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They talked excitedly to each other, now and then vouchsafing a scrap of information to an equally excited audience. When they saw me they rose and rushed for me, and dragged me between them up the street, while the crowd tailed at our heels. "'Ye're a true prophet, Captain Thirlstone, Mackay began, 'and I ask your pardon for doubting you.
The queen was sensible of the danger attending these counsels; and after allowing James some decent interval to vent his grief and anger, she employed her emissaries to pacify him, and to set before him every motive of hope or fear which might induce him to live in amity with her. Walsingham wrote to Lord Thirlstone, James's secretary, a judicious letter to the same purpose.
The landlord came in with whisky, and banked up the peats till they glowed beneath a pall of blue smoke. "I hope to goodness we are alone," said Thirlstone, and he turned to the retreating landlord and asked the question. "There's naebody bidin' the nicht forbye yoursels," he said, "but the morn there's a gentleman comin'. I got a letter frae him the day. Maister Wiston, they ca him.
He was a dour, ill-tempered Scotsman, very anxious for the safety of his property, but perfectly careless about any danger to himself. "'Captain Thirlstone, he said, 'that Governor of yours is a damned fool. "Of course I shut him up very brusquely, but he paid no attention.
The sitting-room at the inn is a place of comfort, and while Thirlstone warmed his long back at the fire I sank contentedly into one of the well-rubbed leather arm-chairs. The company of a friend made the weather and scarcity of salmon less the intolerable grievance they had seemed an hour ago than a joke to be laughed at.
I've been in Kaffir wars afore, but I never thought I would ride without weapon of any kind into such a black Armageddon. I am a peaceable man for ordinar', and a canny one, but I wasna myself in that hour. Man, Thirlstone, I was that overcome by the spirit of your chief, that if he had bidden me gang alone on the same errand, I wouldna say but what I would have gone.
Some distant ridges of hill stood out snow-clad against the dun sky, and half in anger, half in dismal satisfaction, I told myself that fishing to-morrow would be as barren as to-day. At the inn door a tall man was stamping his feet and watching a servant lifting rodcases from a dog-cart. Hooded and wrapped though he was, my friend Thirlstone was an unmistakable figure in any landscape.
He never looked to right or left, never recognised me or anybody, for he was seeing something quite different from the red road and the white shanties and the hot sky." The fire had almost died out. Thirlstone stooped for a moment and stirred the peats. "Yes," he said, "I knew that in his fool's ear the trumpets of all Asia were ringing, and the King of Bokhara was entering Samarkand."
Maybe ye ken him?" I started at the name, which I knew very well. Thirlstone, who knew it better, stopped warming himself and walked to the window, where he stood pulling his moustache and staring at the snow. When the man had left the room, he turned to me with the face of one whose mind is made up on a course but uncertain of the best method.
"I went there in '99" Thirlstone was saying, "the time Wiston and I were sent " and then he stopped, and his eager face clouded. Wiston's name cast a shadow over our reminiscences. "What did he actually do?" I asked after a short silence. "Pretty bad! He seemed a commonplace, good sort of fellow, popular, fairly competent, a little bad-tempered perhaps.
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