The General was quartered at the "Swan with Two Necks," a very respectable hostelry, where my first care was to have a cloth thrown over Sultan, and to order for him a bucket of warm small beer with three or four handfuls of oatmeal stirred into it. While this was adoing, and I was awaiting a summons to his lordship's presence, I took a nip of brandy in the public room of the inn, and over it amused myself by reading a crude fly-sheet nailed on the wall, offering a reward of fifty guineas to anyone giving information leading to the arrest of one Samuel Nixon, commonly called 'Swift Nicks,' a notorious highwayman, six feet high, of very genteel appearance, well-spoken, but a cruel, bloody ruffian with it all. The Highlander interrupted my reading by beckoning me to follow him. Upstairs we went, and he ushered me into a room where were two gentlemen seated on opposite sides of a table on which were a small map and two large glasses containing a yellowish liquid.
The younger of them was of much the same general appearance as Maclachlan, though by the look of him a simpler and sweeter man. The other, a middle-aged, domineering man with a powerful face, looked angrily at me as I handed him my dispatch.
He read it impatiently, threw it down beside the map, and said, "They're coming on to-night, Davie." Then, curtly to me, "Your name, sir?"
"Wheatman of the Hanyards."
"Hanyards? Humph! Are you an Irishman?"
"No, my lord. Not even a Scotchman!"
He glared at me, but his companion laughed, and said, "That's one under your short ribs, Geordie!"
"Damn the Irish!" cried Murray. "They're the ruination of the whole business, Davie, and ye know it."
"Of course they are," he replied, "but that's no reason for telling it to an English loon who thinks less of a Scotchman than he does of a pickelt herring."
"That may be, my lord," said I to him, "but I think so well of one Scottish lady that I'm proud to be her humble courier." And I handed him his letter.