All that day M'Adam sat in his kitchen, drinking, muttering, hatching revenge.
“Curse it, Wullie! curse it! The time's slippin'—slippin'—slippin'! Thursday next—but three days mair! and I haena the proof—I haena the proof!”—and he rocked to and fro, biting his nails in the agony of his impotence.
All day long he never moved. Long after sunset he sat on; long after dark had eliminated the features of the room.
“They're all agin us, Wullie. It's you and I alane, lad. M'Adam's to be beat somehow, onyhow; and Moore's to win. So they've settled it, and so 'twill be—onless, Wullie, onless—but curse it! I've no the proof!”—and he hammered the table before him and stamped on the floor.
At midnight he arose, a mad, desperate plan looming through his fuddled brain.
“I swore I'd pay him, Wullie, and I will. If I hang for it I'll be even wi' him. I haena the proof, but I know—I know!” He groped his way to the mantel piece with blind eyes and swirling brain. Reaching up with fumbling hands, he took down the old blunderbuss from above the fireplace.
“Wullie,” he whispered, chuckling hideously, “Wullie, come on! You and I—he! he!” But the Tailless Tyke was not there. At nightfall he had slouched silently out of the house on business he best wot of. So his master crept out of the room alone—on tiptoe, still chuckling.
The cool night air refreshed him, and he stepped stealthily along, his quaint weapon over his shoulder: down the hill; across the Bottom; skirting the Pike; till he reached the plank-bridge over the Wastrel.
He crossed it safely, that Providence whose care is drunkards placing his footsteps. Then he stole up the slope like a hunter stalking his prey.
Arrived at the gate, he raised himself cautiously, and peered over into the moonlit yard. There was no sign or sound of living creature. The little gray house slept peacefully in the shadow of the Pike, all unaware of the man with murder in his heart laboriously climbing the yard-gate.