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Things were certainly going badly with Toddles that night. There were four men in the car: Bob Donkin, coming back from a holiday trip somewhere up the line; MacNicoll, the baggage-master; Nulty, the express messenger and Hawkeye. Toddles' inventory of the contents of the chest had been hurried but intimate. A small bunch of six bananas was gone, and Hawkeye was munching them unconcernedly.
Hawkeye, however, had an intuition deep down inside of him that there wasn't any doubt even about that, and as he opened the door of the baggage car his intuition was vindicated. There was a grin on the faces of Nulty, MacNicoll and Bob Donkin that disappeared with suspicious celerity at sight of him as he came through the door. There was no hesitation then on Hawkeye's part.
We left the issue to MacLachlan, and I must say he came up to the demands of the moment with gentlemanliness, minding he was in another's house than his own. "What is it ye want?" he asked MacNicoll, burring out his Gaelic r's with punctilio. "We want you in room of a murderer your father owes us," said MacNicoll.
He ran back both wooden bars before I let him. With a roar and a display of teeth and steel the MacNicolls came into the lobby from the crowded stair, and we were driven to the far parlour end. In the forefront of them was Nicol Beg MacNicoll, the nearest kinsman of the murdered Braleckan lad.
"You'll rue this, MacNicoll," fumed the Provost as red as a bubblyjock at the face mopping with a napkin at his neck in a sweat of annoyance; "you'll rue it, rue it, rue it!" and he went into a coil of lawyer's threats against the invaders, talking of brander-irons and gallows, hame-sucken and housebreaking. We were a daft-like lot in that long lobby in a wan candle-light.
Of course Clan MacNicoll was brought to book for this frolic on Inneraora fair-day, banned by Kirk, and soundly beaten by the Doomster in name of law. To read some books I've read, one would think our Gaels in the time I speak of, and even now, were pagan and savage.
"Just so," he said, a little bitterly; "the advice is well meant," and on went his jacket that had hung on a peg behind him, and his bonnet played scrug on his forehead. A wiry young scamp, spirited too! He was putting his sword into its scabbard, but MacNicoll stopped him, and he went without it.
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