Like most Scottish lakes, Loch Spellanderie is not wide, and Cleg manfully ploughed his way across without fear of the result. For he had often swam much further at the piers of Leith and Trinity, as well as much longer in the many lochs which are girt like a girdle of jewels round about his native city. But presently his clothes began to tire him, and long ere the dark line of the trees on the further side approached, he was longing to be on shore again.
Sometimes also he seemed to hear the voices of men before him, though, owing the deep shadow of the trees, [263]he could see no one. Cleg's arms began to ache terribly, and his feet to drag lower and lower. The power went out of his strokes. He called out lustily for the men to wait for him. He could hear something like a boat moving along the edge of the reeds, rustling through them with a sough as it went.
Suddenly Cleg saw something dark swimming slowly along the surface of the water. He struck towards it fearlessly. It was a piece of wood moved, as it seemed, by some mysterious power from the shore. Cleg called out again for the men whose voices he had heard to wait for him. But, instead of waiting, they promptly turned and fled. Cleg could hear them crashing like bullocks through the briars and hazels of the underbrush.
However, he was not far from the land now, and in a minute more he felt his feet rest upon the shelving gravel of the lake shore. Cleg brought the wedge-shaped piece of wood with him. He found upon holding it close to his eyes in the dim light, that a double row of hooks was attached to it beneath, and that there were half a dozen good trout leaping and squirming upon different sides of it.
Cleg had no notion of the nature of the instrument he had captured. Nor indeed had he the least idea that he had disturbed certain very honest men in a wholly illegal operation.
He only shook himself like a water-dog and proceeded to run through the wood at an easy trot, for the purpose of getting some heat back into his chilled limbs.
As he ran his thoughts returned often to Loch Spellanderie, and each time he cracked his thumbs with glee.
"I showed her, I'm thinkin'!" he said aloud.
Suddenly Cleg found himself out of the wood. He came upon a slight fence of wire hung upon cloven undressed [264]posts, over which ran the shallow trench of the railway to Port Andrew.
Cleg knew himself on sure ground again so soon as he came to something so familiar as the four-foot way. He felt as if he had a friend in each telegraph post, and that the shining perspective of the parallel metals stretched on and on into direct connection with Princes Street Station and the North Bridge tram lines which ran almost to the Canongate Head. He was, as it were, at home.
The boy hesitated a little which way to turn. But ultimately he decided that he would take the left hand. So Cleg sped along the permanent way towards Port Andrew at the rate of six miles an hour.
Had he known it, he was running as fast as he could out of all civilisation. For at this point the railway passes into a purely pastoral region of sheep and muircocks, where even farms and cot-houses are scarcer than in any other part of the lowlands of Scotland.
Nevertheless Cleg kept up the steady swinging trot, which had come to him by nature in direct descent from Tim Kelly, the Irish harvestman and burglar who in his day had trotted so disastrously into Isbel Beattie's life.
But Cleg was not to lie homeless and houseless that night, as Vara and the children had often done. Cleg possessed all a cat's faculty for falling on his feet.
At a lonely place on the side of the line he came upon a little cluster of tanks and offices, which was yet not a station. There was, in fact, no platform at all. It consisted mainly of the little tank for watering the engine, and, set deep under an overhanging snout of heathery moorland, an old narrow-windowed railway carriage raised upon wooden uprights.
[265]
Cleg stood petrified with astonishment before this strange encampment. For there were lights in the windows, and the sound of voices came cheerfully from within. Yet here was the lonely moor, with the birds calling weirdly all about him, and only the parallel bars of the four-foot way starting out east and west into the darkness, from the broad stream of comfortable light which fell across them from the windows of the wheelless railway carriage.
Finally Cleg plucked up heart to knock. He had a feeling that nothing far amiss could happen to him, so near a railway which led at long and last to Princes Street, where even at that moment so many of his friends were busily engaged selling the evening papers. Besides which he was in still nearer connection with his friends Muckle Alick, the porter, and Duncan Urquhart, the goods enginedriver at Netherby Junction.
Cleg tapped gently, but there was at first no cessation in the noise. He knocked a second time a little harder; still it was without effect.
