It was half-past four when, in reply to repeated hails, the boat left the Dullarg shore with a company of three men on board, and in addition the sort of person who is called a "single lady."
Two of the men stood together at one end of the ferry-boat, and after Bess had bidden one of them sharply to "get out of her road," she called him "Drows" to make it up, and asked him if he were going over to the lamb sale at Nether Airds.
"If it's the Lord's wull!" Drows replied, with solemnity.
Both he and his companion had commodious, clean-shaven "horse" faces, with an abundance of gray hair standing out in a straggling semi-circular aureole underneath the chin. Cameronian was stamped upon their faces with broad strong simplicity. The blue bonnet, already looking old-world among the universal "felts" common to most adult manhood—the deep serious eyes, as it were withdrawn under the penthouse of bushy brows, and looking upon all things (even lamb sales) as fleeting and transitory—the long upper lip and the mouth tightly compressed—these marked out John Allanson of Drows and Matthew Carment of Craigs as pillars of that Kirk which alone of all the fragments of Presbytery is senior to the Established Church of Scotland.
On the other side of the boat and somewhat apart stood Dr. Hector Stuart, gazing gloomily at the black water as it rippled and clappered under the broad lip of the ferry-boat. A proud man, a Highland gentleman of old family, was the minister of Dullarg. He kept his head erect, and for any notice he had taken of the Cameronian elders, they might just as well not have been on the boat at all. And in their turn the elders of the Cameronian Kirk compressed their lips more firmly and their eyes seemed deeper set in their heads when their glances fell on this pillar of Erastianism. For nowhere is the racial antipathy of north and south so strong as in Galloway. There, and there alone, the memory of the Highland Host has never died out, and every autumn when the hills glow red with heather from horizon to horizon verge, the story is told to Galloway childhood of how Lag and Clavers wasted the heritage of the Lord, and how from Ailsa to Solway all the west of Scotland is "flowered with the blood of the Martyrs."
The thin nervous woman kept close to the minister's elbow.
"I tell you I saw her cross the water, Hector," she was saying as Dr. Stuart looked ahead, scanning keenly the low sandy shores they were nearing.
"The boat is gone and she has not returned. It is a thing not proper for a young lady and a minister's daughter to be so long absent from home!"
"My daughter has been too well brought up to do aught that is improper!" said Dr. Stuart, with grave sententious dignity. "You need not pursue the subject, Mary!"
There was just enough likeness between them to stamp the pair as brother and sister. As the boat touched the edge of the sharply sloping shingle bank, the hinged gang-plank tilted itself up at a new angle. The passengers paid their pennies to Bess MacTaggart and stepped sedately on shore. The boat-house stands in a water-girt peninsula, the Ken being on one side broad and quiet, the Black Water on the other, sulky and turbulent. So that for half a mile there was but one road for this curiously assorted pair of pairs.