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When he had finished he had a rope running through pulleys from the big gate up over the gable of the bridge and to the porch of the toll-house. "There," he muttered, with great satisfaction, "that's the first bear-trap I ever set, and it ain't no extra sort of job, but I reckon when old grizzly goes ag'inst it he'll cal'late that this 'ere is a toll-bridge." Then came days of anxious waiting.
I often went to see him in his little toll-house. He joined in my childish games, told me his finest stories, and let me gather his flowers. Deprived as he was of all external attractiveness, he showed himself full of kindness to all who came to him, and, though he never would put himself forward, he had a welcome for everyone.
Perhaps the silence which had hardened between them since the day the question of his money had been discussed would break now. The late afternoon was warm with the yellow haze of October sunshine when they walked out over the bridge to the toll-house wharf, where Blair hired a boat.
Blair laughed, and said he would make her "treat" for a change, and she replied that she couldn't afford it. At the toll-house he urged again, with gay obstinacy. "Oh, come in! You needn't eat the stuff, but just for the fun of the thing; Mrs. Todd will be charmed to see us, I'm sure." "Well," Elizabeth agreed; for a moment the vapid talk was like balm laid upon burnt flesh.
And how I liked his calling me a good lass it was better than princess! We crossed the bridge slowly, lingering with half the car in England, half in Scotland; then suddenly we sprang on gayly, with a rush ahead, past the famous toll-house, which looked exactly like all its pictures. "Ho for Scotland our ain countree!"
My own adventures how I grew from garment to garment, how I became a law-student, and at length a writer myself have little to do with the present narrative, and are therefore spared the reader in detail; but the first startling intelligence I received from home was, that English John had resigned his important office at the toll-house, and gone, nobody knew whither!
Once or twice he drew near enough to fire his pistols through the doors and windows of the toll-house, and so great was the spell of terror surrounding the person of the terrible adventurer that nobody ventured outside the city wall to try and capture him; nay, the burgesses even remained under arms in the streets all night guarding the principal entrances for fear lest Fatia Negra and his band might take it into their heads to formally besiege the place, and, had it only depended upon his will to do so, he would assuredly have made the attempt.
Methinks, for a person whose instinct bids him rather to pore over the current of life than to plunge into its tumultuous waves, no undesirable retreat were a toll-house beside some thronged thoroughfare of the land.
The franchise of the town was extended to the rural possessions of the Abbey without it; the farmers "came to the toll-house, were written in the alderman's roll, and paid the town-penny." A chance story preserved in a charter of later date shows the same struggle for justice going on in a greater town.
Without the river there could not have been a bridge; the fact of the bridge may have made him look for the river; but the bridge is foremost in his mind. It is a long wooden tunnel, with two roadways, and a foot-path on either side of these; there is a toll-house at each end, and from one to the other it is about as far as from the Earth to the planet Mars.
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