"As the Queen of Sheba," assented the other. "Some day, perhaps, when we are better acquainted, I may tell you more of her history; but I give not my friendship lightly," he added, with a scrutinising glance from his shining grey eyes; "it is offered only to those who owe me, or to whom I owe, a heavy debt of gratitude."
"I am sure I ought to be grateful to you," said John Garnet, "and so I am; but I can do nothing to prove it till you get me off this bed, and out of this room. Then, Doctor, speak up boldly. Say what you want, and I am your man!"
The other laughed a noiseless laugh, peculiar to himself. "You owe me but little as yet," said he; "perhaps you may live to be deeper in my debt than for the healing of a scratch. Not that I mean to say the scratch was a trifling one. I tell you honestly, many a surgeon would have given your case up as hopeless; and you ought to be thankful, if you young men ever are thankful, that you fell into my hands. No; for a bold, enterprising fellow, in the prime of life and strength, whose fingers, as I guess, close round his hilt pretty readily, I might do something better than stop a hole in the side. There are paths to fortune, plenty of them, for men who look upward and onward, steep it may be, and leading through miry places, not seldom slippery with blood. To a bold spirit this is half the charm! You are lying here, unable to leave your bed to-day; but do you not long for the time when you shall be riding wild horses, pledging lawless healths, drinking, dicing, and brawling once more? When the frost is bitter, and the earth white with snow, and the robin hops to your window for crumbs, do you not look forward to the opening spring, the soft south wind, the coming of the blackbird at last?"
A look of intelligence passed between them, and the sick man's eye brightened. It was the pass-word of a losing, nay, of a ruined cause. The handful of Jacobites remaining in England had not yet relinquished all hope of his return, who had proved indeed a bird of ill-omen, blacker than night, to those whose loyalty waged life and lands on his behalf.
"Nay, Doctor," said the other, with a flush of pride on his face, "the blackbird's whistle has cost us simply all we had, but not one of us ever complained; we bought defeat too dear."
"I know you, John Garnet," answered Katerfelto. "You come of a trusty race."
"Know me!" repeated the other, "How did you find me out? I would have told you without hesitation, but you never asked my name—no more did Waif."
"I know a great many things," replied the charlatan. "In many ways you could not understand, unless you had studied, as I have, the hidden mysteries of Heaven and Earth, and of places under the Earth. I know that the Garnets lost titles and lands for the—for the Black-bird—we will say. I know that the last of them would leap from that bed, bandages and all, to burn powder and draw steel if the yellow beak did but so much as whistle from its garden in the South."
"You learned all that in the 'Annual Register' or the 'North Britain,'" said John Garnet, proudly, "but how did you guess I belonged to the family who have been so loyal, so constant, and proved themselves such—fools?"