“Found him,” the little man replied, sucking his twig. “Found him in ma stockin' on ma birthday. A present from ma leetle David for his auld dad, I doot.”
“So do I,” said Tammas, and was seized with sudden spasm of seemingly causeless merriment. For looking up as M'Adam was speaking, he had caught a glimpse of a boy's fair head, peering cautiously round the cow-shed, and, behind, the flutter of short petticoats. They disappeared as silently as they had come; and two small figures, just returned from school, glided away and sought shelter in the friendly darkness of a coal-hole.
“Coom awa', Maggie, coom awa'! 'Tis th' owd un, 'isself,” whispered a disrespectful voice.
M'Adam looked round suspiciously.
“What's that?” he asked sharply.
At the moment, however, Mrs. Moore put her head out of the kitchen window.
“Coom thy ways in, Mister M'Adam, and tak' a soop o' tea,” she called hospitably.
“Thank ye kindly, Mrs. Moore, I will,” he answered, politely for him. And this one good thing must be allowed of Adam M'Adam: that, if there was only one woman of whom he was ever known to speak well, there was also only one, in the whole course of his life, against whom he ever insinuated evil—and that was years afterward, when men said his brain was sapped. Flouts and jeers he had for every man, but a woman, good or bad, was sacred to him. For the sex that had given him his mother and his wife he had that sentiment of tender reverence which, if a man still preserve, he cannot be altogether bad. As he turned into the house he looked back at Red Wull.
“Ay, we may leave him,” he said. “That is, gin ye're no afraid, Mr. Thornton?”
Of what happened while the men were within doors, it is enough to tell two things. First, that Owd Bob was no bully. Second, this: In the code of sheep-dog honor there is written a word in stark black letters; and opposite it another word, writ large in the color of blood. The first is “Sheep-murder”; the second, “Death.” It is the one crime only to be wiped away in blood; and to accuse of the crime is to offer the one unpardonable insult. Every sheep-dog knows it, and every shepherd.