“Oh, aye!” returned Lang Tammas. “I dinna ken hoo to deny that I hed that to say to him, an’ to do to him as weel. I’m a vairy truthfu’ mon, young lady, an’ if ye must be told, I’ve called to wring his garry neck for dereesively gee’in an unoffending veesitor frae Thrums by yelling deealect at him frae the hoose-tops.”
“Are you sure it was here?” asked the nurse, anxiously, the old gentleman seemed so deeply in earnest.
“Sure? Oh, aye—pairfectly,” replied Lang Tammas; but even as he spoke, the falsity of his impression was proved by the same strident voice that had so offended before, coming from the other side of the street:
“What a crittur ye are, ye cow! What a crittur ye are!”
“Soonds are hard to place, ma’am,” said Lang Tammas, jerking about as if he had been shot. It was a very hard position for the old man, for, with the immediate need for an apology to the nurse, there rushed over him an overwhelming wave of anger. Hitherto it was merely a suspicion that he was being made sport of that had irritated him, but this last outburst—“What a crittur ye are, ye cow!”—was convincing evidence that it was to him that the insults were addressed; for in Thrums it is history that Hendry and T’nowhead and Jim McTaggart frequently greeted Lang Tammas’s jokes with “Oh, ye cow!” and “What a crittur ye are!” But the old man was equal to the emergency, and fixing one eye upon the house opposite and the other upon the sweet-faced nurse, he darted glances that should kill at his persecutor, and at the same time apologized for disturbing the nurse. The latter he did gracefully.
“Ye look aweary, ma’am,” he said. “An’ if the head o’ the hoose maun dee, may he dee immejiately, that ye may rest soon.”
And with this, pulling his hat down over his forehead viciously, he turned and sped swiftly across the way. The nurse gazed anxiously after him, and in her secret soul wondered if she would not better send for Jamie McQueen, the town constable. Poor Tammas’s eye was really so glaring, and his whole manner so manifestly that of a man exasperated to the verge of madness, that she considered him somewhat in the light of a menace to the public safety. She was not at all reassured, either, when Tammas, having reached the other side of the street, began gesticulating wildly, shaking his “faithfu’ steck” at the façade of the confronting flat-house. But an immediate realization of the condition of the sick man above led her to forego the attempt to protect the public safety, and closing the door softly to, she climbed the weary stairs to the sixth floor, and soon forgot the disturbing trial of the morning in reading to her patient certain inspiring chapters from the Badminton edition of Haggert’s Chase of Heretics, relieved with the lighter Rules of Golf; or, Auld Putt Idylls, by the Rev. Ian McCrockett, one of the most exquisitely confusing humorous works ever published in the Highlands.
Lang Tammas meanwhile was addressing an invisible somebody in the building over the way, and in no uncertain tones.
“If I were not a geentlemon and a humorist,” he said, impressively, agitating his stick nervously at the building front, “I could say much that nae Scut may say. But were I nae Scut, I’d say this to ye: ‘Ye have all the eelements of a confairmed heeritic. Ye’ve nae sense of deecint fun. Ye’re not a man for a’ that, as most men air—ye’re an ass, plain and simple, wi’ naether the plainness nor the simpleecity o’ the individual that Balaam rode. Further—more—’”
What Lang Tammas would have said furthermore had he not been a Scot the world will never know, for from the other side of the street—farther along, however—came the squawking voice again: