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But Tarmillan and Tozer were at it again, and he was snubbed. Jimmy Wilson sniggered, and the other youngsters enjoyed his discomfiture. Huh! What right has he to set up his pipe? His shirt stuck to his back. He would have liked the ground to open and swallow him. He gulped a huge swill of whisky to cover his vexation; and oh, the mighty difference! A sudden courage flooded his veins.
Two are in a Colonial Cabinet now, two are in the poorhouse. So they go. Tarmillan was the last to arrive. He came in sucking his thumb, into which he had driven a splinter while conducting an experiment. "I've a morbid horror of lockjaw," he explained.
Partan, who liked to extend his geographical knowledge, would have talked of Tibet for the rest of the evening and Tarmie would have told him news but Allan broke in. "How's the book, Tarmillan?" he inquired. Tarmillan was engaged on a treatise which those who are competent to judge consider the best thing of its kind ever written. "Oh, don't ask me," he writhed.
"It's the danger of the aphorism," said Allan, "that it states too much in trying to be small. Tozer, what do you think?" "I never was engaged on a big subject," sniffed Tozer. "We're aware o' that!" said Tarmillan. Tozer went under, and Tarmillan had the table. Allan was proud of him. "Courage is the great thing," said he. "It often succeeds by the mere show of it.
That was the first telegram ever seen in Barbie, and it had been brought by special messenger from Skeighan. It was short and to the point. It ran: "Will buy 300 stone cheese 8 shillings stone delivery at once," and was signed by a merchant in Poltandie. Gourlay was talking to old Tarmillan of Irrendavie, when Wilson pushed in and addressed Tarmillan, without a glance at the grain-merchant.
I remember when I was gold-mining in Tibet, one of our carriers who died of lockjaw had such a circumbendibus in his body that we froze him and made him the hoop of a bucket to carry our water in. You see he was a thin bit man, and iron was scarce." "Ay, man!" cried Partan, "you've been in Tibet?" "Often," waved Tarmillan, "often! I used to go there every summer."
"I remember when Bauldy went off to Paris on the spree. He kept his mouth shut when he came back, for he was rather ashamed o' the outburst. But the bodies were keen to hear. 'What's the incense like in Notre Dame? said Johnny Coe, with his een big. 'Burning stink! said Bauldy." "I can cap that with a better one still," said Tarmillan, who wasn't to be done by any man.
"I never get a jag from a pin but I see myself in the shape of a hoop, semicircular, with my head on one end of a table, my heels on the other, and a doctor standing on my navel trying to reduce the curvature." "Gosh!" said Partan, who was a literal fool, "is that the treatment they purshoo?" "That's the treatment!" said Tarmillan, sizing up his man. "Oh, it's a queer thing lockjaw!
Tozer cleared a sarcastic windpipe. "Why do you clear your throat like that?" said Tarmillan "like a craw with the croup, on a bare branch against a gray sky in November! If I had a throat like yours, I'd cut it and be done wi't."
When Tarmillan went, and the three students were left by themselves, Gourlay continued to nag and bluster, for that blatant laugh of Armstrong's rankled in his mind. "I saw Hepburn in the street to-day," said Gillespie, by way of a diversion. "Who's Hepburn?" snapped Gourlay. "Oh, don't you remember? He's the big Border chap who got into a row with auld Tam on the day you won your prize essay."
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