“You ken, sir,” said he in very good English—“you ken yourself what the country’s like just now, given over to unending brawl, and I am glad to see good-humoured people about me, even if they are penniless gangrels.”
“My own business is war,” I acknowledged; “I’ll be frank enough to tell you I’m just now making my way to Inneraora as well as the weather and the MacDonalds will let me.”
He was pleased at my candour, I could see; confidence is a quality that rarely fails of its purpose. He pushed the bottle towards me with the friendliest of gestures, and took the line of the fellow-conspirator.
“Keep your thumb on that,” said he; “I’m not supposed to precognosce every lodger in Tynree upon his politics. I’m off Clan Chattan myself, and not very keen on this quarrel—that’s to say, I’ll take no side in it, for my trade is feeding folk and not fighting them. Might I be asking if you were of the band of Campbells a corps of MacDonalds were chasing down the way last night?”
I admitted I was.
“I have nothing to do with it,” said he; “and I’ll do a landlord’s duty by any clan coming my way. As for my guests here, they’re so pleased to see good order broken in the land and hamlets half-harried that they’ll favour any man whose trade is the sword, especially if he’s a gentleman,” he added. “I’m one myself, though I keep a sort of poor hostel here. I’m a young son.”
We were joined by the gipsy, a bold tall man with very black and lambent eyes, hiccoughing with drink but not by any means drunken, who took out a wallet and insisted on my joining now in his drink. I dare not refuse the courtesy.
“Would you like your fortune spaed, sir?” asked my black friend, twitching his thumb in the direction of his wife, who was leering on me with a friendliness begot of the bottle. The place was full of deafening noises and peat-smoke. Fiddle jigged and pipes snored in the deep notes of debauchery, and the little Jew’s-trump twanged between the teeth of a dirty-faced man in a saffron shirt and hodden breeks, wanting jacket and hose—a wizen little old man, going around the world living like a poet in realms whereto trump and tipple could readily bring him.
“Spae my fortune!” said I, laughing; “such swatches of the same as I had in the past were of no nature to make me eager to see what was to follow.”
“Still and on,” said he, “who knows but you may find a wife and a good fortune in a little lurk of the thumb? Jean! Jean! woman,” he cried across the chamber to his callet, and over she came to a very indifferent and dubious client.