A voice within took up a rollicking tune, and the words came rantingly through the wooden partition. Cleg's hand slid down till it rested upon the stirrup-shaped brass handle of a railway carriage. It turned readily in his fingers, and Cleg peered curiously within.
He could now see the singer, who sat on a wooden chair with his stocking-soles cocked up on the little stove which filled all one end of the hut. There came from within a delightful smell of broiling bacon ham, which hungry Cleg sniffed up with gusto.
The singer was a rough-haired, black-bearded man with a wide chest and mighty shoulders, even though he could not be called a giant when compared with Muckle Alick down at Netherby. And this is what he sang:
[266]
Auld Granny Grey Pow, Fetch the bairnies in; Bring them frae the Scaur Heid, Whaur they mak' sic din. Chase them frae the washin' pool, Thrang at skippin' stanes— Auld Granny Grey Pow, Gather hame the weans.The singer's voice sang this verse of the Poet of the Iron Road[6] so gaily that Cleg felt that his quarters for the night were assured. He was about to step within when a new voice spoke.
"'Deed and it micht serve ye better a deal, Poet Jock, gin ye wad set doon your feet and lift your Bible to tak' a lesson to yoursel', instead o' rantin' there at a gilravage o' vain sangs—aye, even wastin' your precious time in makkin' them, when ye micht be either readin' the Company's rules or thinkin' aboot the concerns o' your never-dying sowl!"
"You haud your tongue, Auld Chairlie," cried the singer, pausing a moment, but not turning round; "gin ye hadna missed thae troots the nicht and lost your otter to the keepers in Loch Spellanderie, ye wadna hae been sitting there busy wi' Second Chronicles!"
And again the singer took up his ranting melody:
Bring in Rab to get him washed, Weel I ken the loon, Canna do unless he be Dirt frae fit to croon. Tam and Wull are juist the same For a' I tak' sic pains— [267] Auld Granny Grey Pow, Gather hame the weans.So the singer sang, and ever as he came to the refrain he cuddled an imaginary fiddle under his chin and played it brisk and tauntingly like a spring:
Auld Granny Grey Pow, Gather hame the weans.Then, before another word could be spoken, Cleg stepped inside.
"Guidnicht to ye a'!" he said politely.
The man who had been called Poet Jock took down his feet from the top of the stove so quickly that the legs of the chair slipped from under him, and he came down upon the floor of the carriage with a resounding thump. Auld Chairlie, a white-haired old man who sat under a lamp with a large book on his knee, also stood up so suddenly that the volume slipped to the floor.
"O mercy! Lord, preserve me, what's this?" he cried, his teeth chattering in his head as he spoke.
"Wha may you be and what do ye want?" asked poet Sandy, without, however, getting up from the floor.
"I'm juist Cleg Kelly frae the Sooth Back," said the apparition.
"And whaur got ye that otter and troots?" broke in Auld Chairlie, who could not take his eyes off them.
"I got them in the loch. Did ye think they grew in the field, man?" retorted Cleg, whose natural man was rising within him at the enforced catechism.
"Preserve us a'—I thocht ye had been either the deil or a gamekeeper!" said Auld Chairlie, with intense earnestness; "weel, I'm awesome glad ye are no a game watcher, at ony rate. We micht maybe hae managed to [268]gie the deil a bit fley by haudin' the muckle Bible to his e'e. But gamekeepers are a' juist regairdless heathen loons that care neither for Kirk nor minister—except maybe an orra while at election time."
"Aye, man, an' ye are Cleg Kelly? Where did ye 'Cleg' frae?" asked the poet, who contented himself jovially with his position in the corner of the floor, till a few cinders fell from the stove and made him leap to his feet with an alacrity which was quite astounding in so big a man. Then the reason why he had been content to sit still became manifest. For his head struck the roof of the little carriage with a bang which made him cower. Whereupon he sat down again, rubbing it ruefully, muttering to himself, "There maun be the maist part o' an octavo volume o' poems stuck to that roof already, and there gangs anither epic!"
When the Poet and Auld Chairlie had re-composed themselves in the little hut, Cleg proceeded to tell them all his adventures, and especially all those which concerned Mistress McWalter of Loch Spellanderie, and the great swim across the water.