Mrs Catterick knew his step on the gravel, and met him at the door.
“Bide the nicht?” she cried. “‘Deed ye may, and blithe to see ye! Ye’ve gotten rid o’ the auld man? Whae was he?”
“A gentleman from London. He’s safely home now.”
“Keep us a’. Just what I jaloused. That’s a stick for me to haud ower Erchie’s heid. Erchie was here twae days syne, speirin’ what had become o’ the man he had sae sair mishandled. D’ye ken what I said? I said he was deid and buried among the tatties in the yaird. No anither word could Erchie get oot o’ me, and he gae’d off wi’ an anxious hert. I’ll keep him anxious. He’ll be expectin’ the pollis ony day.”
Five minutes later Jaikie sat in the best room, while his hostess lit the peat fire.
“Ye’ve been doun by Castle Gay?” she gossiped. “It’s a braw bit, and it’s a peety the family canna afford to bide in it. It’s let to somebody—I canna mind his name. We’re on his lordship’s land here, ye ken. There’s a picture o’ Miss Alison. She used to come often here, and a hellicat lassie she was, but rale frank and innerly. I aye said they wad hae a sair job makin’ a young leddy o’ her.”
Mrs Catterick pointed to where above the mantelpiece hung a framed photograph of a girl, whose face was bordered by two solemn plaits of hair.
“It’s a bonny bit face,” she said reflectively. “There’s daftness in it, but there’s something wise and kind in her een. ‘Deed, Jaikie, when I come to look at them, they’re no unlike your ain.”
THE END
The Power-House
I. BEGINNING OF THE WILD-GOOSE CHASE
II. I FIRST HEAR OF MR ANDREW LUMLEY
III. TELLS OF A MIDSUMMER NIGHT
IV. I FOLLOW THE TRAIL OF THE SUPER-BUTLER
VI. THE RESTAURANT IN ANTIOCH STREET
DEDICATION
TO MAJOR-GENERAL SIR FRANCIS LLOYD, K.C.B.
My Dear General,
A recent tale of mine has, I am told, found favour in the dug-outs and billets of the British front, as being sufficiently short and sufficiently exciting for men who have little leisure to read. My friends in that uneasy region have asked for more. So I have printed this story, written in the smooth days before the war, in the hope that it may enable an honest man here and there to forget for an hour the too urgent realities, I have put your name on it, because among the many tastes which we share one is a liking for precipitous yarns.
J.B.
PREFACE BY THE EDITOR
We were at Glenaicill—six of us—for the duck-shooting, when Leithen told us this story. Since five in the morning we had been out on the skerries, and had been blown home by a wind which threatened to root the house and its wind-blown woods from their precarious lodgment on the hill. A vast nondescript meal, luncheon and dinner in one, had occupied us till the last daylight departed, and we settled ourselves in the smoking-room for a sleepy evening of talk and tobacco.
Conversation, I remember, turned on some of Jim’s trophies which grinned at us from the firelit walls, and we began to spin hunting yarns. Then Hoppy Bynge, who was killed next year on the Bramaputra, told us some queer things about his doings in New Guinea, where he tried to climb Carstensz, and lived for six months in mud. Jim said he couldn’t abide mud— anything was better than a country where your boots rotted. (He was to get enough of it last winter in the Ypres Salient.) You know how one tale begets another, and soon the whole place hummed with odd recollections, for five of us had been a good deal about the world.
All except Leithen, the man who was afterwards Solicitor- General, and, they say, will get to the Woolsack in time. I don’t suppose he had ever been farther from home than Monte Carlo, but he liked hearing about the ends of the earth.
Jim had just finished a fairly steep yarn about his experiences on a Boundary Commission near Lake Chad, and Leithen got up to find a drink.
“Lucky devils,” he said. “You’ve had all the fun out of life. I’ve had my nose to the grindstone ever since I left school.”
I said something about his having all the honour and glory.
“All the same,” he went on, “I once played the chief part in a rather exciting business without ever once budging from London. And the joke of it was that the man who went out to look for adventure only saw a bit of the game, and I who sat in my chambers saw it all and pulled the strings. ‘They also serve who only stand and wait,’ you know.”
Then he told us this story. The version I give is one he afterwards wrote down, when he had looked up his diary for some of the details.
I.
BEGINNING OF THE WILD-GOOSE CHASE
It all started one afternoon early in May when I came out of the House of Commons with Tommy Deloraine. I had got in by an accident at a by-election, when I was supposed to be fighting a forlorn hope, and as I was just beginning to be busy at the Bar I found my hands pretty full. It was before Tommy succeeded, in the days when he sat for the family seat in Yorkshire, and that afternoon he was in a powerful bad temper. Out of doors it was jolly spring weather; there was greenery in Parliament Square and bits of gay colour, and a light wind was blowing up from the river. Inside a dull debate was winding on, and an advertising member had been trying to get up a row with the Speaker. The contrast