His services to the state had not been important up to the present time. A few letters carried, a little information collected, had been the extent of his usefulness. But, though he was not in their regular employ, the authorities were keeping a favourable eye on him, for he had so far proved himself capable, close-mouthed, and a very miracle of local knowledge.
He sat in his cart looking resentfully after Flemington between the stems of the alders and the lattice of their golden-brown leaves, and, though the one word tossed over the rider’s shoulders did not tell him much, he determined he would not lose sight of Archie if he could help it. “Brechin” might mean anything from a night’s lodging to a lengthened stay, but he would follow him as far as he dared and set about discovering his movements. Skirling Wattie had friends in Brechin, as he had in most places round about, and certain bolt-holes of his own wherein he could always find shelter for himself and his dogs; but he did not mean to trust himself nearer than these refuges to Lord Balnillo, at any rate, not for a few days. Chance had relieved him of the letter for which he was responsible sooner than he expected, and at present he was a free man. He roused his team, tucked his pipes into their corner of the cart, and, guiding himself carefully between the trees, issued from the thicket like some ribald vision of goblinry escaped from the world of folk-lore.
He turned towards Brechin, and set off for the town at a brisk trot, the yellow dog straining at his harness, and his comrades taking their pace from him. Every inch of the road was known to Wattie, every tree and tuft, every rut and hole; and as there were plenty of these last, he bumped and swung along in a way that would have dislocated the bones of a lighter person. The violent roughness of his progress was what served him for exercise and kept him in health. There were not many houses near the highway, but the children playing round the doors of the few he passed hailed him with shouts, and he answered them, as he answered everyone, with his familiar wag of the head.
When he entered Brechin and rolled past the high, circular shaft of its round tower, the world made way for him with a grin, and when it was not agile enough to please him, he heralded himself with a shrill note from the chanter, which he had unscrewed from his pipes. Business was business with him. He meant to lie in the town to-night, but he was anxious to get on to Flemington’s tracks before the scent was cold.
He drove to the Swan inn and entered the yard, and there he had the satisfaction of seeing Archie’s horse being rubbed down with a wisp of straw. Its rider, he made out, had left the inn on foot half an hour earlier, so, with this meagre clue, he sought the streets and the company of the idlers haunting their thievish corners, to whom the passing stranger and what might be made out of him were the best interests of the day. By the time the light was failing he had traced Flemington down to the river, where he had been last seen crossing the bridge. The beggar was a good deal surprised; he could not imagine what was carrying Archie away from the place.
In the dusk he descended the steep streets running down to the Esk, and, slackening his pace, took out a short, stout pair of crutches that he kept beside him, using them as brakes on either side of the cart. People who saw Wattie for the first time would stand, spell-bound, to watch the incredible spectacle of his passage through a town, but, to the inhabitants of Brechin, he was too familiar a sight for anything but the natural widening of the mouth that his advent would produce from pure force of habit.
The lights lit here and there were beginning to repeat themselves in the water, and men were returning to their houses after the day’s work as he stopped his cart and sent out that surest of all attractions, the first notes of ‘The Tod,’ into the gathering mists of the river-side. By ones and twos, the details of a sympathetic audience drew together round him as his voice rose over the sliding rush of the Esk. Idlers on the bridge leaned over the grey arches as the sound came to them above the tongue of the little rapid that babbled as it lost itself in the shadow of the woods downstream.
Then the pipes took up their tune. Jests and roars of laughter oiled the springs of generosity, and the good prospects of supper and a bed began to smile upon the beggar. When darkness set in, he turned his wheels towards a shed that a publican had put at his disposal for the night, and he and his dogs laid themselves down to rest in its comfortable straw. The yellow cur, relieved from his harness, stole closer and closer to his master and lay with his jowl against the pipes. Presently Wattie’s dirty hand went out and sought the coarse head of his servant.
“Doag,” he was muttering, as he went to sleep.
Perhaps in all the grim, grey little Scottish town, no living creature closed its eyes more contentedly than the poor cur whose head was pillowed in paradise because of the touch that was on it.