I'll
tell ye this"--with a sudden snarl of bitterness--"That you'd be the
vairy last person I wad tell."

Chapter XVII. A MAD DOG

DAVID and Maggie, meanwhile, were drifting further and further apart. He
now thought the girl took too much upon herself; that this assumption of
the woman and the mother was overdone. Once, on a Sunday, he caught her
hearing Andrew his catechism. He watched the performance through a crack
in the door, and listened, giggling, to her simple teaching. At length
his merriment grew so boisterous that she looked up, saw him, and,
straightway rising to her feet, crossed the room and shut the door;
tendering her unspoken rebuke with such a sweet dignity that he slunk
away for once decently ashamed. And the incident served to add point to
his hostility.

Consequently he was seldom at Kenmuir, and more often at home,
quarrelling with his father.

Since that day, two years before, when the boy had been an instrument in
the taking of the Cup from him, father and son had been like two vessels
charged with electricity, contact between which might result at any
moment in a shock and a flash. This was the outcome not of a moment, but
of years.

Of late the contest had raged markedly fierce; for M'Adam noticed his
son's more frequent presence at home, and commented on the fact in his
usual spirit of playful raillery.

"What's come to ye, David?" he asked one day. "Yer auld dad's head is
nigh turned wi' yer condescension. Is James Moore feared ye'll steal the
Cup fra him, as ye stole it from me, that he'll not ha' ye at Kenmuir?
or what is it?"

"I thought I could maybe keep an eye on the Killer gin I stayed here,"
David answered, leering at Red Wull.

"Ye'd do better at Kenmuir--eh, Wullie!" the little man replied.

"Nay," the other answered, "he'll not go to Kenmuir. There's Th' Owd Un
to see to him there o' nights."

The little man whipped round.

"Are ye so sure he is there o' nights, ma lad?" he asked with slow
significance.

"He was there when some one--I dinna say who, though I have ma
thoughts--tried to poison him," sneered the boy, mimicking his father's
manner.

M'Adam shook his head.

"If he was poisoned, and noo I think aiblins he was, he didna pick it up
at Kenmuir, I tell ye that," he said, and marched out of the room.

In the mean time the Black Killer pursued his bloody trade unchecked.
The public, always greedy of a new sensation, took up the matter.
In several