"I ne'er boast," was the reply. "I'm just a canny Scotsman, that's all. If I told all I kenned—weel, I might become popular. But a still tongue makes a wise heid."
"If you are Willie Fearn's brother," said the judge, and it pained him to say what next passed his lips, but as I have said, he was eager to catch at any straw, "you knew Jean Lindsay?"
"Ay, I kenned her weel," was the reply. "But I was aboot to go into the 'Hare and Hoonds,' Mr. Judge Bolitho. Perhaps for the sake of the time when you called yourself Graham you might like to give me a drop of whisky?"
"Come with me," said the judge. "I want to talk with you. If we go up Liverpool Road it will be quiet there. But stay, come with me to the house I'm staying at."
"Dootless you keep a bottle of good whisky in the cupboard there?"
"You shall not regret going," said the judge, and he led the way to Paul's house.
Half an hour later the two sat together in Paul's study. During their walk thither the man of the law had been thinking deeply. He had been trying to piece together the conversation he had heard in the market-place, trying to understand the significance of what Archie Fearn had said. He had no great hope of important revelations, but a lifetime of legal training and practice had proved to him that oft-times the greatest issues depended on the most trivial circumstances, and he could not afford to allow the most insignificant happening to pass by unnoticed.
"How long have you been in Brunford?" asked the judge.
"Since a month before Christmas," was the reply.
"You came here to get work?"