CHAPTER XX
THE REAL MR. POOLE
So in time we ran to Dumfries. And my grandfather put up at a hostelry in English Street, where were many other conveyances with their shafts canted high in the air, the day being Wednesday. He did not wait a moment even to speak to those who saluted him by name, but betook himself at once (and I with him) to the lawyers’ offices in the High Street—where it runs downhill just below the Mid Steeple.
Here we found a little knot of people. For, as it turned out (though at the time we did not know it), Messrs. Smart, Poole and Smart were agents for half the estates in Dumfriesshire, and our Galloway Marnhoul was both a far cry and a very small matter to them.
So when we had watched a while the tremors of the ingoers, all eager to ask favours, and compared them with the chastened demeanour of those coming out, my grandfather said to me with his hand on my shoulder, “I fear, Duncan lad, we shall sleep in Dumfries Tolbooth this night for making so bauld with one of a house like this!”
And from this moment I began to regard our captive Mr. Poole with a far greater respect, in spite of his pistols—which, after all, he might deem necessary when travelling into such a wild smuggling region as, at that day and date, most townsbodies pictured our Galloway to be.
We had a long time to wait in a kind of antechamber, where a man in a livery of canary and black stripes, with black satin knee-breeches and paste buckles to his shoes took our names, or at least my grandfather’s and the name of the estate about which we wanted to speak to the firm.
For, you see, there being so many to attend to on market day, they had parted them among themselves, so many to each. And when it came to our turn it was old Mr. Smart we saw. The grand man in canary and black ushered us ben, told our name, adding, “of Marnhoul estate,” as if we had been the owners thereof.