he could tell his
illiterate comrades wonderful things which he had picked up from
his voracious reading; he could suggest magnificent schemes, though
in carrying them out he was at the best a camp-follower.

At the age of twenty we find Thomas Carlyle Craw in the last year
of his Edinburgh arts course, designing to migrate presently to a
theological college.  His career has not been distinguished, though
he has won a fifth prize in the English Literature class and a
medal for an essay on his namesake.  But he has been active in
undergraduate journalism, and has contributed many pieces to the
evening papers.  Also he has continued his miscellaneous reading,
and is widely if inaccurately informed on every current topic.  His
chief regret is that he is a miserable public speaker, his few
efforts having been attended by instant failure, and this is making
him lukewarm about a ministerial career.  His true weapon, he
feels, is the pen, not the tongue.  Otherwise he is happy, for he
is never bored--and pleasantly discontented, for he is devouringly
ambitious.  In two things his upbringing has left an abiding mark.
The aura of dedication hangs over him; he regards himself as
predestined to be a great man, though he is still doubtful about
the kind of greatness to be attained.  Also father and mother have
combined to give him a serious view of life.  He does not belie his
name, for the sage of Ecclefechan has bequeathed him some rags of
his mantle.  He must always be generalising, seeking for
principles, philosophising; he loves a formula rather than a fact:
he is heavily weighted with unction; rhetoric is in every fibre.
He has a mission to teach the world, and, as he walks the
pavements, his head is full of profound aphorisms or moving
perorations--not the least being the obituary which some day men
will write of him.  One phrase in it will be, "He was the Moses who
led the people across the desert to the Promised Land"; but what
the Promised Land was to be like he would have been puzzled to say.

That winter he suffered his first calamity.  For Campbell Craw fell
ill of pneumonia and died, and a month later Euphemia, his wife,
followed him to Kilmaclavers churchyard.  Thomas Carlyle was left
alone in the world, for his nearest relative was a cousin in
Manitoba whom he had never seen.  He was an affectionate soul and
mourned his parents sincerely; when his grief dulled a little he
wrote a short biography of them, "A Father and a Mother in Israel,"
which appeared in the Partankirk Advertiser and was justly admired.
He was left now to his own resources, to shape his life without the
tender admonitions of the school-house.  Long and solemnly he
perpended the question of the ministry.  It had been his parents'
choice for him, he had been "dedicated" to it, he could not lightly
forsake it.  But his manifest lack of preaching endowments--he had
a weak, high-pitched voice and an extreme nervousness--convinced
him that common sense must prevail over filial piety.  He discussed
the matter with the Minister of Kilmaclavers, who approved.
"There's more ways of preaching than in a pulpit," was that sage's
verdict.

So Thomas decided upon letters.  His parents had bequeathed him
nearly three thousand pounds, he had no debts, he was accustomed to
live sparingly; on such a foundation it seemed to him that he could
safely build the first storey of what should one day be a towering
edifice.  After taking an undistinguished degree, he migrated to
London, according to the secular fashion of ambitious Scottish
youth.

His first enterprises were failures.  The serious monthlies would
have none of his portentous treatises on the conduct of life, and
The Times brusquely refused a set of articles on current politics,
in the writing of which he had almost wept at his own eloquence.
But he found a niche in a popular religious weekly, where, under
the signature of "Simon the Tanner," he commented upon books and
movements and personalities.

Soon that niche became a roomy pulpit, from which every week he
fulminated, argued, and sentimentalised with immense acceptation.
His columns became the most popular feature of that popular
journal.  He knew nothing accurately about any subject in the
world, but he could clothe his ignorance in pontifical vestments
and give his confusion the accents of authority.  He had a
remarkable flair for discerning and elaborating the tiny quantum of
popular knowledge on any matter.  Above all, he was interesting and
aggressively practical.  He took the hand of the half-educated and
made them believe that he was leading them to the inner courts of
wisdom.  Every flicker of public emotion was fanned by him into a
respectable little flame.  He could be fiercely sarcastic in the
manner of his namesake, he could wallow in the last banalities of
sentiment, he could even be jocose and kittenish, but he knew his
audience and never for a moment lost touch with it.  "Helpful" was
the epithet most commonly applied to him.  He was there to
encourage and assist, and his answers to correspondents began to
fill a large space in his chosen journal.

So at the age of twenty-four Thomas was making a good income, and
was beginning to be much in request by uplift societies.  He
resolutely refused to appear in public: he was too wise to let his
halting utterance weaken the impression of his facile pen.  But a
noble discontent was his, and he marshalled his forces for another
advance.  Generations on his mother's side of small traders in
Partankirk had given him considerable business acumen, and he
realised that the way to fortune did not lie in writing for other
men.  He must own the paper which had its vogue from his talents,
and draw to himself the whole profits of exploiting the public
taste.  Looking about him, he decided that there was room for a
weekly journal at a popular price, which would make its appeal to
the huge class of the aspiring half-baked, then being turned out by
free education.  They were not ardent politicians; they were not
scholars; they were homely, simple folk, who wanted a little
politics, a little science, a little religion, set to a domestic
tune.  So he broke with his employers, and, greatly daring, started
his own penny weekly.  He had considerably added to his little
fortune, for he had no extravagant tastes, and he had made many
friends in the circles of prosperous nonconformity.  There was a
spice of the gambler in Thomas, for every penny he possessed or
could borrow he put into the new venture.

The Centre-Forward was a success from the first.  The name was a
stroke of genius; being drawn from the popular sport of football,
it was intelligible to everyone, and it sounded a new slogan.  The
paper would be in the van of progressive thought, but also in the
centre of the road, contemptuous alike of right-hand reaction and
left-hand revolution.  It appeared at that happy time in the
'nineties, when the world was comfortable, mildly progressive, and
very willing to be amused by toys.  And Thomas was an adroit
editor.  He invented ingenious competitions, and offered prizes of
a magnitude hitherto unknown in British journalism.  He discovered
three new poets--poetry was for the moment in fashion--and two new
and now completely forgotten humorists, and he made each reader
share in the discovery and feel that he too was playing the part of
a modest Mæcenas.  He exposed abuses with a trenchant pen, when his
lawyers had convinced him that he was on safe legal ground.  Weekly
he addressed the world, under his own signature, on every
conceivable topic and with an air of lofty brotherhood, so that the
humblest subscriber felt that the editor was his friend.  The name
of Thomas Carlyle Craw might be lightly regarded by superfine
critics, but by some hundreds of thousands of plain Britons it was
extolled and venerated.

Thomas proved an acute man of business.  The Centre-Forward was
never allowed to languish for lack of novelties; it grew in
size, improved in paper and type, carried a great weight of
advertisements, and presently became a pioneer in cheap pictures.
Every detail of its manufacture and distribution, in which it
struck out many new lines, he personally supervised.  Also it
became the parent of several offspring.  It was the time when the
gardening craze was beginning in England, and The Country-Dweller
was founded, a sumptuously produced monthly which made a feature of
its illustrations.  This did no more than pay its way, but a
children's halfpenny made a big hit, and an unctuous and snobbish
penny weekly for the home made a bigger.  He acquired also several
trade journals, and put them on a paying basis.

When the South African War broke out Thomas was a wealthy man,
piling up revenue yearly, for he still lived in two rooms in
Marylebone and spent nothing on himself.  The war more than doubled
his profits.  In the Centre-Forward he had long been a moderate
exponent of the new imperialism, and his own series of articles
"The Romance of Empire" had had a large sale when issued as a book.
Now he became a fervent patriot.  He exposed abuses in the conduct
of the campaign--always on the best legal advice, he had much to
say about inefficient generals, he appeared before the world as the
soldiers' friend.  The result was a new paper, Mother England,
price one penny, which was the Centre-Forward adapted to lower
strata of democracy--a little slangy and vulgar, deliberately
sensational, but eminently sound at heart.  Once a month Thomas
Carlyle Craw compelled the motley array of its subscribers to view
the world from his own lofty watch-tower.

Fortune treated him kindly.  After the war came the Liberal
revival, and he saw his chance.  His politics now acquired a party
character, and he became the chief Free Trade trumpet in the
generally Protectionist orchestra of the Press.  Once again he took
a bold step, for he started a new halfpenny daily.  For the better
part of a year it hovered on the brink of failure, and the profits
on Thomas's other publications went into its devouring maw.  Then,
suddenly, it turned the corner, and raced up the slope to the
pinnacle of public favour.  The View fed an appetite the existence
of which Thomas alone had divined.  It was bright and fresh and
admirably put together; large sums were spent on special
correspondence; its picture pages were the best of their kind;
every brand of notable, at high fees, enlivened its pages.  But
above all it was a paper for the home and the home-maker, and the
female sex became its faithful votaries.  Much of this success was
due to Thomas himself.  He made himself the centre of the paper and
the exponent of its policy.  Once a week, in the View, as in the
Centre-Forward, he summarised the problems of immediate interest
and delivered his weighty judgments.

He was compelled to change his simple habits of life.  He was
compelled, indeed, elaborately to seek seclusion.  There was no
other alternative for one who had no gift of utterance and had
hitherto gone little into society.  With hundreds daily clamouring
for interviews, demanding his help in cash or influence, urging
policies and persons upon his notice, he must needs flee to
sanctuary.  In the palatial offices which he built in the
neighbourhood of Fleet Street he had a modest flat, where he
occasionally passed a night behind a barbed-wire entanglement of
secretaries.  But for the rest he had no known abode, though here I
am privileged to say that he kept suites at several hotels, English
and foreign, in the name of his principal aide-de-camp.

