“Sit ye doon,” he exclaimed, as they met.
“If once I sit down I am lost,” said Archie. “Come on.”
He started along the road with the same dogged step, the beggar keeping alongside. They had gone about half a mile when Flemington clutched at a wayside bush and then slid to the ground in a heap.
Wattie pulled up, dismayed, and scanned their surroundings. To let him lie there by the road was out of the question. He could not tell how much his head had been injured, but he knew enough to be sure that exposure and cold might bring a serious illness on a man in his state; he did not understand that the whisky he had given Archie was the worst possible thing for him. To the beggar, it was the sovereign remedy for all trouble of mind or body.
He cursed his own circumscribed energies; there was no one in sight. The nearest habitation was a little farmhouse on the skirts of the moor with one tiny window in its gable-end making a dark spot, high under the roof.
Wattie turned his wheels reluctantly towards it. Unwilling though he was to draw attention to his companion, there was no choice.
[CHAPTER XV
WATTIE HAS THEORIES]
THOUGH Skirling Wattie seldom occupied the same bed on many consecutive nights, his various resting-places had so great a family likeness that he could not always remember where he was when he chanced to wake in the small hours. Sheds, barns, stables harboured him in the cold months when luck was good; loanings, old quarries, whin-patches, the alder clump beyond Brechin, or the wall-side at Magdalen Chapel, in the summer.
To-night he lay in the barn abutting on the tiny farmhouse at which he had sought shelter for Archie. He had met with a half-hearted reception from the woman who came to the door. Her man was away, she told him, and she was unwilling to admit strangers in his absence. She had never seen Wattie before, and it was plain that she did not like his looks. He induced her at last, with the greatest difficulty, to give shelter in her barn to the comrade whom he described as lying in extremity at the roadside. Finally, she despatched her son, a youth of fifteen, to accompany the beggar, and to help to bring the sufferer back.