‘Ye s’ get that,’ answered Marion. ‘But what want ye a can’le for i’ the braid mids o’ the daylicht?’
‘We want to gang doon a hole,’ replied Steenie with flashing eyes, ‘and see the pictur o’ the bonny man.’
‘Hoot, Steenie! I tellt ye it wasna there,’ interposed Kirsty.
‘Na,’ returned Steenie; ‘ye only said yon hole wasna that place. Ye said the bonny man was there, though I michtna see him. Ye didna say the pictur wasna there.’
‘The pictur’s no there, Steenie.—We’ve come upon a hole, mother, ’at we want to gang doon intil and see what it’s like,’ said Kirsty.
‘The weicht o’ my feet brak throu intil ’t,’ added Steenie.
‘Preserve ’s, lassie! tak tent whaur ye cairry the bairn!’ cried the mother. ‘But, eh, tak him whaur ye like,’ she substituted, correcting herself. ‘Weel ken I ye’ll tak him naegait but whaur it’s weel he sud gang! The laddie needs twa mithers, and the Merciful has gien him the twa! Ye’re full mair his mither nor me, Kirsty!’
She asked no more questions, but got them the candle and let them go. They hastened back, Steenie in his most jubilant mood, which seemed always to have in it a touch of deathly frost and a flash as of the primal fire. What could be the strange displacement or maladjustment which, in the brain harbouring the immortal thing, troubled it so, and made it yearn after an untasted liberty? The source of his jubilance now was easy to tell: the idea of the bonny man was henceforth, in that troubled brain of his, associated with the place into which they were about to descend.
The moment they reached the spot, Kirsty, to the renewed astonishment of Steenie, dived at once into the ground at her feet, and disappeared.
‘Kirsty! Kirsty!’ he cried out after her, and danced like a terrified child. Then he shook with a fresh dismay at the muffled sound that came back to him in answer from the unseen hollows of the earth.