He escaped the publicity given to most press magnates by the Great
War, for he used the staffs of his many papers as a bodyguard for
his anonymity.  The Prime Minister might summon him to urgent
conferences, but Thomas did not attend--he sent an editor.  New
Year and Birthday honours were offered and curtly declined.  Yet
Thomas was only physically in retreat; spiritually he held the
forefront of the stage.  His signed articles had a prodigious
vogue.  Again, as fifteen years before, he was the friend of the
men in the trenches; his criticisms of generals and politicians
were taken seriously, for they were in accord with the suspicions
and fears of the ordinary man.  On the whole the Craw Press played
a useful part in the great struggle.  Its ultimatums were at any
rate free from the charge of having any personal motive, and it
preserved a reasonable standard of decency and good sense.  Above
all it was sturdily optimistic even in the darkest days.

The end of the War found Thomas with fifteen successful papers
under his control, including a somewhat highbrow Sunday publication,
an immense fortune rapidly increasing by judicious investment, and a
commanding if ill-defined position in the public eye.  He permitted
himself one concession to his admirers.  His portrait now appeared
regularly in his own prints.  It showed a middle-aged, baldish man,
with a round head and a countenance of bland benevolence.  His eyes
were obscured by large tortoise-shell spectacles, but they had a
kindly gleam, and redeemed for suavity the high cheek-bones and the
firmly compressed lips.  A suspicion of a retreating chin helped to
produce the effect of friendliness, while the high forehead augured
wisdom.  It was the face which the public had somehow always
imagined, and it did much to define Thomas's personality in his
readers' eyes.

The step had its importance, for he had now become a figure of
almost international note.  Weekly he emerged from the shadows
where he lived to give counsel and encouragement to humanity.  He
was Optimism incarnate, Hope embodied not in a slim nymph but in a
purposeful and masculine Colossus.  His articles were printed in
all his papers and syndicated in the American and Continental
press.  Sursum Corda was his motto.  A Browning in journalese, his
aim was to see the bright side of everything, to expound partial
evil as universal good.  Was there a slump in the basic industries?
It was only the prelude to an industrial revival, in which Britain
would lead the world in new expert trades.  Was there unrest among
the workers?  It was a proof of life, that "loyal unrest"
inseparable from Freedom.  High-speed motoring, jazz music, and the
odd habits of the young were signs of a new Elizabethan uplift of
spirit.  Were the churches sparsely attended?  It only meant that
mankind was reaching after a wider revelation.  For every
difficulty Thomas Carlyle Craw had his happy solution.  The Veiled
Prophet was also the Smiling Philosopher.  Cheerfulness in his
hands was not a penny whistle but a trumpet.

He had of course his critics.  Rude persons declared that his
optimism was a blend of Martin Tupper and the worst kind of
transatlantic uplift-merchant.  Superfine people commented upon the
meagreness of his thought and the turgidity of his style.
Reformers in a hurry considered his soothing syrup a deadly opiate.
The caustic asked who had made this tripe-merchant a judge in
Israel.  Experts complained that whenever he condescended to
details he talked nonsense.  But these were the captious few; the
many had only admiration and gratitude.  In innumerable simple
homes, in schoolrooms, in village clubs, in ministers' studies, the
face of Thomas Carlyle Craw beamed benevolently from the walls.  He
had fulfilled the old ambition both of his parents and himself; he
spoke from his pulpit urbi et orbi; he was a Moses to guide his
people to the Promised Land.

The politics of the Craw Press were now generally Conservative, but
Thomas kept himself aloof from party warfare.  He supported, and
mildly criticised, whatever Government was in power.  In foreign
affairs alone he allowed himself a certain latitude.  His personal
knowledge of other lands was confined to visits to familiar Riviera
resorts, when he felt that he needed a little rest and sunshine.
But he developed an acute interest in Continental politics, and was
in the habit of sending out bright young men to act as private
intelligence-officers.  While mildly supporting the League of
Nations, he was highly critical of the settlement made at
Versailles, and took under his wing various countries which he
considered to have a grievance.  On such matters he permitted
himself to write with assurance, almost with truculence.  He was
furiously against any recognition of Russia, but he demanded that
judgment on the Fascist régime in Italy should be held in abeyance,
and that the world should wait respectfully on the results of that
bold experiment.

But it was in the hard case of Evallonia that he specially
interested himself.  It will be remembered that a republic had been
established there in 1919, apparently with the consent of its
people.  But rifts had since appeared within the lute.  There was a
strong monarchist party among the Evallonians, who wished to
reinstate their former dynasty, at present represented by an
attractive young Prince, and at the same time insisted on the
revision of Evallonian boundaries.  To this party Thomas gave
eloquent support.  He believed in democracy, he told his millions
of readers, and a kingdom (teste Britain) was as democratic a thing
as a republic: if the Evallonians wanted a monarch they should be
allowed to have one: certain lost territories, too, must be
restored, unless they wished to see Evallonia Irredenta a permanent
plague-spot.  His advocacy made a profound impression in the south
and east of Europe, and to Evallonian monarchists the name of Craw
became what that of Palmerston was once to Italy and Gladstone to
Bulgaria.  The mildness of his published portraits did not damp
them; they remembered that the great Cavour had looked like Mr
Pickwick.  A cigar, a begonia, a new scent, and a fashionable hotel
in the Evallonian capital were named in his honour.

Such at the date of this tale was the position of Thomas Carlyle
Craw in the world of affairs.  He was an illustrious figure, and a
self-satisfied, though scarcely a happy, man.  For he suffered from
a curious dread which the scientific call agoraphobia.  A master of
publicity, he shrank from it in person.  This was partly policy.
He had the acumen to see that retirement was his chief asset; he
was the prophet, speaking from within the shrine, a voice which
would lose its awfulness if it were associated too closely with
human lineaments.  But there was also timidity, a shrinking of the
flesh.  He had accustomed himself for thirty years to live in a
shell, and he had a molluscan dread of venturing outside it.  A
lion on paper, he suspected that he would be a rabbit in personal
intercourse.  He realised that his vanity would receive cruel
wounds, that rough hands would paw his prophetic mantle.  How could
he meet a rampant socialist or a republican Evallonian face to
face?  The thought sent a shiver down his spine. . . .

So his sensitiveness became a disease, and he guarded his seclusion
with a vestal jealousy.  He had accumulated a personal staff of
highly paid watch-dogs, whose business was not only the direction
of the gigantic Craw Press but the guardianship of the shrine
consecrated to its master.  There was his principal secretary,
Freddy Barbon, the son of a bankrupt Irish peer, who combined the
duties of grand vizier and major-domo.  There was his general
manager, Archibald Bamff, who had been with him since the early
days of the Centre-Forward.  There was Sigismund Allins, an elegant
young man who went much into society and acted, unknown to the
world, as his chief's main intelligence-officer.  There was
Bannister, half valet, half butler, and Miss Elena Cazenove, a
spinster of forty-five and the most efficient of stenographers.
With the exception of Bamff, this entourage attended his steps--but
never together, lest people should talk.  Like the police in a
Royal procession, they preceded or followed his actual movements
and made straight the path for him.  Among them he ruled as a mild
tyrant, arbitrary but not unkindly.  If the world of men had to be
kept at a distance lest it should upset his poise and wound his
vanity, he had created a little world which could be, so to speak,
his own personality writ large.

It is the foible of a Scot that he can never cut the bonds which
bind him to his own country.  Thomas had happy recollections of his
childhood on the bleak shores of Fife, and a large stock of
national piety.  He knew in his inmost heart that he would rather
win the approval of Kilmaclavers and Partankirk than the plaudits
of Europe.  This affection had taken practical form.  He had
decided that his principal hermitage must be north of the Tweed.
Fife and the East coast were too much of a home country for his
purpose, the Highlands were too remote from London, so he settled
upon the south-west corner, the district known as the Canonry, as
at once secluded and accessible.  He had no wish to cumber himself
with land, for Thomas desired material possessions as little as he
desired titles; so he leased from Lord Rhynns (whose wife's health
and declining fortune compelled him to spend most of the year
abroad) the ancient demesne of Castle Gay.  The place, it will be
remembered, lies in the loveliest part of the glen of the Callowa,
in the parish of Knockraw, adjoining the village of Starr, and some
five miles from the town of Portaway, which is on the main line to
London.  A high wall surrounds a wild park of a thousand acres, in
the heart of which stands a grey stone castle, for whose keep
Bruces and Comyns and Macdowalls contended seven centuries ago.  In
its cincture of blue mountains it has the air of a place at once
fortified and forgotten, and here Thomas found that secure
retirement so needful for one who had taken upon himself the
direction of the major problems of the globe.  The road up the glen
led nowhere, the fishing was his own and no tourist disturbed the
shining reaches of the Callowa, the hamlet of Starr had less than
fifty inhabitants, and the folk of the Canonry are not the type to
pry into the affairs of eminence in retreat.  To the countryside he
was only the Castle tenant--"yin Craw, a newspaper body frae
England."  They did not read his weekly pronouncements, preferring
older and stronger fare.



But at the date of this tale a thorn had fixed itself in Thomas's
pillow.  Politics had broken in upon his moorland peace.  There was
a by-election in the Canonry, an important by-election, for it was
regarded as a test of the popularity of the Government's new
agricultural policy.  The Canonry in its seaward fringe is
highly farmed, and its uplands are famous pasture; its people,
traditionally Liberal, have always been looked upon as possessing
the toughest core of northern common sense.  How would such a
region regard a scheme which was a violent departure from the
historic attitude of Britain towards the British farmer?  The
matter was hotly canvassed, and, since a General Election was not
far distant, this contest became the cynosure of political eyes.
Every paper sent a special correspondent, and the candidates found
their halting utterances lavishly reported.  The Canonry woke up
one morning to find itself "news."

Thomas did not like it.  He resented this publicity at his
doorstep.  His own press was instructed to deal with the subject in
obscure paragraphs, but he could not control his rivals.  He was in
terror lest he should be somehow brought into the limelight--a
bogus interview, perhaps--such things had happened--there were
endless chances of impairing his carefully constructed dignity.  He
decided that it would be wiser if he left the place till after the
declaration of the poll.  The necessity gave him acute annoyance,
for he loved the soft bright October weather at Castle Gay better
than any other season of the year.  The thought of his suite at
Aix--taken in the name of Mr Frederick Barbon--offered him no
consolation.

