At last his fit of coughing ceased, and a kind of peace came into his face.
“Allen, my dear old boy,” I said—I don’t often use the language of affection—“did you never hear that all that stupid story was cleared up; that everyone knows you are innocent?”
He only shook his head; he did not dare to speak, but he looked happier, and he put his hand in mine.
I sat holding his hand, stroking it. I don’t know how long I sat there; I had put my coat and waterproof under him. He was “wet through,” of course; there was little use in what I did. What could I do with him? how bring him to a warm and dry place?
The idea seemed to strike him, for he half rose and pointed to the little burnside, across the loch. A plan occurred to me; I tore a leaf from my sketch-book, put the paper with pencil in his hand, and said, “Where do you live? Don’t speak. Write.”
He wrote in a faint scrawl, “Help me to that burnside. Then I can guide you.”
I hardly know how I got him there, for, light as he was, I am no Hercules. However, with many a rest, we reached the little dell; and then I carried him up its green side, and laid him on the heather of the moor.
He wrote again:
“Go to that clump of rushes—the third from the little hillock. Then look, but be careful. Then lift the big grass tussock.”
The spot which Allen indicated was on the side of a rather steep grassy slope. I approached it, dragged at the tussock of grass, which came away easily enough, and revealed the entrance to no more romantic hiding-place than an old secret whiskey “still.” Private stills, not uncommon in Sutherland and some other northern shires, are extinct in Galloway. Allen had probably found this one by accident in his wanderings, and in his half-insane bitterness against mankind had made it, for some time at least, his home. The smoke-blackened walls, the recesses where the worm-tub and the still now stood, all plainly enough betrayed the original user of the hiding-place. There was a low bedstead, a shelf or two, whereon lay a few books—a Shakespeare, a Homer, a Walton, Plutarch’s “Lives”; very little else out of a library once so rich. There was a tub of oatmeal, a heap of dry peat, two or three eggs in a plate, some bottles, a keg of whiskey, some sardine-tins, a box with clothes—that was nearly all the “plenishing” of this hermitage. It was never likely to be discovered, except by the smoke, when the inmate lit a fire. The local shepherd knew it, of course, but Allen had bought his silence, not that there were many neighbours for the shepherd to tattle with.