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I scudded through the village, passing from one end of the long street to the other. Constable Jacky in his shirt sleeves, was peaceably peeling potatoes on his doorstep, while with a pipe in his mouth Boyd Connoway was looking on and telling him how. The village of Eden Valley was never quieter.
Connoway, that young Sir Louis is likely to recover after the knock on the head he got from your friend. But the wonder to me is that you did not speak more plainly when there was a former fatal assault in the same place." "Now, I put it to ye, sorr, what was a poor woman like me to know about the affairs of the great, my lord?" said Bridget.
What would the "poor childer," what would Bridget herself do without Ephraim? Bridget was not quite sure whether she kept Ephraim or whether Ephraim kept her. At any rate it was not to Boyd Connoway that she and her offspring were anyways indebted for care and sustenance. "The craitur," said Bridget affectionately, "he pays the very rint!"
But Bridget Connoway, instant and authoritative as she was, could not prevent her down-trodden husband from thinking. Who was the mysterious wounded man "down-the-house"? One of the White Smugglers? Hardly.
We gazed earnestly, following the straw and gradually we could see, rising into the still air an unmistakable "pew" of palest blue smoke which, as we looked, changed into a dense white pillar that rose steadily upwards, detaching itself admirably against the deep green black of the Scotch firs behind. "There," said Connoway gravely, "yonder is your ghost mending his fire!"
"Oh, Bridget," he said, shrugging his shoulders with a wearied air, "Bridget doesn't know when she's well off. Och, the craitur! It began with the night of the September Fair. Now, it is known to all the countryside that Boyd Connoway is no drinker. He will sit and talk, as is just and sociable, but nothing more. No, Miss Irma. And so I told Bridget.
"Faith, sir, come to Galloway," he cried open-heartedly "there's the place to provide work for the like of you lads. And it's Boyd Connoway will introduce you to all the excise-case defendants from Annan Port to Loch Ryan. It's him that knows every man and mother's son of them! And who, if ye plaise, has a better right?"
Or Boyd Connoway would tell of the Golden Hind having been seen out in the channel, of rafts of "buoyed" casks sunk to within three foot of the bottom, to be fished up when on a dark night the herring craft slipped out of Balcary or the Scaur, silent as a shadow. These had come to thank Mary Lyon, but could not get a word out.
At which Boyd Connoway laughed for the first time since he had come into the presence of his betters. "No," he said, "for the last time I saw him he was under the sheets with one of my sarks on, and Bridget's best linen sheet tied in ribbons about his head." "And how, then, was he dressed?" said the Fiscal, with a glance of scorn at Shepstone. "Oh," answered Boyd Connoway, "just like you or me.
The General, who thought that he spoke in a mood of mockery, cautioned him that they were met there on a business of life and death, and were in no mood to be trifled with. Therefore, he, Boyd Connoway, had better keep his foolery for another time!
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