But first he must visit Glasgow to arrange with his builders for
some reforms in the water supply, which, with the assent of Lord
Rhynns, he proposed to have installed in his absence.  Therefore,
on the evening of the Kangaroo match already described, his
discreet and potent figure might have been seen on the platform of
Kirkmichael as he returned from the western metropolis.  It was his
habit to be met there by a car, so as to avoid the tedium of
changing trains and the publicity of Portaway station.



Now, as it chanced, there was another election in process.  The
students of the western capital were engaged in choosing their Lord
Rector.  On this occasion there was a straight contest; no freak
candidates, nationalist, sectarian, or intellectual, obscured the
issue.  The Conservative nominee was a prominent member of the
Cabinet, the Liberal the leader of the Old Guard of that faith.
Enthusiasm waxed high, and violence was not absent--the violence
without bitterness which is the happy mark of Scottish rectorial
contests.  Already there had been many fantastic doings.  The
Conservative headquarters were decorated by night with Liberal red
paint, prints which set the law of libel at nought were sold in the
streets, songs of a surprising ribaldry were composed to the
discredit of the opposing candidates.  No undergraduate protagonist
had a single physical, mental, or moral oddity which went
unadvertised.  One distinguished triumph the Liberals had won.  A
lanky Conservative leader had been kidnapped, dressed in a child's
shorts, blouse, socks, and beribboned sailor hat, and attached by
padlocked chains to the college railings, where, like a culprit in
the stocks, for a solid hour he had made sport for the populace.
Such an indignity could not go unavenged, and the Conservatives
were out for blood.

The foremost of the Liberal leaders was a man, older than the
majority of students, who, having forsaken the law, was now
pursuing a belated medical course.  It is sufficient to say that
his name was Linklater, for he does not come into this story.  The
important thing about him for us is his appearance.  He looked
older than his thirty-two years, and was of a comfortable figure,
almost wholly bald, with a round face, tightly compressed lips,
high cheek-bones and large tortoise-shell spectacles.  It was his
habit to wear a soft black hat of the kind which is fashionable
among statesmen, anarchists, and young careerists.  In all these
respects he was the image of Thomas Carlyle Craw.  His parental
abode was Kirkmichael, where his father was a Baptist minister.

On the evening in question Thomas strode to the door of the
Kirkmichael booking-office, and to his surprise found that his car
was not there.  It was a drizzling evening, the same weather which
that day had graced the Kangaroo match.  The weather had been fine
when he left Castle Gay in the morning, but he had brought a light
raincoat with which he now invested his comfortable person.  There
were no porters about, and in the dingy station yard there was no
vehicle except an antique Ford.

His eye was on the entrance to the yard, where he expected to see
any moment the headlights of his car in the wet dusk, when he
suddenly found his arms seized.  At the same moment a scarf was
thrown over his head which stopped all utterance. . . .  About what
happened next he was never quite clear, but he felt himself swung
by strong arms into the ancient Ford.  Through the folds of the
scarf he heard its protesting start.  He tried to scream, he tried
to struggle, but voice and movement were forbidden him. . . .

He became a prey to the most devastating fear.  Who were his
assailants?  Bolshevists, anarchists, Evallonian Republicans,
the minions of a rival press?  Or was it the American group which
had offered him two days ago by cable ten millions for his
properties? . . .  Whither was he bound?  A motor launch on the
coast, some den in a city slum? . . .

After an hour's self-torture he found the scarf switched from his
head.  He was in a car with five large young men in waterproofs,
each with a muffler covering the lower part of his face.  The rain
had ceased, and they seemed to be climbing high up on to the
starlit moors.  He had a whiff of wet bracken and heather.

He found his voice, and with what resolution he could muster he
demanded to know the reason of the outrage and the goal of his
journey.

"It's all right, Linklater," said one of them.  "You'll know soon
enough."

They called him Linklater!  The whole thing was a blunder.  His
incognito was preserved.  The habit of a lifetime held, and he
protested no more.



CHAPTER III

THE BACK HOUSE OF THE GARROCH


The road to the springs of the Garroch water, a stream which never
descends to the lowlands but runs its whole course in the heart of
mossy hills, is for the motorist a matter of wide and devious
circuits.  It approaches its goal circumspectly, with an air of
cautious reconnaissance.  But the foot-traveller has an easier
access.  He can take the cart-road which runs through the heather
of the Clachlands glen and across the intervening hills by the Nick
of the Threshes.  Beyond that he will look into the amphitheatre of
the Garroch, with the loch of that name dark under the shadow of
the Caldron, and the stream twining in silver links through the
moss, and the white ribbon of highway, on which wheeled vehicles
may move, ending in the yard of a moorland cottage.

The Blaweary car had carried Jaikie and Dougal swiftly over the
first fifteen miles of their journey.  At about three o'clock of
the October afternoon they had reached the last green cup where the
Clachlands has its source, and were leisurely climbing the hill
towards the Nick.  Both had ancient knapsacks on their shoulders,
but it was their only point of resemblance.  Dougal was clad in a
new suit of rough tweed knickerbockers which did not fit him well;
he had become very hot and carried his jacket on his arm, and he
had no hat.  Jaikie was in old flannels, for he abominated heavy
raiment, and, being always more or less in training, his slender
figure looked pleasantly cool and trim.  Sometimes they sauntered,
sometimes they strode, and now and then they halted, when Dougal
had something to say.  For Dougal was in the first stage of
holiday, when to his closest friend he had to unburden himself of
six months' store of conversation.  It was as inevitable as the
heat and discomfort which must attend the first day's walk, before
his body rid itself of its sedentary heaviness.  Jaikie spoke
little; his fate in life was to be a listener.

It is unfair to eavesdrop on the babble of youth when its flow has
been long pent up.  Dougal's ran like Ariel over land and sea, with
excursions into the upper air.  He had recovered his only
confidant, and did not mean to spare him.  Sometimes he touched
upon his daily task--its languors and difficulties, the harassments
of the trivial, the profound stupidity of the middle-aged.  He
defended hotly his politics, and drew so many fine distinctions
between his creed and those of all other men, that it appeared that
his party was in the loyal, compact, and portable form of his
single self.  Then ensued torrential confessions of faith and
audacious ambition.  He was not splashing--he was swimming with a
clean stroke to a clear goal.  With his pen and voice he was making
his power felt, and in time the world would listen to him.  His
message?  There followed a statement of ideals which was nobly
eclectic.  Dougal was at once nationalist and internationalist,
humanitarian and man of iron, realist and poet.

They were now in the Nick of the Threshes, where, in a pad of green
lawn between two heathery steeps, a well bubbled among mosses.  The
thirsty idealist flung himself on the ground and drank deep.  He
rose with his forelock dripping.

"I sometimes think you are slipping away from me, Jaikie," he said.
"You've changed a lot in the last two years. . . .  You live in a
different kind of world from me, and every year you're getting less
and less of a Scotsman. . . .  And I've a notion, when I pour out
my news to you and haver about myself, that you're criticising me
all the time in your own mind.  Am I not right?  You're terribly
polite, and you never say much, but I can feel you're laughing at
me.  Kindly, maybe, but laughing all the same.  You're saying to
yourself, 'Dougal gets dafter every day.  He's no better than a
savage.'"

Jaikie regarded the flushed and bedewed countenance of his friend,
and the smile that broadened over his small face was not critical.

"I often think you daft, Dougal.  But then I like daftness."

"Anyway, you've none of it yourself.  You're the wisest man I ever
met.  That's where you and I differ.  I'm always burning or
freezing, and you keep a nice, average, normal temperature.  I take
desperate likes and dislikes.  You've something good to say about
the worst scallywag, and, if you haven't, you hold your tongue.
I'm all for flinging my cap over the moon, while you keep yours
snug on your head.  No.  No"--he quelled an anticipated protest.
"It's the same in your football.  It was like that yesterday
afternoon.  You never run your head against a stone wall.  You wait
till you see your chance, and then you're on to it like forked
lightning, but you're determined not to waste one atom of your
strength."

"That's surely Scotch enough," said Jaikie laughing.  "I'm
economical."

"No, it's not Scotch.  We're not an economical race.  I don't know
what half-wit invented that libel.  We spend ourselves--we've
always spent ourselves--on unprofitable causes.  What's the phrase--
perfervidum ingenium?  There's not much of the perfervid about
you, Jaikie."

"No?" said the other, politely interrogatory.

"No.  You've all the pluck in creation, but it's the considering
kind.  You remember how Alan Breck defined his own courage--'Just
great penetration and knowledge of affairs.'  That's yours. . . .
Not that you haven't got the other kind too.  David Balfour's kind--
'auld, cauld, dour, deidly courage.'"

"I've no courage," said Jaikie.  "I'm nearly always in a funk."

"Aye, that's how you would put it.  You've picked up the English
trick of understatement--what they call meiosis in the grammar
books.  I doubt you and me are very unlike.  You'll not catch me
understating.  I want to shout both my vices and my virtues on the
house-tops. . . .  If I dislike a man I want to hit him on the
head, while you'd be wondering if the fault wasn't in yourself. . . .
If I want a thing changed I must drive at it like a young bull.
If I think there's dirty work going on I'm for starting a
revolution. . . .  You don't seem to care very much about anything,
and you're too fond of playing the devil's advocate.  There was a
time . . ."

"I don't think I've changed," said Jaikie.  "I'm a slow fellow, and
I'm so desperately interested in things that I feel my way
cautiously.  You see, I like so much that I haven't a great deal of
time for hating.  I'm not a crusader like you, Dougal."

