“At the end of the trip,” he explained. “This particular friend is not expecting me, because I hadn't a post-card, hate a letter, and don't seem to have been within shout of a telegraph-office since I left Edinburgh this morning.”
“We have just come from Edinburgh ourselves,” Miss Jean chimed in.
“So!” said the stranger, throwing his arm over the back of his seat to enter more comfortably into the conversation. “It's picturesque. Pretty peaceful, too. But it's liable to be a little shy of the Thespian muse. I didn't know more than Cooper's cow about Edinburgh when I got there last Sunday fortnight; but I've gone perusing around a bit since; and say, my! she's fine and old! I wasn't half a day in the city when I found out that when it came to the real legit. Queen Mary was the king-pin of the outfit in Edinburgh. Before I came to this country I couldn't just place Mary; sometimes she was Bloody and sometimes she was Bonnie, but I suppose I must have mixed her up with some no-account English queen of the same name.”
“Edinburgh,” said Miss Amelia, “is redolent of Mary Queen of Scots—and Robert Louis.”
“It just is!” he said. “There's a little bedroom she had in the castle yonder, no bigger than a Chicago bath-room. Why, there's hardly room for a nightmare in it; a skittish nightmare 'd kick the transom out. There doesn't seem to be a single dramatic line in the whole play that Mary didn't have to herself. She was the entire cast, and the spot-light was on her for the abduction scene, the child-widow scene, the murder, the battle, and the last tag at Fotheringay. Three husbands and a lot of flirtations that didn't come to anything, her portrait everywhere, and the newspapers tracking her up like Old Sleuth from that day to this! I guess Queen Lizzie put her feet in it when she killed Mary—for Mary's the star-line in history, and Lizzie's mainly celebrated for spoiling a good Prince Albert coat on Walter Raleigh.”
He spoke so fast, he used such curious words and idioms which the Misses Duff had never heard before nor read in books, that they were sure again he was a dreadful person. With a sudden thought of warnings to “Beware of Pickpockets” she had seen in Edinburgh, Miss Amelia clutched so hard at the chain of the reticule which held their purse as well as their mystery that it broke, and the bag fell over the side of the coach and, bursting open, scattered its contents on the road unobserved by the guard, whose bugle at the moment was loudly flourishing for the special delectation of a girl at work in a neighboring cornfield.
“Hold hard, John,” said the American, and before the coach had quite stopped he was down on the highway recovering the little teacher's property.
The serpent had unwound its coils; it lay revealed in all its hideousness—a teacher's tawse!
At such a sad exposure its owners could have wept. They had never dreamed a tawse could look so vulgar and forbidding as it looked when thus exposed to the eye of man on the king's highway.
“Oh, thank you so much,” said Miss Jean. “It is so kind of you.”