Among the crowd of relations, acquaintances, and companions alongside of which a man begins life, Time and Trouble, like a pair of witch-doctors, are busy with their rites and dances and magic sticks selecting his friends; and often the identity of the little handful they drag from the throng is a surprise. For Gilbert they had secured a wooden-legged naval captain, a sullen young cadger, and a retired fishwife with gold earrings. As he watched the ground fly past the wheels, he recognised that the dreadful functionaries had gone far to justify their existence by the choice they had made.
There were dark marks under pad and breeching, for the sun was growing strong, and, though Jimmy held his horse together and used such persuasive address as he had never been known to waste upon a human being, he was now beginning to have recourse to the whip. Speid realized that their pace was gradually flagging. By the time they had done half the journey and could see, from a swelling rise, down over the Morphie woods, it was borne in on him that Rob Roy’s step was growing short. He made brave efforts to answer to the lash, but they did not last, and the sweat had begun to run round his drooping ears. The two friends looked at each other.
‘Ma’ grannie had a sair drive last nicht,’ said Jimmy.
‘Pull up for a moment and face him to the wind,’ cried Speid, jumping down.
With handfuls of rush torn from a ditch they rubbed him down, neck, loins, and legs, and turned his head to what breeze was moving. His eyes stared, and, though he was close to the green fringe of grass which bordered the roadside, he made no attempt to pick at it.
The hands of Gilbert’s watch had put ten o’clock behind them as he looked over the far stretch to Morphie and Fullarton. Jimmy, whose light eyes rested in dogged concern on the horse’s heaving sides, put his shoulder under the shaft to ease off the weight of the cart. Away beyond, on the further edge of the wood, was the kirk; even now, the doors were probably being opened and the seats dusted for the coming marriage.
Speid stood summing up his chances, his eyes on the spreading landscape; he was attempting an impossibility in trying to reach Fullarton.
‘There is no use in pushing on to Fullarton,’ he said, laying his hand on Rob Roy’s mane, ‘we shall only break his heart, poor little brute. I am going to leave you here and get across country to the kirk on my own feet. Here is some money—go to the nearest farm and rest him; feed him when he’ll eat, and come on to Whanland when you can. Whatever may happen this morning, I shall be there in the afternoon.’
The boy nodded, measuring the miles silently that lay between them and the distant kirk. It would be a race, he considered, but it would take a deal to beat the Laird of Whanland.
‘Brides is aye late,’ he remarked briefly.