"I'm a poor sort of crusader," said Dougal ruefully.  "I get into a
tearing passion about something I know very little about, and when
I learn more my passion ebbs away.  But still I've a good hearty
stock of dislikes and they keep me from boredom.  That's the
difference between us.  I'm for breaking a man's head, and I
probably end by shaking hands.  You begin by shaking hands. . . .
All the same, God help the man or woman or creed or party that you
make up your slow mind to dislike. . . .  I'm going to make a stir
in the world, but I know that I'll never be formidable.  I'm not so
sure about you."

"I don't want to be formidable."

"And that's maybe just the reason why you will be--some day.  But
I'm serious, Jaikie.  It's a sad business if two ancient friends
like you and me are starting to walk on different sides of the
road.  Our tracks are beginning to diverge, and, though we're still
side by side, in ten years we may be miles apart. . . .  You're not
the good Scotsman you used to be.  Here am I driving myself mad
with the sight of my native land running down the brae--the cities
filling up with Irish, the countryside losing its folk, our law and
our letters and our language as decrepit as an old wife.  Damn it,
man, in another half-century there will be nothing left, and we'll
be a mere disconsidered province of England. . . .  But you never
bother your head about it.  Indeed, I think you've gone over to the
English.  What was it I heard you saying to Mr McCunn last night?--
that the English had the most political genius of any people
because they had the most humour?"

"Well, it's true," Jaikie answered.  "But every day I spend out of
Scotland I like it better.  When I've nothing else to do I run over
in my mind the places I love best--mostly in the Canonry--and when
I get a sniff of wood smoke it makes me sick with longing for peat-
reek.  Do you think I could forget that?"

Jaikie pointed to the scene which was now spread before them, for
they had emerged from the Nick of the Threshes and were beginning
the long descent to the Garroch.  The October afternoon was warm
and windless, and not a wisp of cloud broke the level blue of the
sky.  Such weather in July would have meant that the distances were
dim, but on this autumn day, which had begun with frost, there was
a crystalline sharpness of outline in the remotest hills.  The
mountains huddled around the amphitheatre, the round bald forehead
of the Yirnie, the twin peaks of the Caldron which hid a tarn in
their corrie, the steel-grey fortress of the Calmarton, the vast
menacing bulk of the Muneraw.  On the far horizon the blue of the
sky seemed to fade into white, and a hill shoulder which rose in
one of the gaps had an air of infinite distance.  The bog in the
valley was a mosaic of colours like an Eastern carpet, and the
Garroch water twined through it like some fantastic pictured stream
in a missal.  A glimpse could be had of Loch Garroch, dark as ink
in the shadow of the Caldron.  There were many sounds, the tinkle
of falling burns far below, a faint calling of sheep, an occasional
note of a bird.  Yet the place had an overmastering silence, a
quiet distilled of the blue heavens and the primeval desert.  In
that loneliness lay the tale of ages since the world's birth, the
song of life and death as uttered by wild living things since the
rocks first had form.

The two did not speak for a little.  They had seen that which
touched in both some deep elemental spring of desire.

Down on the level of the moss, where the green track wound among
the haggs, Dougal found his tongue.

"I would like your advice, Jaikie," he said, "about a point of
conduct.  It's not precisely a moral question, but it's a matter of
good taste.  I'm drawing a big salary from the Craw firm, and I
believe I give good value for it.  But all the time I'm despising
my job, and despising the paper I help to make up, and despising
myself.  Thank God, I've nothing to do with policy, but I ask
myself if I'm justified in taking money from a thing that turns my
stomach."

"But you're no more responsible for the paper than the head of the
case-room that sets the type.  You're a technical expert."

"That's the answer I've been giving myself, but I'm not sure that
it's sound.  It's quite true that my leaving Craw's would make no
difference--they'd get as good a man next day at a lower wage--
maybe at the same wage, for I will say that for them, they're not
skinflints.  But it's a bad thing to work at something you can't
respect.  I'm condescending on my job, and that's ruin for a man's
soul."

"I see very little harm in the Craw papers," said Jaikie.  "They're
silly, but they're decent enough."

"Decent!" Dougal cried.  "That's just what they are not.  They're
the most indecent publications on God's earth.  They're not
vicious, if that's what you mean.  They would be more decent if
they had a touch of blackguardism.  They pander to everything
that's shoddy and slushy and third-rate in human nature.  Their
politics are an opiate to prevent folk thinking.  Their endless
stunts, their competitions and insurances and country-holiday
schemes--that's the ordinary dodge to get up their circulation, so
as to raise their advertisement prices.  I don't mind that, for
it's just common business.  It's their uplift, their infernal
uplift, that makes my spine cold.  Oh, Lord!  There's not a vulgar
instinct, not a half-baked silliness, in the whole nation that they
don't dig out and print in leaded type.  And above all, there's the
man Craw!"

"Did you ever meet him?" Jaikie asked.

"Never.  Who has?  They tell me he has a house somewhere in the
Canonry, when he gets tired of his apartments in foreign hotels.
But I study Craw.  I'm a specialist in Craw.  I've four big press-
cutting books at home full of Craw.  Here's some of the latest."

Dougal dived into a pocket and produced a batch of newspaper
cuttings.

"They're mostly about Evallonia.  I don't worry about that.  If
Craw wants to be a kingmaker he must fight it out with his
Evallonians. . . .  But listen to some of the other titles.  'Mr
Craw's Advice to Youth!'  'Mr Craw on the Modern Drama.'--He must
have sat in the darkness at the back of a box, for he'd never show
up in the stalls.--'Mr Craw on Modern Marriage.'--A fine lot he
knows about it!--'Mr Craw warns the Trade Unions.'--The devil he
does!--'Mr Craw on the Greatness of England.'  'Mr Craw's Open
Letter to the President of the U.S.A.'  Will nobody give the body a
flea in his ear? . . .  I could write a book about Craw.  He's
perpetually denouncing, but always with a hopeful smirk.  I've
discovered his formula.  'This is the best of all possible worlds,
and everything in it is a necessary evil.'  He wants to be half
tonic and half sedative, but for me he's just a plain emetic."

Dougal waved the cuttings like a flag.

"The man is impregnable, for he never reads any paper but his own,
and he has himself guarded like a gun-factory.  But I've a notion
that some day I'll get him face to face.  Some day I'll have the
chance of telling him just what I think of him, and what every
honest man--"

Jaikie by a dexterous twitch got possession of the cuttings,
crumpled them into a ball, dropped it in a patch of peat, and
ground it down with his heel.

"What's that you've done?" Dougal cried angrily.  "You've spoiled
my Craw collection."

"Better that than spoiling our holiday.  Look here, Dougal, my lad.
For a week you've got to put Craw and all his works out of your
head.  We are back in an older and pleasanter world, and I won't
have it wrecked by your filthy journalism. . . ."

For the better part of five minutes there was a rough-and-tumble on
the green moor-road, from which Jaikie ultimately escaped and fled.
When peace was made the two found themselves at a gate in a dry-
stone dyke.

"Thank God," said Dougal.  "Here is the Back House at last.  I want
my tea."

Their track led them into a little yard behind the cottage, and
they made their way to the front, where the slender highway which
ascended the valley of the Garroch came to an end in a space of
hill gravel before the door.  The house was something more than a
cottage, for fifty years ago it had been the residence of a
prosperous sheep-farmer, before the fashion of "led" farms had
spread over the upland glens.  It was of two storeys and had a
little wing at right angles, the corner between being filled with a
huge bush of white roses.  The roof was slated, the granite walls
had been newly whitewashed, and were painted with the last glories
of the tropæolum.  A grove of scarlet-berried rowans flanked one
end, beyond which lay the walled garden of potatoes and gooseberry
bushes, varied with golden-rod and late-flowering phloxes.  At the
other end were the thatched outhouses and the walls of a sheepfold,
where the apparatus for boiling tar rose like a miniature gallows
above the dipping-trough.  The place slept in a sunny peace.  There
was a hum of bees from the garden, a slow contented clucking of
hens, the echo of a plashing stream descending the steeps of the
Caldron, but the undertones made by these sounds were engulfed in
the dominant silence.  The scent of the moorlands, compounded of
miles of stone and heather and winds sharp and pure as the sea,
made a masterful background from which it was possible to pick out
homelier odours--peat-reek, sheep, the smell of cooking food.  To
ear, eye, and nostril the place sent a message of intimate and
delicate comfort.

The noise of their feet on the gravel brought someone in haste to
the door.  It was a woman of between forty and fifty, built like a
heroine of the Sagas, deep-bosomed, massive, straight as a
grenadier.  Her broad comely face was brown like a berry, and the
dark eyes and hair told of gipsy blood in her ancestry.  Her arms
were bare, for she had been making butter, and her skirts were
kilted, revealing a bright-coloured petticoat, so that she had the
air of a Highland warrior.

But in place of the boisterous welcome which Jaikie had expected,
her greeting was laughter.  She stood in the doorway and shook.
Then she held up a hand to enjoin silence, and marched the two
travellers to the garden gate out of earshot of the house.

"Did you get my postcard, Mrs Catterick?" Jaikie asked, when they
had come to a standstill under a rowan tree.

"Aye, I got your postcaird, and I'm blithe to see ye baith.  But ye
come at an unco time.  I've gotten anither visitor."

"We don't want to inconvenience you," Jaikie began.  "We can easily
go down the water to the Mains of Garroch.  The herd there will
take us in."

"Ye'll dae nae siccan thing.  It will never be said that Tibby
Catterick turned twae auld freends frae her door, and there's beds
to spare for ye baith. . . .  But ye come at an unco time and ye
find me at an unco job.  I'm a jyler."

"A what?"

