The League of the Leopard Part 6

As luck would have it, the next person Dane met was Lilian, and she looked very winsome as she stood bareheaded under the morning suns.h.i.+ne in her thin white dress. Dane's lips set tight as he watched her, then suddenly his face softened again.

"I am glad to see you recovering, Hilton," she greeted him. "That hat hides my bandages nicely. Do you feel able to walk slowly over to Culmeny with me to-day?"

It was a tantalizing question: Dane felt not only able but very willing to walk across the breadth of Scotland in Lilian Chatterton's company.

He feared however, that his moral strength would prove unequal to the strain the excursion might impose, for it was growing very difficult to observe the conditions of the indefinite compact.

"I am very sorry, but I have letters to write," he said.

Lilian Chatterton was a trifle quick-tempered, and though Dane knew it, and considered it not a fault but a characteristic, he wondered at the ways of women as she answered:

"I could not, of course, expect you to delay your correspondence, which is no doubt important. Have you run out of those new powder cartridges?"

Dane felt that, under the circ.u.mstances, this was particularly hard on him, but he smiled dryly.

"The correspondence relates to my departure for London. I want you to listen, Lilian. I have just had an interview with your uncle, which makes my absence appear desirable. Perhaps you can guess its purport, and the gist of what he said."

The clear rose-color deepened a little in the girl's cheeks, but she answered steadily.

"I will admit the possibility. The most important question is what you said to him."

Now Dane had not only subdued mutinous alien laborers, and held them to their task, but he had even been complimented by a South American Spaniard upon the incisive vocabulary which helped him to accomplish it.

Nevertheless, at that moment he felt almost abject, and found speech of any kind very difficult.

"Are you ashamed of your answer?" asked the girl.

"I am," Dane admitted. "There was, however, only one way in which I could satisfy Mr. Chatterton without running the risk of allowing him to apply considerable misdirected energy to the task of convincing a second person. Therefore, though I did not like it, I took that way. He was not pleased with me."

"You told him----" Lilian began, coloring still more.

"I did," said Dane grimly. "Horribly unflattering, wasn't it; but it was the best I could do for you."

The girl first experienced a wholly illogical desire to humiliate the speaker; but, recognizing the unreasonableness of this, she reflected a moment, and then laughed mirthlessly.

"It should certainly prove effective. Still, a woman would have found a neater way out of the difficulty!"

Lilian left him, and when the man pa.s.sed out of earshot into the shrubbery, he used a few pointed and forbidden adjectives in connection with what he termed his luck.

He was leaning moodily upon a gate, looking down on a sunlit stubble-field the following afternoon, when the next link was forged in the chain of circ.u.mstances which, beginning with Chatterton's fis.h.i.+ng, would drag him through strange adventures. There was late honeysuckle on the hedges, and festoons of warm-tinted straw. Running water sang soothingly beneath the pine branches overhanging a neighboring hollow; while all the wide vista of river, moor, and fell was mellowed by the golden autumn haze. Dane, however, was far from happy. He was in no way jealous of Carsluith Maxwell, which was perhaps surprising; but, in addition to his other troubles, it did not please him that the latter should have accompanied Miss Chatterton home on foot from Culmeny. They had also been an inordinate time over the journey.

Presently, a little brown-faced child came pattering barefooted down the lane, and stopping, glanced at him shyly, as though half afraid. She was a pretty, elfish little thing, though her well-mended garments betokened industrious poverty. She apparently gathered courage when the man smiled at her.

"Whom are you staring so hard at, my little maid?" said he.

The child fished out a strip of folded paper from somewhere about her diminutive person, and held it up to him.

"Ye will be the Mr. Dane who's staying at The Larches?"

Dane nodded, and the girl glanced up and down the lane suspiciously.

"Then Sis telt me to give ye this when there was naebody to see."

"And who is your sister, and what's it all about?" asked Dane; and the little thing smiled roguishly.

"Just Mary Johnstone. Maybe it would tell ye gin ye lookit inside it, sir."

