“Keh, keh, it’s not worth making a noise about after all. Gie me the jacket, Mansie, my man, and it’ll maybe serve my nephew, young Killim, who is as lingit in the waist as a wasp. Let us take a shake of your paw over the counter, and be friends. Bye-ganes should be bye-ganes.”
Never let it be said that Mansie Wauch, though one of the king’s volunteers, ever thrust aside the olive branch of peace; so, ill-used though I had been, to say nothing of James Batter, who had got his pipe smashed to crunches, and one of the eyes of his spectacles knocked out, I gave him my fist frankly.
James Batter’s birse had been so fiercely put up, and no wonder, that it was not so easily sleeked down; so, for a while, he looked unco glum, till Cursecowl insisted that our meeting should not be a dry one; nor would he hear a single word on me and James Batter not accepting his treat of a mutchkin of Kilbagie.
I did not think James would have been so doure and refractory, funking and flinging like old Jeroboam; but at last, with the persuasion of the treat, he came to, and, sleeking down his front hair, we all three took a step down to the far end of the close, at the back street, where Widow Thamson kept the sign of ‘The Tankard and the Tappit Hen;’ Cursecowl, when we got ourselves seated, ordering in the spirits with a loud rap on the table with his knuckles, and a whistle on the landlady through his foreteeth, that made the roof ring. A bottle of beer was also brought; so, after drinking one another’s healths round, with a tasting out of the dram glass, Cursecowl swashed the rest of the raw creature into the tankard, saying—
“Now take your will o’t; there’s drink fit for a king; that’s real ‘Pap-in.’”
He was an awful body, Cursecowl, and had a power of queer stories, which, weel-a-wat, did not lose in the telling. James Batter, beginning to brighten up, hodged and leuch like a nine-year-old; and I freely confess, for another, that I was so diverted, that, I daresay, had it not been for his fearsome oaths, which made our very hair stand on end, and were enough to open the stone-wall, we would have both sate from that time to this.
We got the whole story of the Willie-goat, out and out, it seeming to be with Cursecowl a prime matter of diversion, especially that part of it relating to the head, by which he had won a crown-piece from Deacon Paunch, who wagered that the wife and me would eat it, without ever finding out our mistake. But, aha, lad!
The long and the short of the matter was this. The Willie-goat had, for eighteen years, belonged to a dragoon marching regiment, and, in its better days, had seen a power of service abroad; till, being now old and infirm, it had fallen off one of the baggage-carts, and got its leg broken on the road to Piershill, where it was sold to Cursecowl, by a corporal, for half-a-crown and a dram. The four quarters he had managed to sell for mutton, like lightning, this one buying a jigget, that one a back ribs, and so on. However, he had to weather a gey brisk gale in making his point good. One woman remarked that it had an unearthly, rank smell; to which he said, “No, no—ye do not ken your blessings, friend; that’s the smell of venison, for the beast was brought up along with the deers in the Duke’s parks.” And to another wife, that, after smell-smelling at it, thought it was a wee humphed, he replied, “Faith, that’s all the thanks folks get for letting their sheep crop heather among the Cheviot hills,” and such-like lies. But as for the head, that had been the doure business. Six times had it been sold and away, and six times had it been brought back again. One bairn said that her “mother didna like a sheep’s-head with horns like these,” and wanted it changed for another one. A second one said, that “it had tup’s een, and her father liked wether mutton.” A third customer found mortal fault with the colours, which, she said, “were not canny, or in the course of nature.” What the fourth one said, and the fifth one took leave to observe, I have stupidly forgotten, though, I am sure, I heard both; but I mind one remarked, quite off-hand, as she sought back her money, that “unless sheep could do without beards, like their neighbours, she would keep the pot boiling with a piece beef, in the meantime.” After all this—would any mortal man believe it?—Deacon Paunch, the greasy Daniel Lambert that he is, had taken the wager, as I before took opportunity to remark, that our family would swallow the bait! But, aha, he was off his eggs there!
James and me were so tickled with Cursecowl’s wild, outrageous, off-hand, humoursome way of telling his crack, that, though sore with neighering, none of the two of us ever thought of rising; Cursecowl chapping in first one stoup, and then another, and birling the tankard round the table, as if we had been drinking dub-water. I daresay I would never have got away, had I not slipped out behind Lucky Thamson’s back—for she was a broad fat body, with a round-eared mutch, and a full-plaited check apron—when she was drawing the sixth bottle of small beer, with her corkscrew between her knees; Cursecowl lecturing away, at the dividual moment, like a Glasgow professor, to James Batter, whose een were gathering straws, on a pliskie he had once, in the course of trade, played on a conceited body of a French sick-nurse, by selling her a lump of fat pork to make beef-tea of to her mistress, who was dwining in the blue Beelzebubs.
Ohone, and woe’s me, for old Father Adam and the fall of man! Poor, sober, good, honest James Batter was not, by a thousand miles, a match for such company. Everything, however, has its moral, and the truth will out. When Nanse and me were sitting at our breakfast next morning, we heard from Benjie, who had been early up fishing for eels at the water-side, that the whole town talk was concerning the misfortunate James Batter, who had been carried home, totally incapable, far in the night, by Cursecowl and an Irish labourer—that sleeped in Widow Thamson’s garret—on a hand-barrow, borrowed from Maister Wiggie’s servant-lass, Jenny Jessamine.—Mansie Wauch.