"A jyler.  I've a man inbye, and I'm under bond no to let him stir
a fit frae the Back House till the morn's morn. . . .  I'll tell ye
the gospel truth.  My guid-brither's son--him that's comin' out for
a minister--is at the college, and the morn the students are
electin' what they ca' a Rector.  Weel, Erchie's a stirrin' lad and
takes muckle ado wi their politics.  It seems that there was a man
on the ither side that they wanted to get oot o' the road--it was
fair eneugh, for he had pitten some terrible affronts on Erchie.
So what maun the daft laddie dae but kidnap him?  How it was done
I canna tell, but he brocht him here late last nicht in a cawr,
and pit me on my aith no to let him leave the place for thirty
'oors. . . .  So you see I'm turned jyler."  Mrs Catterick again
shook with silent merriment.

"Have you got him indoors now?"

"He's ben the hoose in the best room.  I kinnled a fire for him,
for he's a cauldrife body.  What's he like?  Oh, a fosy wee man wi'
a bald heid and terrible braw claithes.  Ye wad say he was ower
auld to be a student, but Erchie says it takes a lang time to get
through as a doctor.  Linklater, they ca' him."

"Has he given you any trouble?" Dougal asked anxiously.  He seemed
to long to assist in the task of gaoler.

"No him.  My man's awa wi' the crocks to Gledmouth, and, as ye ken,
we hae nae weans, but I could manage twa o' him my lane.  But he
never offered to resist.  Just ate his supper as if he was in his
ain hoose, and spak nae word except to say that he likit my scones.
I lent him yin o' John's sarks for a nicht-gown and this mornin' he
shaved himsel' wi' John's razor.  He's a quiet, saft-spoken wee
body, but there's nae crack in him.  He speaks wi' a kind o'
English tongue and he ca's me Madam.  I doot that deil Erchie maun
be in the wrang o' it, but kin's kin and I maun tak the wyte o' his
cantrips."

Again Jaikie became apologetic and proposed withdrawal, and again
his proposal was rejected.

"Ye can bide here fine," said Mrs Catterick, "now that ye ken the
truth.  I couldna tell it ye at the door-cheek, for ye were just
forenent his windy. . . .  Ye'll hae your meat wi' me in the
kitchen, and ye can hae the twa beds in the loft. . . .  Ye'd
better no gang near Linklater, for he maybe wadna like folk to ken
o' this performance--nor Erchie neither.  He has never stirred frae
his room this day, and he's spak no word except to speir what place
he was in and how far it was frae Glen Callowa. . . .  Now I think
o't, that was a queer thing to speir, for Erchie said he brocht him
frae Kirkmichael. . . .  Oh, and he was wantin' to send a telegram,
but I tell't him there was nae office within saxteen miles and the
post wadna be up the water till the morn. . . .  I'm just wonderin'
how he'll get off the morn, for he hasna the buits for walkin'.  Ye
never saw sic snod, wee, pappymashy things on a man's feet.  But
there's twa bicycles, yin o' John's and yin that belongs to the
young herd at the west hirsel.  Wi' yin o' them he'll maybe manage
down the road. . . .  But there's nae sense in crossin' brigs till
ye come to them.  I've been thrang wi' the kirnin', but the
butter's come, and the kettle's on the boil.  Your tea will be
ready as sune as ye've gotten your faces washed."

Half an hour later Jaikie and Dougal sat in the kitchen, staying a
hearty hunger with farles of oatcake and new-baked scones, and a
healthier thirst with immense cups of strong-brewed tea.  Their
hostess, now garbed somewhat more decorously, presided at the
table.  She apologised for the delay.

"I had to gie Linklater his tea.  He's gettin' terrible restless,
puir man.  He's been tryin' to read the books in the best room, but
he canna fix his mind, and he's aye writin' telegrams.  He kens
ye're here, and speired whae ye were, and I telled him twa young
lads that were trampin' the country.  I could see that he was
feared o' ye, and nae wonder.  It would be sair on a decent body if
folk heard that he had been kidnapped by a deil like Erchie.  I
tried to set his mind at rest about the morn, and telled him about
John's bicycle."

But the meal was not the jovial affair which Jaikie remembered of
old.  Mrs Catterick was preoccupied, and did not expand, as was her
custom, in hilarious gossip.  This new task of gaoler lay heavy on
her shoulders.  She seemed always to be listening for sounds from
the farther part of the house.  Twice she left the table and
tiptoed along the passage to listen at the door.

"He's awfu' restless," she reported.  "He's walkin' aboot the floor
like a hen on a het girdle.  I wish he mayna loss his reason.  Dod,
I'll warm Erchie's lugs for this ploy when I get a haud o' him.
Sic a job to saddle on a decent wumman!"

Then for a little there was peace, for a question of Jaikie's led
their hostess to an account of the great April storm of that year.

"Thirty and three o' the hill lambs deid in ae nicht. . . .  John
was oot in the snaw for nineteen 'oors and I never looked to see
him mair.  Puir man, when he cam in at last he couldna eat--just
a dram o' whisky in het milk--and he sleepit a round o' the
clock. . . .  I had fires in ilka room and lambs afore them in a'
the blankets I possessed. . . .  Aye, and it was waur when the
snaw went and the floods cam.  The moss was like a sea, and the
Caldron was streikit wi' roarin' burns.  We never saw the post for
a week, and every brig atween here and Portaway gaed doun to the
Solway. . . .  Wheesht!"

She broke off and listened.  A faint cry of "Madam" came from the
other end of the house.

"It's him.  It's Linklater.  'Madam' he ca's me.  Keep us a'!"

She hurried from the kitchen, shutting the door carefully behind
her.

When she returned it was with a solemn face.

"He's wonderin' if ane o' you lads wad take a telegram for him to
the office.  He's terrible set on't.  'Madam,' he says wi' his
Englishy voice, 'I assure you it's a matter of the first
importance.'"

"Nonsense," said Dougal.  "Sixteen miles after a long day's tramp!
He can easily wait till the morning.  Besides, the office would be
closed before we got there."

"Aye, but hearken."  Mrs Catterick's voice was hushed in awe.  "He
offers twenty punds to the man that will dae his will.  He's gotten
the notes in his pooch."

"Now where on earth," said Dougal, "did a medical student get
twenty pounds?"

"He's no like a student.  The mair I look at him the better I see
that he's nane o' the rough clan that Erchie rins wi'.  He's yin
that's been used wi' his comforts.  And he's aulder than I thocht--
an aulder man than John.  I wadna say but that blagyird Erchie has
kidnapped a Lord Provost, and whaur will we a' be then?"

"We had better interview him," said Dougal.  "It's a shame to let
him fret himself."

"Ane at a time," advised Mrs Catterick, "for he's as skeery as a
cowt.  You gang, Dougal.  Ye ken the ways o' the college lads."

Dougal departed and the two left behind fell silent.  Mrs
Catterick's instinct for the dramatic had been roused, and she kept
her eye on the door, through which the envoy would return, as if it
had been the curtain of a stage play.  Even Jaikie's placidity was
stirred.

"This is a funny business, Mrs Catterick," he said.  "Dougal and I
come here for peace, and we find the Back House of the Garroch
turned into a robbers' den.  The Canonry is becoming a stirring
place.  You've an election on, too."

"So I was hearin', and the post brings us papers about it.  John
maun try and vote, if he can get an orra day atween the sales.  He
votit last time, honest man, but we never heard richt whae got in.
We're ower far up the glens for poalitics.  Wheesht!  Is that
Dougal?"

It was not.  He did not return for nearly half an hour, and when he
came it was to put his head inside the door and violently beckon
Jaikie.  He led him out of doors to the corner of the garden, and
then turned on him a face so excited and portentous that the
appropriate utterance should have been a shout.  He did not shout:
he whispered hoarsely.

"Do you mind our talk coming up the road? . . .  Providence has
taken me at my word. . . .  Who do you think is sitting ben the
house?  It's the man Craw!"



CHAPTER IV

THE RECONNAISSANCE OF CASTLE GAY


The westering sun was lighting up the homely furniture of Mrs
Catterick's best room--the sheepskins on the floor, the framed
photographs decorated with strings of curlews' eggs on the walls--
when Dougal and Jaikie entered the presence of the great man.
Mr Craw was not at the moment an impressive figure.  The
schoolmaster's son of Kilmaclavers had been so long habituated to
the attentions of an assiduous valet that he had found some
difficulty in making his own toilet.  His scanty hair was in
disorder, and his spruce blue suit had attracted a good deal of
whitewash from the walls of his narrow bedroom.  Also he had lost
what novelists call his poise.  He sat in a horsehair-covered arm-
chair drawn up at a table, and strove to look as if he had command
of the situation, but his eye was uncertain and his fingers drummed
nervously.

"This is Mr Galt, sir," said Dougal, adding, "of St Mark's College,
Cambridge."

Mr Craw nodded.

"Your friend is to be trusted?" and his wavering eyes sought
Jaikie.  What he saw cannot have greatly reassured him, for Jaikie
was struggling with a strong inclination to laugh.

"I have need to be careful," he said, fixing his gaze upon a
photograph of the late Queen Victoria, and picking his words.
"I find myself, through no fault of my own, in a very delicate
position.  I have been the subject of an outrage on the part of--
of some young men of whom I know nothing.  I do not blame them.
I have been myself a student of a Scottish University. . . .  But
it is unfortunate--most unfortunate.  It was apparently a case of
mistaken identity.  Happily I was not recognised. . . .  I am a
figure of some note in the world.  You will understand that I do
not wish to have my name associated with an undergraduate--'rag,'
I think, is the word."

His two hearers nodded gravely.  They were bound to respect such
patent unhappiness.

"Mr--I beg your pardon--Crombie?--has told me that he is employed
on one of my papers.  Therefore I have a right to call upon his
assistance.  He informs me that I can also count on your goodwill
and discretion, sir," and he inclined his head towards Jaikie.  "It
is imperative that this foolish affair should never be known to the
public.  I have been successful in life, and therefore I have
rivals.  I have taken a strong stand in public affairs, and
therefore I have enemies.  My position, as you are no doubt aware,
is one of authority, and I do not wish my usefulness to be impaired
by becoming the centre of a ridiculous tale."