She vanished the next moment, with a patter of bare feet, leaving Dane to stare blankly at the folded paper.

"Now, who is Mary Johnstone, and what can she want with me?" he wondered, as he prepared to follow the child's advice and read the missive. When this had been done, however, he was not greatly enlightened.

"_I'm taking a great liberty_," it ran. "_I am in great trouble, and you are the one person who can help me. If you would not have two little children go hungry all winter, you will meet me by the planting at Hallows Brig in the gloaming to-morrow. I saw you at The Larches, and thought I could trust you._"

"Very confiding of Miss Johnstone, whoever she is, but I'm thankful my conscience is clear," thought Dane. It was unfortunate that he did not obey the first impulse which prompted him to destroy the note. Instead of this, he lighted another cigar, and sat down to consider the affair.

Just then the local constable, who on an eventful occasion had also stuck fast in the hedge, came tramping through the stubble with elephantine gait.

"Grand weather the day, sir," he beamed. "Ye will have heard we grippit the man who broke yere heid."

"I'm summoned as a witness; but who is Mary Johnstone?" asked Dane. "You should know everybody about here."

"Old Rab Johnstone's daughter; and that's no great credit to the la.s.s.

Rab's overfond of the whisky, and never does nothing when he can help it, which is gey often, I'm thinking. The daughter's a hard working la.s.s--sews for the gentlefolks; and she and her brither between them keep the two mitherless bairns fed. It's him we've got in the lock-up for breaking yere heid."

"Oh," said Dane, as a light dawned upon him. "Then Mary Johnstone would be the pretty, light-haired girl I saw sewing for Miss Chatterton?"

"That same, sir," answered the constable, with professional alacrity.

"Miss Chatterton has missed nothing, has she?"

"Of course not!" Dane said impatiently. "I was only inquiring out of curiosity. You need not mention it. Would this coin be of any use to you?"

The official admitted that it might be; but when he appeared to smother a bovine chuckle, Dane turned upon him.

"What the deuce is amusing you so?"

"Naething, sir," the man answered sheepishly. "I'm taken that way whiles in hot weather."

The constable furnished further particulars about the poacher's family before he departed; and Dane, reflecting that his must be the most damaging testimony against the prisoner, understood why Mary Johnstone had sent for him. It was perhaps foolish, but the child's face had attracted him; and deciding that the lot of the pretty seamstress, struggling to bring up her sisters under the conditions mentioned, must be a hard one at the best, he resolved at least to hear what she had to say.

CHAPTER V

THE TRYST AT HALLOWS BRIG

It was a clear, cool evening when Carsluith Maxwell leaned on the rails of a footbridge which spanned the river, looking up at the old place of Culmeny. It rose from the stony hillside, a straggling pile of time-worn masonry, with all its narrow windows aflame with the evening light, and the green of ivy softening its rugged simplicity. A square tower formed its major portion, and this had been built with no pretense at adornment in troubled days when the Maxwells had won and held their possessions with the mailed hand. They had been, for the most part, soldiers of fortune, and their descendant recalled the traditions of his race as, turning, he looked south and east across the s.h.i.+ning flood-tide toward the Solway sands.

More of his forbears had, when there was scarcity at Culmeny--which was generally the case--ridden that way in steel cap and dinted harness than ever rode back, and Carsluith Maxwell had hitherto fulfilled the family destiny, chancing his life in modern ventures where the risks were perhaps as heavy as any the old moss-troopers ran. Now, however, he had come to a turning-point in his career, and that night must decide whether he applied his energies to the slow conversion of barren mosses into arable land, or went forth again to seek his fortune over seas. The wandering life appealed to his instincts; and fortune had not wholly evaded him; but he had recognized of late that unless he could share it with one woman, even prosperity would have little value for him. There was a trace of melancholy almost akin to superst.i.tion in his nature, and it was with a curious smile that he turned toward Culmeny to put his fate to the test. If Lilian Chatterton would not listen, it was high time to begin his search for the African mine.