“His name?” and MacDaly, nimble-witted as he was, could not for his life call up on the instant the name of any of his former quadrupeds. “I call him—I call him——” he responded.
His sentence was never finished. While speaking to the boys, his eye fell on a small hole in the wall, through which he took surveys of the courtyard. He still kept up some of the traditions of a long-ago brief military experience. The washhouse was his fortress; the Pavilion sometimes the camp of an enemy, sometimes the stronghold of an ally. Just now there was a besieging force advancing upon him, consisting of two ladies. With a face of dismay he watched Stargarde coming toward his place of retreat. The figure of the young lady with her was not familiar to him. MacDaly did not care particularly who she was; he did not look at her until, as Stargarde pointed to the washhouse, the girl lifted her head. Then he clapped his hand to his mouth to restrain a shrill cry—a long unseen face had risen before him.
“Lord have mercy upon us, miserable sinners!” he gasped, and huddling the two astonished boys together, he drove them into the small room where he slept, and turning a wooden button on the door, forbade them on the peril of their lives to move hand or foot till he should tell them to do so.
“MacDaly, MacDaly—are you here?” came floating up to his room in Stargarde’s clear voice.
Shivering violently, MacDaly clutched the shoulders of the half-frightened, half-angry boys. “Whisht—whisht,” he said in a warning undertone to them.
“Not home yet,” they heard her say to her companion. “I must send some one to look for him.”[him.”]
When the sound of their footsteps died away, the boys wrathfully demanded an explanation from MacDaly, for they plainly saw that they had been deceived in the matter of the pup.
Instead of an explanation they received a temperance lecture. Shocked once more into partial sobriety, the miserable man, with the fumes of liquor still on his breath, and with an earnestness that impressed the boys in spite of their anger, begged and prayed them never to touch a drop of anything stronger than water.
“It will be the ruin of you, my lads,” he said brushing the moisture from his bleared eyes. “Swear by your fathers and mothers that you’ll leave the cursed stuff alone. ’Twill make ye anything—thieves, liars, and even murderers.”
The boys, more struck by his extraordinary ascent from foolishness and frivolity to impassioned and clear language, than by the fervor of his exhortations, shook off his persuasive hand and, assuring him that they could take care of themselves, insisted upon their immediate release from his room.