Mr Craw was losing his nervousness and growing fluent.  He felt
that these two young men were of his own household, and he spoke to
them as he would have addressed Freddy Barbon, or Sigismund Allins,
or Archibald Bamff, or Bannister, his butler, or that efficient
spinster Miss Elena Cazenove.

"I don't think you need be afraid, sir," said Dougal.  "The
students who kidnapped you will have discovered their mistake as
soon as they saw the real Linklater going about this morning.  They
won't have a notion who was kidnapped, and they won't want to
inquire.  You may be sure that they will lie very low about the
whole business.  What is to hinder you sending a wire to Castle Gay
to have a car up here to-morrow, and go back to your own house as
if nothing had happened?  Mrs Catterick doesn't know you from Adam,
and you may trust Jaikie and me to hold our tongues."

"Unfortunately the situation is not so simple."  Mr Craw blinked
his eyes, as if to shut out an unpleasing picture, and his hands
began to flutter again.  "At this moment there is a by-election in
the Canonry--a spectacular by-election. . . .  The place is full of
journalists--special correspondents--from the London papers.  They
were anxious to drag me into the election, but I have consistently
refused.  I cannot embroil myself in local politics.  Indeed, I
intended to go abroad, for this inroad upon my rural peace is in
the highest degree distasteful. . . .  You may be very certain that
these journalists are at this moment nosing about Castle Gay.  Now,
my household must have been alarmed when I did not return last
night.  I have a discreet staff, but they were bound to set
inquiries on foot.  They must have telephoned to Glasgow, and they
may even have consulted the police.  Some rumours must have got
abroad, and the approaches to my house will be watched.  If one of
these journalists learns that I am here--the telegraph office in
these country parts is a centre of gossip--he will follow up the
trail.  He will interview the woman of this cottage, he will wire
to Glasgow, and presently the whole ridiculous business will be
disclosed, and there will be inch headlines in every paper except
my own."

"There's something in that," said Dougal.  "I know the ways of
those London journalists, and they're a dour crop to shift.  What's
your plan, sir?"

"I have written a letter."  He produced one of Mrs Catterick's
disgraceful sheets of notepaper on which her disgraceful pen had
done violence to Mr Craw's neat commercial hand.  "I want this put
into the hand of my private secretary, Mr Barbon, at once.  Every
hour's delay increases the danger."

"Would it not be best," Dougal suggested, "if you got on to one of
the bicycles--there are two in the outhouse, Mrs Catterick says--
and I escorted you to Castle Gay this very night.  It's only about
twenty miles."

"I have never ridden a bicycle in my life," said Mr Craw coldly.
"My plan is the only one, I fear.  I am entitled to call upon you
to help me."

It was Jaikie who answered.  The first day's walk in the hills was
always an intoxication to him, and Mrs Catterick's tea had banished
every trace of fatigue.

"It's a grand night, Dougal," he said, "and there's a moon.  I'll
be home before midnight.  There's nothing I would like better than
a ride down Garroch to the Callowa.  I know the road as well as my
own name."

"We'll go together," said Dougal firmly.  "I'm feeling fresher than
when I started. . . .  What are your instructions, sir?"

"You will deliver this letter direct into Mr Barbon's hands.  I
have asked him to send a car in this direction to-morrow before
midday, and I will walk down the glen to meet it.  It will wait for
me a mile or so from this house. . . .  You need not say how I came
here.  I am not in the habit of explaining my doings to my staff."

Mr Craw enclosed his letter in a shameful envelope and addressed
it.  His movements were brisker now and he had recovered his self-
possession.  "I shall not forget this, Mr Crombie," he said
benignly.  "You are fortunate in being able to do me a service."

Dougal and Jaikie betook themselves to the outhouse to examine the
bicycles of John Catterick and the herd of the west hirsel.

"I eat the man's bread," said the former, "so I am bound to help
him, but God forbid that I should ever want to accept his favours.
It's unbelievable that we should spend the first night of our
holiday trying to save the face of Craw. . . .  Did you ever see
such an image?  He's more preposterous even than I thought.  But
there's a decency in all things, and if Craw's bones are to be
picked it will be me that has the picking of them, and not those
London corbies."

But this truculence did not represent Dougal's true mind, which
presently became apparent to his companion as they bumped their way
among the heather bushes and flood-gravel which composed the upper
part of the Garroch road.  He was undeniably excited.  He was a
subaltern officer in a great army, and now he had been brought face
to face with the general-in-chief.  However ill he might think of
that general, there was romance in the sudden juxtaposition,
something to set the heart beating and to fire the fancy.  Dougal
regarded Mr Craw much as a stalwart republican might look on a
legitimate but ineffectual monarch; yet the stoutest republican is
not proof against an innocent snobbery and will hurry to a street
corner to see the monarch pass.  Moreover, this general-in-chief
was in difficulties; his immediate comfort depended upon the humble
subaltern.  So Dougal was in an excited mood and inclined to
babble.  He was determined to do his best for his chief, but he
tried to salve his self-respect by a critical aloofness.

"What do you think of the great Craw?" he asked Jaikie.

"He seems a pleasant fellow," was the answer.

"Oh, he's soft-spoken enough.  He has the good manners of one
accustomed to having his own way.  But, man, to hear him talk was
just like hearing a grandfather-clock ticking.  He's one mass of
artifice."

Dougal proceeded to a dissection of Mr Craw's mind which caused him
considerable satisfaction.  He proved beyond question that the
great man had no brains of his own, but was only an echo, a
repository for other men's ideas.  "A cistern, not a spring," was
his conclusion.  But he was a little dashed by Jaikie, who listened
patiently to the analysis, and then remarked that he was talking
rubbish.

"If a man does as much in the world as Craw, and makes himself as
important, it's nonsense to say he has no brains.  He must have
plenty, though they may not be the kind you like.  You know very
well, Dougal, that you're mightily pleased to have the chance of
doing the great man a favour.  And maybe rather flattered."

The other did not reply for a moment.  "Perhaps I am," he said at
length.  "We're all snobs in a way--all but you.  You're the only
true democrat I know.  What's the phrase--'Fellow to a beggar and
brother to a king, if he be found worthy'?  It's no credit to you--
it's just the way you're made."

After that it was impossible to get a word out of Jaikie, and even
Dougal drifted by way of monosyllables into silence, for the place
and the hour had their overmastering enchantments.  There was no
evening mist, and in the twilight every hill stood out clean-cut in
a purple monochrome.  Soon the road skirted the shores of the Lower
Loch Garroch, twining among small thickets of birch and hazel, with
the dark water on its right lapping ghostly shingle.  Presently the
glen narrowed and the Garroch grumbled to itself in deep linns,
appearing now and then on some rockshelf in a broad pool which
caught the last amethyst light of day.  There had been no lamps
attached to the bicycles of John Catterick and the herd of the west
hirsel, so the travellers must needs move circumspectly.  And then
the hills fell back, the glen became a valley, and the Garroch ran
free in wild meadows of rush and bracken.

The road continued downstream to the junction with the Callowa not
far from the town of Portaway.  But to reach Castle Gay it was
necessary to break off and take the hill-road on the left, which
crossed the containing ridge and debouched in the upper part of
Glen Callowa.  The two riders dismounted, and walked the road which
wound from one grassy howe to another till they reached the low
saddle called the Pad o' the Slack, and looked down upon a broader
vale.  Not that they had any prospect from it--for it was now very
dark, the deep autumn darkness which precedes moonrise; but they
had an instinct that there was freer space before them.  They
remounted their bicycles, and cautiously descended a road with many
awkward angles and hairpin bends, till they found themselves among
trees, and suddenly came on to a metalled highway.

"Keep to the right," Jaikie directed.  "We're not more than two
miles from the Castle gates."

The place had the unmistakable character of a demesne.  Even in the
gloom it had an air of being well cared for, and the moon, which
now began to send a shiver of light through the darkness, revealed
a high wall on the left--no dry-stone dyke but a masoned wall with
a coping.  The woods, too, were not the scrub of the hills, but
well-grown timber trees and plantations of fir.  Then the wall fell
back, there were two big patches of greensward protected by chains
and white stones, and between them a sweep of gravel, a castellated
lodge, and vast gates like a portcullis.  The Lord Rhynns of three
generations ago had been unhappily affected by the Gothic Revival.

"Here's the place," said Dougal.  "It's a mighty shell for such a
wee body as Craw."

The gates were locked.  There was a huge bell pendant from one of
the pillars and this Jaikie rang.  It echoed voluminously in the
stillness, but there was no sign of life in the lodge.  He rang
again and yet again, making the night hideous, while Dougal
hammered at the massive ironwork of the gate.

"They're all dead or drunk," the latter said.  "I'm positive
there's folk in the lodge.  I saw a bit of a light in the upper
window.  What for will they not open?"

Jaikie had abandoned the bell and was peering through the ironwork.

"Dougal," he whispered excitedly, "look here.  This gate is not
meant to open.  Look what's behind it.  It's a barricade.  There's
two big logs jammed between the posts.  The thing would keep a Tank
out.  Whoever is in there is terrified of something."

"There's somebody in the lodge watching us.  I'm certain of that.
What do they mean by behaving as if they were besieged?  I don't
like it, Jaikie.  There's something here we don't understand--and
Craw doesn't understand.  How can they expect to defend as big a
space as a park?  Any active man could get over the wall."

"Maybe they want to keep out motors. . . .  Well, we needn't waste
time here.  That letter has got to be delivered, and there's more
roads than the main road."

"Is there another entrance?"

"Yes.  This is the main one, but there's a second lodge a mile
beyond Starr--that's the village--on the Knockraw road.  But we
needn't worry about that.  We can leave our bicycles, and get into
the park at the Callowa bridge."

