Having thus delivered my message, I thanked the Dominie very heartily, and went to the play of the golf green till the messenger should return.
I had an excellent game, but, not playing with mine own clubs, I was beaten (though not at a great odds), by the young Laird of Gremmat, whose chin was hardly yet better of the cleaving it got on the fatal day at the Lady's Carse. But this interfered naught with his putting. Now gaming on the green is uncommonly fretting to the temper, and more especially when you are losing with a man like Gremmat, who cries and shouts at every good stroke of his own and dispraises yours. Yet, owing to the well-kenned equality of my temper, and also because he was not yet fully recovered of his wound, I did not clout him over the sconse with my cleek, as I certainly was in a great mind more than once to do.
We were yet hard at it, and the afternoon wearing on apace when I saw the little Dominie coming toward us with the boy William Dalrymple by his side. The schoolmaster held the letter in his hand and gave it back to me.
'William Dalrymple says that he found not the Laird of Auchendrayne in his own house, and has therefore brought back the letter.'
I looked at it a moment, turning it over in my hand.
'It has been opened,' said I. 'See, the wax is gone, and there are finger-marks within.'
'So, indeed, it has,' said Dominie Mure. 'Boy, if you have opened it I will tan you alive, outside and in.'
Whereat the boy began to weep.
'I have said what I was told to say,' he cried, and for all we could do, nothing more could we get out of him—save that a dark man, faced like an ape or a wild beast, had come some way home behind him and sorely terrified him. So we sent the boy back to his mother, and, bidding farewell for that time to the Dominie and to young Gremmat, I fared along the way to Culzean to make me ready for the long journey of the morrow.
CHAPTER XXIX