“Mr. Smart,” said the big man, “this is a market day, but I shall need to ride and see if this is well founded. You will put on your coat decently and take my work. Abraham has already as much as he can do. Be short with them—they will not come wanting to drink with you as they do with me! If what this good Cameronian says be true at this moment, as I have no doubt it was when he left Marnhoul, the sooner I, Richard Poole, am on the spot the better.”
So he bade us haste and get our beast out of the yard. As for him he was booted and spurred and buckskinned already. He had nothing to do but mount and ride.
All this had passed so quickly that I had hardly time to think on the strangeness of it. Our Mr. Poole, he to whom my uncle Rob had given such a stamp, was not the partner in the ancient firm of Smart, Poole and Smart of the Plainstones. Of these I had seen two, and heard the busy important voice of the third in another room as we descended the stairs. They were all men very different from the viper whom my grandmother had caught as in a bag. Even Mr. Smart was a gentleman. For if he had a flannel dressing-gown on, one could see the sparkle of his paste buckles at knee and instep, and his hose were of the best black silk, as good as Doctor Gillespie’s on Sacrament Sabbath when he was going up to preach his action sermon. But our Mr. Wringham Pollixfen Poole—I would not have wiped my foot on him—though, indeed, Uncle Rob had made no bones about that matter.
CHAPTER XXI
WHILE WE SAT BY THE FIRE
Through the deep solitude of Tereggles Long Wood, past lonely lochs on which little clattering ripples were blowing, into a west that was all barred gold and red islands of fire, we rode. Or rather grandfather and I went steadily but slowly on our pony, while beside us, sometimes galloping a bit, anon trotting, came big Mr. Richard Poole on his black horse. Sometimes he would ride off up a loaning to some farm-town where he had a job to be seen to, or rap with the butt of his loaded whip at the door of some roadside inn—the Four Mile house or Crocketford, where he would call for a tankard and drain it off, as it were, with one toss of the head.
It was easy to be seen that, for some reason of his own, he did not wish to get to Heathknowes before us. Yet, after he had asked my grandfather as to the children, and some details of the attack on the house of Marnhoul (which he treated as merely an affair between two rival bands of smugglers) he was pretty silent. And as we got nearer home, he grew altogether absorbed in his thoughts.
But I could not help watching him. He looked so fine on his prancing black, with the sunset glow mellowing his ruddy health, and his curious habit of constantly making the thong of his horsewhip whistle through the air or smack against his leg.