Callandar began to think back. He had not heard one complaint from Archie since the day they rode out of Fort Augustus together, and he remembered his own astonishment at hearing he was in pain from his wound. It seemed only to have become painful in the last couple of hours.
“It is easy to make accusations,” he said grimly, “but you will have to prove them. What proof have you?”
“Is it pruifs ye’re needin’? Fegs, a dinna gang aboot wi’ them in ma poke! A can tell ye ma pruifs fine, but maybe ye’ll no listen.”
He made as though to drive on.
Callandar stepped in front of the dogs, and stood in his path.
“You will speak out before I take another step,” said he. “I will have no shuffling. Come, out with what you know! I will stay here till I get it.”
[CHAPTER XXII
HUNTLY HILL (continued)]
CALLANDAR sat a little apart from his men on the fringe of the fir-wood; on the other side of the clearing on which the party had bivouacked Wattie formed the centre of a group. It was past sunset, and the troop-horses, having been watered and fed, were picketed together. Callandar’s own horse snatched at the straggling bramble-shoots behind a tree.
The officer sat on a log, his chin in his hand, pondering on the amazing story that the beggar had divulged. It was impossible to know what to make of it, but, in spite of himself, he was inclined to believe it. He had questioned and cross-questioned him, but he had been able to form no definite opinion. Wattie had described his meeting with Archie on the day of the taking of the ship; he had told him how he had accompanied him on his way, how he had been forced to ask shelter for him at the farm, how he had lain and listened in the darkness to his feverish wanderings and his appeals to Logie. If the beggar’s tale had been true, there seemed to be no doubt that the intelligence officer whose services were so much valued by Cumberland, had taken money from the rebels, though it seemed that he had hesitated over the business. His conscience must have smitten him even in his dreams. “I will say nothing, but I will tell you all!” he had cried to Logie. “I shall know where you are, but they shall never know!” In his delirium, he had taken the beggar for the man whose fellow-conspirator he was proving himself to be, and when consciousness was fighting to return, and he had sense enough to know that he was not speaking to Logie, it was his companion’s promise to deliver a message of reassurance that had given him peace and sleep. “Tell him that he can trust me,” he had said. What puzzled Callandar was the same thing that had puzzled Wattie: Why had these two men, linked together by a hidden understanding, fought? Perhaps Flemington had repented of the part he was playing, and had tried to cut himself adrift. “Let me go!” he had exclaimed. It was all past Callandar’s comprehension. At one moment he was inclined to look on Wattie as an understudy for the father of lies; at another, he asked himself how he could have had courage to invent such a calumny—how he had dared to choose a man for his victim who had reached the position that Archie had gained. But he realized that, had Wattie been inventing, he would hardly have invented the idea of a fight between Flemington and Captain Logie. That little incongruous touch seemed to Callandar’s reasonable mind to support the truth of his companion’s tongue.