I paused and stood still on the pavement, drawing back so as to have the most perfect view of my companion which the light afforded me, and which was sufficient to guard against any sudden motion of assault.
“You have said,” I answered, “either too much or too little—too much to induce me to confide in you as a mere stranger, since you avow yourself a person amenable to the laws of the country in which we are—and too little, unless you could show that you are unjustly subjected to their rigour.”
As I ceased to speak, he made a step towards me. I drew back instinctively, and laid my hand on the hilt of my sword.
“What!” said he—“on an unarmed man, and your friend?”
“I am yet ignorant if you are either the one or the other,” I replied; “and to say the truth, your language and manner might well entitle me to doubt both.”
“It is manfully spoken,” replied my conductor; “and I respect him whose hand can keep his head.—I will be frank and free with you—I am conveying you to prison.”
“To prison!” I exclaimed—“by what warrant or for what offence?—You shall have my life sooner than my liberty—I defy you, and I will not follow you a step farther.”
“I do not,” he said, “carry you there as a prisoner; I am,” he added, drawing himself haughtily up, “neither a messenger nor sheriff's officer. I carry you to see a prisoner from whose lips you will learn the risk in which you presently stand. Your liberty is little risked by the visit; mine is in some peril; but that I readily encounter on your account, for I care not for risk, and I love a free young blood, that kens no protector but the cross o' the sword.”
While he spoke thus, we had reached the principal street, and were pausing before a large building of hewn stone, garnished, as I thought I could perceive, with gratings of iron before the windows.
“Muckle,” said the stranger, whose language became more broadly national as he assumed a tone of colloquial freedom—“Muckle wad the provost and bailies o' Glasgow gie to hae him sitting with iron garters to his hose within their tolbooth that now stands wi' his legs as free as the red-deer's on the outside on't. And little wad it avail them; for an if they had me there wi' a stane's weight o' iron at every ankle, I would show them a toom room and a lost lodger before to-morrow—But come on, what stint ye for?”