“I thought YOUR FRIEND, Sir James, might have told you,” continued Custer, with significant emphasis.
“I have not seen Sir James for two months.”
“Well, Malcolm's a crank—always was one, I reckon, and is reg'larly off his head now. Yes, sir; Scotch whiskey and your friend Sir James finished him. After that dinner at MacFen's he was done for—went wild. Danced a sword-dance, or a strathspey, or some other blamed thing, on the table, and yelled louder than the pipes. So they all did. Jack, I've painted the town red once myself; I thought I knew what a first-class jamboree was: but they were prayer-meetings to that show. Everybody was blind drunk—but they all got over it except HIM. THEY were a different lot of men the next day, as cool and cautious as you please, but HE was shut up for a week, and came out crazy.”
“But what's that to do with his claim?”
“Well, there ain't much use 'whooping up the boys' when only the whooper gets wild.”
“Still, that does not affect any right he may have in the property.”
“But it affects the syndicate,” said Custer gloomily; “and when we found that he was whooping up some shopkeepers and factory hands who claimed to belong to the clan,—and you can't heave a stone at a dog around here without hitting a McHulish,—we concluded we hadn't much use for him ornamentally. So we shipped him home last steamer.”
“And the property?”
“Oh, that's all right,” said Custer, still gloomily. “We've effected an amicable compromise, as Sir James calls it. That means we've taken a lot of land somewhere north, that you can shoot over—that is, you needn't be afraid of hitting a house, or a tree, or a man anywhere; and we've got a strip more of the same sort on the seashore somewhere off here, occupied only by some gay galoots called crofters, and you can raise a lawsuit and an imprecation on every acre. Then there's this soul-subduing, sequestered spot, and what's left of the old bone-boiling establishment, and the rights of fishing and peat-burning, and otherwise creating a nuisance off the mainland. It cost the syndicate only a hundred thousand dollars, half cash and half in Texan and Kentucky grass lands. But we've carried the thing through.”
“I congratulate you,” said the consul.