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They chased the neighbors' cows from the fields out to the road, and the pigs from the road into the fields. They climbed trees and stole birds' nests. They dammed the creek and flooded Cameron's pasture. They teased Sandy McQuarry's old ram until it was mad with rage, and butted the ex-elder all over the barnyard.
It was in this drear, lonely place that the tramp had taken up his abode. Just where a corduroy road, now abandoned and grass-grown, passed out of the ravine and along the edge of the swamp, stood Sandy McQuarry's old lumber shanty, and here Uncle Hughie Cameron and the doctor had taken John McIntyre.
For if any one in the village was late in starting for the station, all one had to do was to wave a towel at the back door as the train slowed up over the ravine bridge, and Lauchie would wait at the station. Of course, it was understood that the belated traveler was already on the way thither, taking the path across McQuarry's fields.
When the new doctor's horse arrived, and he began to drive about the country, even the outrageous conduct of Sandy McQuarry's new watchman, and the antics of the orphans, became matters of secondary interest to the village.
You might jist be stepping up to Sandy McQuarry's and tell him not to be forgetting that this is the night to go and see poor John McIntyre." "Goody! You're a duck, Uncle Hughie. John McIntyre isn't that the tramp you found in the hollow?" "Yes; but indeed I will be thinking that it's no ordinary tramp he will be, whatever. Poor man, eh, eh, poor buddy.
The man had sat for hours gazing down the winding stream, and afterward he had said it was the Golden River, and that the place should be called Treasure Valley. But Sandy McQuarry's father, who was living then, said that onybody with a head on him could see that it was clean ridic'l'us to give a place such a daft name.
The two had not driven together since the day they had witnessed Sandy McQuarry's Waterloo, and they recalled it with laughter, and discussed, with even more merriment, the wonderful sequel.
As he was hurrying homeward he bethought himself of a short road to the village, a winter highway, that went up the ravine, past the Drowned Lands, following the old abandoned corduroy track. It had been made by Sandy McQuarry's teams hauling logs up to the mill, and being sheltered, was comparatively free from drifts.
They were returned with dignified thanks, and Silas and his wife sat and exclaimed over the strange man's obstinacy, while Davy Munn and the eldest orphan despatched the despised viands. Mrs. Long told her story the next afternoon at Miss McQuarry's, where the village mothers had met to make a quilt for the Sawyer twins' bed.
Uncle Hughie had promised the minister that they would all accompany him down the ravine to give a welcome and a kind word to the poor tramp who had come to live in Sandy McQuarry's old shanty by the Drowned Lands. So the philosopher was waiting for his friends, and as he sang he gazed expectantly up the village street.
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