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On the same evening, I placed one of the notes in Rory's hand, adjuring him not to let the storekeeper know anything about it, but to depart from me while he was safe. He shrank from the note as from a lizard, while his lip quivered, and he tried to swallow his emotion down.
He's up first!" cried a girl whose brilliant complexion and still more brilliant locks proclaimed her relationship to the captain of the north side. "Huh! Barney'll soon catch him, you'll see," cried Margaret. "Oh, Barney, hurry! hurry!" "Indeed, he will need to hurry," cried Rory's sister, mercilessly exultant. "He's up! He's up!"
It is a morally upsetting thing, for instance, to discover that the unassuming Londoner, to whom you have been somewhat loosely explaining the pedigrees of the British Peerage, has spent most of his life as a clerk in the Heralds' College. But I noticed a growing uneasiness in Rory's manner, despite his efforts towards a free-and-easy cordiality.
A long term of self-communion in the back country will never leave a man as it found him. Outside his daily avocation, he becomes a fool or a philosopher; and, in Rory's case, the latter seemed to have been superimposed on the former. At ten o'clock, I hunted him to bed. I had plenty of blank forms in my writing-case, and on these I took a preliminary copy of A Plea for Woman.
Both were framers, both famous captains, and more than once had they led the opposing forces at raisings. The awkward silence following Rory's hot speech was relieved by Charley Boyle's ready wit. "We'll divide the work, boys," he said. "Some men do the liftin' and others the yellin'. Tom and me'll do the yellin'."
An obvious rejoinder rose to my mind, but evidently not to Rory's, for the look on his face told only of a dogged resolution to continue sinning against the light. He knew that his own contumacy in this respect would land his soul in perdition, and he deliberately let it go at that. Brave old Rory!
My first impulse was to hail him with a friendly greeting, but a scruple of punctilio made me pause. The clearing of Rory's horse-paddock was visible here and there through gaps in the scrub; even the hut was in sight from my own point of view; the sun was still a couple of hours above the horizon; and the repose of the wilga shade was more to be desired than the activity of the wood-heap.
"Ay, is there?" said Ody. "But the fac' is Rory's in none too good a temper this minyit, goodness help him, and he'll be apt to thravel more contint, the crathur, if he sees he's not the on'y body wid a loadin'." "Rax me over the one of them," said Hugh, "I've nought barrin' the bit of ribbon, and the rapin'-hook 'ill be nothin' to me at all." And in this way they plodded back to Lisconnel.
He's won!" shrieked Rory's admiring faction. "Barney! Barney!" screamed his contingent reproachfully. "Well done, Rory! Keep at it! You've got them beaten!" "Beaten, indeed!" was the scornful reply. "Just wait a minute." "They're at the 'purlines'!" shrieked Rory's sister, and her friends, proceeding to scream wildly after the female method of expressing emotion under such circumstances.
We will not be forgetting, brethren," said old Donald, "that there will be sore hearts here this night. Straight Rory's answer was a sigh so woeful and so deep that Yankee looked over at him and remarked in an undertone to Ranald, "He ain't so cheerful as he might be. He must feel awful inside." "It is a sad and terrible day for the Camerons," said Peter McRae.
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