"Yes," he said hesitatingly, "in some ways. But how do you happen to be away back here alone, Mr. McAlpine?"
The minister explained his presence. He had been asked to go to Barbay to assist with the sacrament on the following Sabbath, and had intended to spend the night with a friend and take the stage out in the morning.
"But I could not wait," he concluded, "I was constrained to come on." There was that strange gleam in his eye which had always so filled Scotty with awe in his childhood. The young man understood. Mr. McAlpine's burning restlessness, his erratic way of making arrangements to be driven to certain places, and then suddenly setting out in the dead of night to walk prodigious distances had been the wondering talk of the Oa since he was a child. For this man carried a burden of souls that gave him no rest day or night, and that even now, when he was broken and aged, sometimes drove him to stupendous labour.
"But you will surely stay here to-night!" cried Scotty, feeling in the capacity of host even in this wild tangle of forest growth. "I am camping, but there is plenty of room in the shanty, and I can cook you some supper."
The old man accepted the hospitality gratefully. He appeared worn and exhausted, and seemed to have suddenly lost his restless energy, as though the spur which had driven him forth in the night had been removed.
Scotty made a comfortable seat for him of cedar boughs placed against a large tree trunk, and stirred up the fire to a blaze. Its rays danced forth, lighting up the worn face and white hair of the old man seated before it, and the strong frame of the young one standing erect in splendid contrast. The light made the log walls of the old shanty stand forth, touched here and there the fantastic heaps of dead brushwood and misshapen stumps, illumined the underside of the adjacent trees and danced away down the dim avenues to be lost among the ghostly shadows.
And while his host prepared supper, the minister beguiled the time by asking after all his friends in the Oa and the Glen, especially the Highlanders, for Mr. McAlpine was not above possessing a little weakness for anyone who spoke the Gaelic. And then he must know what the young man was doing, and how he came to be there.
Scotty answered his questions in the distantly respectful manner that all the Glenoro youth had been wont to show this man. He explained his sudden excursion to the woods as merely a natural desire to be out of doors. He told something too of his life with Raye & Hemming in Barbay, but he had all the reticence of his class and kin, and the minister learned little from what he said.
And while they conversed the elder man was watching the younger with the keen eye of a detective. For to old John McAlpine every soul with whom he came in contact was a burden to be carried until it was laid safely at the foot of the cross, and he was yearning to know if this young man, so respectful and kindly of manner, had yet had his heart touched by Divine love.
He tried to read the dark, young face in the light of the dancing flames, noting every feature—the intellectual brow, the kind, bright eyes, the mouth, still boyish, and showing some wilfulness and impatience of rule; the resolute chin. A good face, the man concluded, with rare possibilities. But he was convinced before the conversation closed that its owner was not a follower of the meek and lowly One.