They remounted and resumed their course along the highway.  One or
two cottages were passed, which showed no sign of life, since the
folk of these parts rise early and go early to bed.  But in an open
space a light was visible from a larger house on the slope to the
right.  Then came a descent and the noise of a rapid stream.

The bicycles were shoved under a hawthorn bush, and Jaikie
clambered on to the extreme edge of the bridge parapet.

"We can do it," he reported.  "A hand traverse for a yard or two
and then a ten-foot drop.  There's bracken below, so it will be
soft falling."

Five minutes later the two were emerging from a bracken covert on
to the lawn-like turf which fringed the Callowa.  The moon was now
well up in the sky, and they could see before them the famous wild
park of Castle Gay.  The guide-books relate that in it are both red
deer and fallow-deer, and in one part a few of the ancient
Caledonian wild cattle.  But these denizens must have been asleep,
for as Jaikie and Dougal followed the river they saw nothing but an
occasional rabbit and a belated heron.  They kept to the stream
side, for Jaikie had once studied the ordnance map and remembered
that the Castle was close to the water.

The place was so magical that one of the two forgot his errand.  It
was a cup among high hills, but, seen in that light, the hills were
dwarfed, and Jaikie with a start realised that the comb of
mountain, which seemed little more than an adjacent hillock, must
be a ridge of the great Muneraw, twenty miles distant.  The patches
of wood were black as ink against the pale mystery of the moonlit
sward.  The river was dark too, except where a shallow reflected
the moon.  The silence was broken only by the small noises of wild
animals, the ripple of the stream, and an occasional splash of a
running salmon.

Then, as they topped a slope, the house lay before them.  It stood
on its own little plateau, with the ground falling from it towards
the park and the stream, and behind it the fir-clad Castle Hill.
The moon turned it into ivory, so that it had the air of some
precious Chinese carving on a jade stand.  In such a setting it
looked tiny, and one had to measure it with the neighbouring
landscape to realise that it was a considerable pile.  But if it
did not awe by its size, it ravished the eyes with its perfection.
Whatever may have been crude and ugly in it, the jerry-building of
our ancestors, the demented reconstruction of our fathers, was
mellowed by night into a classic grace.  Jaikie began to whistle
softly with pure delight, for he had seen a vision.

The practical Dougal had his mind on business.  "It's past eleven
o'clock, and it looks as if they were all in their beds.  I don't
see a light.  There'll be gardens to get through before we reach
the door.  We'd better look out for dogs too.  The folk here seem a
bit jumpy in their nerves."

But it was no dog that obstructed them.  Since they had come in
sight of their goal they had moved with circumspection, and, being
trained of old to the game, were as noiseless as ferrets.  They had
left the wilder part of the park, had crossed a piece of meadowland
from which an aftermath of hay had lately been taken, and could
already see beyond a ha-ha the terraces of a formal garden.  But
while they guarded against sound, their eyes were too much on their
destination to be wary about the foreground.

So it befell that they crossed the ha-ha at the very point where a
gentleman was taking his ease.  Dougal fell over him, and the two
travellers found themselves looking at the startled face of a small
man in knickerbockers.

His pipe had dropped from his mouth.  Jaikie picked it up and
presented it to him.  "I beg your pardon, sir," he said, "I hope
you're not hurt."  In the depths of the ha-ha there was shadow, and
Jaikie took the victim of Dougal's haste for someone on the Castle
staff.

"What are you doing here?"  The man's air was at once apologetic
and defiant.  There was that in his tone which implied that he
might in turn be asked his business, that he had no prescriptive
right to be sitting smoking in that ha-ha at midnight.

So Jaikie answered:  "Just the same as you.  Taking the air and
admiring the view."

The little man was recovering himself.

"You gave me quite a start when you jumped on the top of me.  I
thought it was one of the gamekeepers after a poacher."  He began
to fill his pipe.  "More by token, who are you?"

"Oh, we're a couple of undergraduates seeing the world.  We wanted
a look at the Castle, and there's not much you can see from the
highroad, so we got in at the bridge and came up the stream. . . .
We're strangers here.  There's an inn at Starr, isn't there?  What
sort of a place is it?"

"Nothing to write home about," was the answer.  "You'd better go on
to Portaway. . . .  So you're undergraduates?  I thought that maybe
you were of my own profession, and I was going to be a bit jealous.
I'm on the staff of the Live Wire."

Dougal's hand surreptitiously found Jaikie's wrist and held it
tight.

"I suppose you're up here to cover the by-election," he observed,
in a voice which he strove to keep flat and uninterested.

"By-election be hanged!  That was my original job, but I'm on to
far bigger business.  Do you know who lives in that house?"

Two heads were mendaciously shaken.

"The great Craw!  Thomas Carlyle Craw!  The man that owns all the
uplift papers.  If you've never heard of Craw, Oxford's more of a
mausoleum than I thought."

"We're Cambridge," said Jaikie, "and of course we've heard of Craw.
What about him?"

"Simply that he's the mystery man of journalism.  You hear of him
but you never see him.  He's a kind of Delphic oracle that never
shows his face.  The Wire doesn't care a hoot for by-elections, but
it cares a whole lot about Craw.  He's our big rival, and we love
him as much as a cat loves water.  He's a go-getter, is Craw.
There's a deep commercial purpose behind all his sanctimonious
bilge, and he knows how to rake in the shekels.  His circulation
figures are steadily beating ours by at least ten per cent.  He has
made himself the idol of his public, and, till we pull off the
prophet's mantle and knock out some of the sawdust, he has us
licked all the time.  But it's the deuce and all to get at him, for
the blighter is as shy as a wood nymph.  So, when this election
started, my chief says to me:  'Here's our chance at last,' he
says.  'Off you go, Tibbets, and draw the badger.  Get him into the
limelight somehow.  Show him up for the almighty fool he is.
Publicity about Craw,' he says, 'any kind of publicity that will
take the gilt off the image.  It's the chance of your life!'"

"Any luck?" Dougal asked casually.

Mr Tibbets's voice became solemn.  "I believe," he said, "that I am
on the edge of the world's biggest scoop.  I discovered in half a
day that we could never get Craw to mix himself up in an election.
He knows too much.  He isn't going to have the Wire and a dozen
other papers printing his halting utterances verbatim in leaded
type, and making nice, friendly comments. . . .  No, that cock
won't fight.  But I've found a better.  D'you know what will be the
main headline in to-morrow's Wire?  It will be 'Mysterious
Disappearance of Mr Craw--Household Distracted.'--And by God, it
will be true--every word of it.  The man's lost."

"How do you mean?"

"Just lost.  He never came back last night."

"Why should he?  He has probably offed it abroad--to give the
election a miss."

"Not a bit of it.  He meant to go abroad to-morrow, and all the
arrangements were made--I found out that from standing a drink to
his second chauffeur.  But he was expected back last night, and his
car was meeting him at Kirkmichael.  He never appeared.  He has a
staff like Buckingham Palace, and they were on the telephone all
evening to Glasgow.  It seems he left Glasgow right enough. . . .
I got that from the chauffeur fellow, who's new and not so damned
secretive as the rest.  So I went to Kirkmichael this morning on a
motorbike, and the ticket collector remembered Craw coming off the
Glasgow train.  He disappeared into the void somewhere between here
and Kirkmichael at some time after 7.15 last night.  Take my word
for it, a judgment has fallen upon Craw."

"Aren't you presuming too much?" Jaikie asked.  "He may have
changed his mind and be coming back to-morrow--or be back now--or
he's wiring his servants to meet him somewhere.  Then you and the
Wire will look rather foolish."

"It's a risk, no doubt, but it's worth taking.  And if you had seen
his secretary's face you wouldn't think it much of a risk.  I never
saw a chap so scared as that secretary man.  He started off this
afternoon in a sports-model at eighty miles an hour and was back an
hour later as if he had seen his father's ghost. . . .  What's
more, this place is in a state of siege.  They wouldn't let me in
at the lodge gates.  I made a long detour and got in by the back
premises, and blessed if I hadn't to run for my life! . . .  Don't
tell me.  The people in that house are terrified of something, and
Craw isn't there, and they don't know why Craw isn't there. . . .
That's the mystery I'm out to solve, and I'll get to the bottom of
it or my name isn't Albert Tibbets."

"I don't quite see the point," said Jaikie.  "If you got him on a
platform you might make capital out of his foolishness.  But if
some accident has happened to him, you can't make capital out of a
man's misfortunes."

"We can out of Craw's.  Don't you see we can crack the shell of
mystery?  We can make him NEWS--like any shop-girl who runs away
from home or city gent that loses his memory.  We can upset his
blasted dignity."

Dougal got up.  "We'll leave you to your midnight reveries, Mr
Tibbets.  We're for bed.  Where are your headquarters?"

"Portaway is my base.  But my post at present is in and around this
park.  I'm accustomed to roughing it."

"Well, good night and good luck to you."

The two retraced their steps down the stream.

"This letter will have to wait till the morn's morn," said Dougal.
"Craw was right.  It hasn't taken long for the opposition Press to
get after him.  It's our business, Jaikie my man, to make the Wire
the laughing-stock of British journalism. . . .  Not that Tibbets
isn't a dangerous fellow.  Pray Heaven he doesn't get on the
track of the students' rag, for that's just the kind of yarn he
wants. . . .  They say that dog doesn't eat dog, but I swear before
I've done with him to chew yon tyke's ear. . . .  I'm beginning to
think very kindly of Craw."



CHAPTER V

INTRODUCES A LADY


Jaikie was roused next morning in his little room in the Westwater
Arms by Dougal sitting down heavily on his toes.  He was a sound
sleeper, and was apt to return but slowly to a waking world.  Yet
even to his confused perceptions' the state of the light seemed to
mark an hour considerably later than that of seven a.m. which had
been the appointed time.  He reached for his watch and saw that it
was nearly nine o'clock.

"You never called me," he explained apologetically.

