“Wha’s there?” growled a deep rough voice; “open, I’m a freend.”
I tried to speak, but could not; something like a halfpenny roll was sticking in my throat, so I tried
to cough it up, but it would not come. “Gie the pass-word then,” said the laddie, staring as if his eyes would loup out; “gie the pass-word!”
First came a loud whistle, and then “Copmahagen,” answered the voice. Oh! what a relief! The laddie started up, like one crazy with joy. “Ou! ou!” cried he, thrawing round the key, and rubbing his hands; “by jingo, it’s the bethrel—it’s the bethrel—it’s auld Isaac himsell.”
First rushed in the dog, and then Isaac, with his glazed hat, slouched over his brow, and his horn bowet glimmering by his knee. “Has the French landed, do ye think? Losh keep us a’,” said he, with a smile on his half-idiot face (for he was a kind of a sort of a natural, with an infirmity in his leg), ‘“od sauf us, man, put by your gun. Ye dinna mean to shoot me, do ye? What are ye about here with the door lockit? I just keepit four resurrectioners louping ower the wall.”
“Gude guide us!” I said, taking a long breath to drive the blood from my heart, and something relieved by Isaac’s company—“Come now, Isaac, ye’re just gieing us a fright. Isn’t that true, Isaac?”
“Yes, I’m joking—and what for no?—but they might have been, for onything ye wad hae hindered them to the contrair, I’m thinking. Na, na, ye maunna lock the door; that’s no fair play.”
When the door was put ajee, and the furm set fornent
the fire, I gave Isaac a dram to keep his heart up on such a cold stormy night. ’Od, but he was a droll fellow, Isaac. He sung and leuch as if he had been boozing in Luckie Thamson’s, with some of his drucken cronies. Feint a hair cared he about auld kirks, or kirkyards, or vouts, or through-stanes, or dead folk in their winding-sheets, with the wet grass growing over them, and at last I began to brighten up a wee myself; so when he had gone over a good few funny stories, I said to him, quoth I, “Mony folk, I daresay, mak mair noise about their sitting up in a kirkyard than it’s a’ worth. There’s naething here to harm us?”
“I beg to differ wi’ ye there,” answered Isaac, taking out his horn mull from his coat pouch, and tapping on the lid in a queer style—“I could gie anither version of that story. Did ye no ken of three young doctors—Eirish students—alang with some resurrectioners, as waff and wile as themsells, firing shottie for shottie with the guard at Kirkmabreck, and lodging three slugs in ane of their backs, forbye firing a ramrod through anither ane’s hat?”