en, leaning forward as if jesting, I made
a proposition. By himself, I said, such a man could do but little. He
was but a tracked beast without a den. See what it had brought him to,
tumbling on a carpet for a living, and hungry withal! I would give him
safety, a position, the high road between two market towns, neither of
them yet reached by the railway, running before our very door.

"Finally, on the doorstep of the Red Lion, holding unstably by either
lintel, a warning to all sober men like myself, I pointed out Riddick
of Langbarns, who, as I knew, had that day sold his two-year-old horses
to the tune of eight hundred pounds!

"Jeremy Orrin and I left the lighted town behind us. I am well aware
even then that I put my life in his hands--how terrible was my danger I
did not know. For the young man's wayward madness was as yet hidden
from me, as from all the world except his elder sister. At the Windy
Slap, a narrow wind-swept gully, and a wild enough scene at the best of
times, I came out suddenly, and speaking to Riddick, who was on
horseback, asked him civilly if he would need any sheets or tablecloths
that year. For that I was making out my winter's orders. He knew me
at once, and bade me get out of his sight for an arrant self-seeking
miser that would keep a shivering man from a good glass of toddy at his
own fireside!

"Then I lowered my prices till he checked his horse beside a bank (for
I had been walking by his side), and while he strove to calculate cost
and rebate in his drink-dozened brain, Jeremy quietly leaped up from
behind, and clasped about his neck the broad-palmed, long-fingered,
hairy hands that had crushed the byre trident. Riddick of Langbarns
never spake word. We buried him decently in the kirkyard--in a grave
that had that day been filled, laying him on the coffin of a better man
than himself--even that of Ephraim Rae, elder in the Hardgate
Cameronian Kirk. Face down we laid him--his nose to the name
plate--and so filled in and replaced the sods. It was very secure--an
idea of my own. No disturbance of the earth, or none that mattered.
For who would ever seek for a lost man in the grave, where, that same
day, another had been laid with all due funeral observances? It would
be sacrilege. Afterwards, when we used this method, I always tried to
be present at both interments. In fact, I got a name for my reverence
and exactitude at burials. Also it gave me some useful thoughts u