CHAPTER XVI
GREYBEARDS AND DIMPLE CHINS
One Sabbath morn there came an unwonted message to me, as I sat lingering and idle in the armoury of Culzean. I had cleaned my own graith and oiled the pistols—which I regularly did on the Sabbath morning whenever I did not go to the kirk at Maybole. Now, this particular day of which I speak, I was idly conning the leaves of a song-book full of trifling, vain, and amatorious lilts and catches—some of them very pleasant, however, and taking to the mind. It ought to have been my psalm-book that I was at, God forgive me; but since ballad-book it was, why, even so will I set it down here.
And the message that came was by the mouth of a kind of jackal or lickpot of John Dick's—who, for reasons of his own, hated me, chiefly because I took no share in the foulness of him and his subservient crew. This youth was of so little worth, that in all the transactions of this book he has not once come into the narrative—though as I now remember he was at the tulzie in Edinburgh, and also at the flitting of the sow. On both occasions he was the first to run.
The name of him was Colin Millar, an ill-favoured, envious, upsetting knave, compact of various ignorances and incapacities. And there needs no more to be said about him.
'There is a man wanting to see you down at Sandy Allison's, the Grieve's,' he said.
Then he looked at me with the cast in his eye as crooked as a paddock's hind leg, and says he, 'The tat will be in the fire now, I'm thinking. They tell me that it is the Minister!'
I knew very well what the ill-tongued hound meant. So right gladly without a word I set the knuckles of my hand, Sabbath morning though it was, against his ugly face in a way that would leave a mark for a day or two.
'Take you that, dog,' I said to him, 'and learn to keep a more ruly member in your insolent head. Think not that you are John Dick, though you carry his dirty slanders. As the wild boar gnashes its tushes, so the little piglings squeak!'
And as he went away, lowering and snarling, I had a mind to go after him and give him something more than my knuckles. For the thing he meant was a lie of the devil, lighted at his furnace and spewed out of the reek of his pit.