The Paymaster was abashed, but “Just consider, Colin,” he pleaded. “I am not so young as I was, and a bonny-like thing it would be to throttle him on the ground he gave.”
“Old Mars!” cried the Cornal, with a sneer. “Man! but MacColl hit your character when he made his song; you were always well supplied by luck with excuses for not fighting.”
To the General the Paymaster turned with piteous appeal. “Dugald,” said he, “I’ll leave it to you if Colin’s acting fairly. Did ever I disgrace the name of Campbell, or Gael, or soger?”
“I never said you did,” cried the Cornal. “All I said was that fate was a scurvy friend to you and seldom put you face to face with your foe on any clear issue. Perhaps I said too much; I’m hot-tempered, I know; never mind my taunt, John. But you’ll allow it’s galling to have a beggarly upstart like Turner throwing our bachelorhood in our teeth. Now if we had sons, or a son, one of us, I’ll warrant we could bring him up with more credit than Turner brings up his long-lugged Sandy, or that randy lass of his.”
“Isn’t that what I told him?” said the Paymaster, scooping a great heap of dust into his nostrils, and feverishly rubbing down the front of his vest with a large handkerchief. “I wish——”
He stopped suddenly; he looked hard at Gilian, whose presence in the shadow of the big chair he had seemingly forgotten; seeing him gaze thus and pause, the Cornal turned too and looked at the youth, and the General shrugged himself into some interest in the same object. Before the gaze of the three brothers, the boy’s skin burned; his eyes dropped.
“This is a queer callant you’ve brought us here,” said the Cornal, nudging his brother and nodding in Gilian’s direction. “I’ve seen some real diverts in my time, but he beats all. And you have a notion to make a soger of him, they tell me. You heard that yourself, didn’t you, General?”
The General made no reply, for he was looking at the portrait of himself when he was thirty-five, and to sit doing nothing in a house would have been torture.
“I only said it in the by-going to Mary,” explained the Paymaster humbly. “The nature for sogering is the gift of God, and the boy may have it or he may not; it is too soon to say.”
“There’s no more of the soger in him than there is of the writer in me!” cried the Cornal; “but there’s something by-ordinar in him all the same. It’s your affair, John, but—” He stopped short and looked again at Gilian and hummed and ha’d a little and fingered his stock. “Man, do you know I would not say but here’s your son for you.”