The price was paid and the tale told. The quick championship of the boy was engaged for the gallant dog, and Geordie's eyes sparkled at the prospect of dark adventure. Bobby was on the floor listening, ears and eyes, brambly muzzle and feathered tail alert. He listened with his whole, small, excited body, and hung on the answer to the momentous question.
“Is there no' a way to smuggle the bit dog into the kirkyard?”
It appeared that nothing was easier, “aince ye ken hoo.” Did Mr. Traill know of the internal highway through the old Cunzie Neuk at the bottom of the Row? One went up the stairs on the front to the low, timbered gallery, then through a passage as black as “Bluidy” McKenzie's heart. At the end of that, one came to a peep-hole of a window, set out on wooden brackets, that hung right over the kirkyard wall. From that window Bobby could be dropped on a certain noble vault, from which he could jump to the ground.
“Twa meenits' wark, stout hearts, sleekit footstaps, an' the fearsome deed is done,” declared twelve-year-old Geordie, whose sense of the dramatic matched his daring.
But when the deed was done, and the two stood innocently on the brightly lighted approach to the bridge, Mr. Traill had his misgivings. A well-respected business man and church-member, he felt uneasy to be at the mercy of a laddie who might be boastful.
“Geordie, if you tell onybody about this I'll have to give you a licking.”
“I wullna tell,” Geordie reassured him. “It's no' so respectable, an' syne ma mither'd gie me anither lickin', an' they'd gie me twa more awfu' aces, an' black marks for a month, at Heriot's.”
V.
Word had been left at all the inns and carting offices about both markets for the tenant of Cauldbrae farm to call at Mr. Traill's place for Bobby. The man appeared Wednesday afternoon, driving a big Clydesdale horse to a stout farm cart. The low-ceiled dining-room suddenly shrank about the big-boned, long legged hill man. The fact embarrassed him, as did also a voice cultivated out of all proportion to town houses, by shouting to dogs and shepherds on windy shoulders of the Pentlands.