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If ever I meet Stephen Mackaye again, I shall not be responsible for my actions. It passes beyond me that a man with whom I shared food and blanket, and with whom I mushed over the Chilcoot Trail, should turn out the way he did. I always sized Steve up as a square man, a kindly comrade, without an iota of anything vindictive or malicious in his nature. I shall never trust my judgment in men again.
I ha' tried it. Mony was the year I looked for nought but my ain pleasure, and got it too, when it was a' "Sandy Mackaye, bonny Sandy Mackaye, There he sits singing the lang simmer's day; Lassies gae to him, And kiss him, and woo him Na bird is sa merry as Sandy Mackaye. "An' muckle good cam' o't. Ye may fancy I'm talking like a sour, disappointed auld carle. But I tell ye nay.
Yes; it was no dream! the money was paid, and I was free! The sudden relief was as intolerable as the long burden had been; and, like a prisoner suddenly loosed from off the rack, my whole spirit seemed suddenly to collapse, and I sank with my head upon the table to faint even for gratitude. But who was my benefactor? Mackaye vouchsafed no answer, but that I "suld ken better than he."
"And now I come to that which will, comrade of my heart, bring home to your understanding what lies behind the charges against me: "Trouble came between Canada and Virginia. Major Washington, one Captain Mackaye, and myself marched out to the Great Meadows, where at Fort Necessity we surrendered, after hard fighting, to a force three times our number.
But he told me to sit down, commended me for the excellent character which he had of me both from my master and Mackaye, and then entered on the subject of my literary tastes. He heard I was a precious clever fellow. No wonder, I came of a clever stock; his poor dear brother had plenty of brains for everything but business. But without capital, I think brains a curse.
"Am I clever?" asked I, in honest surprise. "What! haven't you found that out yet? Don't try to put that on me. Don't a girl know when she's pretty, without asking her neighbours?" "Really, I never thought about it." "More simpleton you. Old Mackaye has, at all events; though, canny Scotchman that he is, he'll never say a word to you about it, yet he makes no secret of it to other people.
A little longer it delayed, howling under the stars that leaped and danced and shone brightly in the cold sky. Then it turned and trotted up the trail in the direction of the camp it knew, where were the other food-providers and fire-providers. I don't think much of Stephen Mackaye any more, though I used to swear by him. I know that in those days I loved him more than my own brother.
Oh! that I had met you before that I had had more time to speak to poor Mackaye! Oh! wait, wait there is a deliverance for you! but never in this path never. And just while I, and nobler far than I, are longing and struggling to find the means of telling you your deliverance, you, in the madness of your haste, are making it impossible!"
Even his most potent excuse that "a boy must live somehow," Crossthwaite treated as contemptuously as if he had been a very Leonidas, while Mackaye chimed in with "An' ye a Papist! ye talk o' praying to saints an' martyrs, that died in torments because they wad na do what they should na do?
And then Crossthwaite lost his temper and called the Queen's counsel a hired bully, and so went down; having done, as I was told afterwards, no good to me. And then there followed a passage of tongue fence between Mackaye and some barrister, and great laughter at the barrister's expense; and then.
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