"I did not, but I've been up since six myself.  I've been thinking
hard.  Jaikie, there's more in this business than meets the eye.
I've lain awake half the night considering it.  But first I had to
act.  We can't let the Wire's stuff go uncontradicted.  So I
bicycled into Portaway and called up the office on the telephone.
I caught Tavish just as he was going out to his breakfast.  I had
to take risks, so I said I was speaking from Castle Gay on Mr
Craw's behalf. . . .  Tavish must have wondered what I was doing
there. . . .  I said that Mr Craw had left for the Continent
yesterday and would be away some weeks, and that an announcement to
that effect was to appear in all the Craw papers."

"Did he raise any objection?"

"I thought he would, for this is the first time that Craw has
advertised his movements, and I was prepared with the most
circumstantial lies.  But I didn't need to lie, for he took it like
a lamb.  Indeed, it was piper's news I was giving him, for he had
had the same instructions already.  What do you think of that?"

"He got them from Barbon the secretary?"

"Not a bit of it.  He had had no word from Castle Gay.  He got them
yesterday afternoon from London.  Now, who sent them?"

"The London office."

"I don't believe it.  Bamff, the General Manager, is away in Canada
over the new paper contracts.  Don't tell me that Craw instructed
London to make the announcement before he was bagged by the
students.  It isn't his way. . . .  There's somebody else at work
on this job, somebody that wants to have it believed that Craw is
out of the country."

Jaikie shook a sceptical head.

"You were always too ingenious, Dougal.  You've got Craw on the
brain, and are determined to find melodrama. . . .  Order my
breakfast like a good chap.  I'll be down in twenty minutes."

Jaikie bathed in the ancient contrivance of wood and tin, which was
all that the inn provided, and was busy shaving when Dougal
returned.  The latter sat himself resolutely on the bed.

"The sooner we're at the Castle the better," he observed, as if the
remark were the result of a chain of profound reasoning.  "The more
I think of this affair the less I like it.  I'm not exactly in love
with Craw, but he's my chief, and I'm for him every time against
his trade rivals.  Compared to the Wire crowd, Craw is respectable.
What I want to get at is the state of mind of the folk in the
Castle.  They're afraid of the journalists, and they've cause.  A
fellow like Tibbets is as dangerous as nitro-glycerine.  They've
lost Craw, and they want to keep it quiet till they find him again.
So far it's plain sailing.  But what in Heaven's name did they mean
by barricading the gate at the big lodge?"

"To prevent themselves being taken by surprise by journalists in
motor-cars or on motor-bicycles," said Jaikie, who was now trying
to flatten out his rebellious hair.

"But that's not sense.  To barricade the gate was just to give the
journalists the kind of news they wanted.  'Mr Craw's House in a
State of Siege.'  'Amazing Precautions at Castle Gay'--think of the
headlines!  Barbon and the rest know everything about newspaper
tricks, and we must assume that they haven't suddenly become
congenital idiots. . . .  No, Jaikie my lad, they're afraid--blind
afraid--of something more than the journalists, and the sooner we
find out what it is the better for you and me and Craw. . . .  I'll
give you twenty minutes to eat your breakfast, and then we take the
road.  It'll be by the bridge and the water-side, the same as last
night."

It was a still hazy autumn morning with the promise of a warm
midday.  The woods through which the two sped were loud with
pheasants, the shooting of which would be at the best perfunctory,
for the tenant at the Castle never handled a gun.  No one was on
the road, except an aged stonebreaker in a retired nook.  They hid
their bicycles with some care in a mossy covert, for they might
be for some time separated from them, and, after a careful
reconnaissance to see that they were unobserved, entered the park
by way of the bridge parapet, the traverse and the ten-foot drop.
This time they had not the friendly night to shield them, and they
did not venture on the lawn-like turf by the stream side.  Instead
they followed a devious route among brackeny hollows, where they
could not be seen from any higher ground.  The prospect from the
highway was, they knew, shut out by the boundary wall.

Dougal moved fast with a sense of purpose like a dog on a scent.
He had lost his holiday discursiveness, and had no inclination to
linger in bypaths earthly or spiritual.  But Jaikie had his
familiar air of detachment.  He did not appear to take his errand
with any seriousness or to be much concerned with the mysteries
which filled Dougal's thoughts.  He was revelling in the sounds and
scents of October in that paradise which possessed the charm of
both lowland and highland.  The film of morning was still silver-
grey on rush and grass and heather, and the pools of the Callowa
smoked delicately.  The day revealed some of the park's features
which night had obscured.  In particular there was a tiny lochan,
thronged with wildfowl, which was connected by a reedy burn with
the Callowa.  A herd of dappled fallow-deer broke out of the
thicket, and somewhere near a stag was belling.

The house came suddenly into sight at a slightly different angle
from that of the night before.  They were on higher ground, and had
a full view of the terrace, where even now two gardeners were
trimming the grass edges of the plots.  That seemed normal enough,
and so did the spires of smoke ascending straight from the chimneys
into the windless air.  They stood behind a gnarled, low-spreading
oak, which must have been there as a seedling when steel-bonneted
reivers rode that way and the castle was a keep.  Dougal's hand
shaded his eyes, and he scanned warily every detail of the scene.

"We must push forward," he said.  "If anyone tries to stop us we
can say we've a letter to Mr Barbon from Mr Craw.  Knowing Barbon's
name will be a sort of passport.  Keep your eyes skinned for
Tibbets, for he mustn't see us.  I daresay he'll be at his
breakfast in Portaway--he'll be needing it if he has been hunkering
here all night.  We haven't . . ."

He broke off, for at that instant two animals precipitated
themselves against his calves, thereby nearly unbalancing him.
They were obviously dogs, but of a breed with which Dougal was
unfamiliar.  They had large sagacious heads, gentle and profoundly
tragic eyes, and legs over which they seemed to have no sort of
control.  Over Dougal they sprawled and slobbered, while he strove
to evade their caresses.

Then came a second surprise, for a voice spoke out of the tree
above them.  The voice was peremptory and it was young.  It said,
"Down, Tactful!  Down, Pensive!"  And then it added in a slightly
milder tone:  "What are YOU doing here?"

These last words were so plainly addressed to the two travellers
that they looked up into the covert, half green, half russet, above
their heads.  There, seated in a crutch made by two branches, they
beheld to their amazement a girl.

Her face was visible between the branches, but the rest of her was
hidden, except one slim pendant brown leg ending in a somewhat
battered shoe.  The face regarded them solemnly, reprovingly,
suspiciously.  It was a pretty face, a little sunburnt, not
innocent of freckles, and it was surmounted by a mop of tawny gold
hair.  The eyes were blue and stern.  The beagle pups, having
finished their overtures to Dougal, were now making ineffective
leaps at her shoe.

"How did you get up that tree?"  The question was wrung from
Jaikie, a specialist in such matters, as he regarded the branchless
bole and the considerable elevation of the bough on which she sat.

"Quite easily," was the answer.  "I have climbed much harder trees
than this.  But that is not the question.  What are you two doing
here?"

"What are you?"

"I have permission to go anywhere in the Castle grounds.  I have a
key for the gates.  But you are trespassers, and there will be an
awful row if Mackillop catches you."

"We're not," said Dougal.  "We're carrying a letter from Mr Craw to
Mr Barbon.  I have it in my pocket."

"Is that true?"  The eyes were sceptical, but also startled.

For answer Dougal drew the missive from his inner pocket.  "There
it is:  'The Honourable Frederick Barbon.'  Look for yourself!"

The girl peered down at the superscription.  The degraded envelope
of Mrs Catterick's did not perhaps carry conviction, but something
in the two faces below persuaded her of their honesty.  With a
swift movement she wriggled out of the crutch, caught a bough with
both hands, and dropped lightly to the ground.  With two deft kicks
she repelled the attentions of Tactful and Pensive, and stood
before the travellers, smoothing down her short skirt.  She was
about Jaikie's height, very slim and straight, and her interrogation
was that of a general to his staff.

"You come from Mr Craw?"

"Yes."

"When did you leave him?"

"Last night."

"Glory be!  Let's sit down.  There's no hurry, and we must move
very carefully.  For I may as well let you know that the Devil has
got into this place.  Yes.  The Devil.  I don't quite know what
form he has taken, but he's rampant in Castle Gay.  I came here
this morning to prospect, for I feel in a way responsible.  You see
it belongs to my father, and Mr Craw's our tenant.  My name is
Alison Westwater."

"Same name as the pub in Starr?" asked Dougal, who liked to connect
his knowledge organically.

She nodded.  "The Westwater Arms.  Yes, that's my family.  I live
at the Mains with my aunt, while Papa and Mamma are on the
Continent.  I wouldn't go.  I said, 'You can't expect me after a
filthy summer in London to go ramping about France wearing tidy
clothes and meeting the same idiotic people.'  I had a year at
school in Paris and that gave me all the France I want in this
life.  I said, 'Castle Gay's my home, though you've chosen to let
it to a funny little man, and I'm not going to miss my whack of
Scotland.'  So I hopped it here at the end of July, and I've been
having a pretty peaceful time ever since.  You see, all the outdoor
people are OUR people, and Mr Craw has been very nice about it, and
lets me fish in the Callowa and all the lochs and treat the place
as if he wasn't there."

"Do you know Mr Craw well?" Dougal asked.

"I have seen him three times and talked to him once--when Aunt
Harriet took me to tea with him.  I thought him rather a dear, but
quite helpless.  Talks just like a book, and doesn't appear to
understand much of what you say to him.  I suppose he is very
clever, but he seems to want a lot of looking after.  You never saw
such a staff.  There's a solemn butler called Bannister.  I believe
Bannister washes Mr Craw's face and tucks him into bed. . . .
There's a typewriting woman by the name of Cazenove with a sharp
nose and horn spectacles, who never takes her eyes off him, and is
always presenti