SIR EDWARD LEITHEN'S MYSTERIES - Complete Series. Buchan John

to think he’ll plump for Carnmore, for he must think John Macnab a fairly desperate fellow who will aim first at killing his stag in peace, and will trust to Providence for the rest. So at the moment I favour Carnbeg.”

      Leithen wrinkled his brow. “There are three of us,” he said. “That gives us a chance of a little finesse. What about letting Charles or me make a demonstration against Carnmore, while you wait at Carnbeg?”

      “Good idea! I thought of that too.”

      “You’d better assume Colonel Raden to be in very full possession of his wits,” Leithen continued. “The simple bluff won’t do—he’ll see through it. He’ll think that John Macnab is the same wary kind of old bird as himself. I found out in the war that it didn’t do to underrate your opponent’s brains. He’s pretty certain to expect a feint and not to be taken in. I’m for something a little subtler.”

      “Meaning?”

      “Meaning that you feint in one place, so that your opponent believes it to be a feint and pays no attention—and then you sail in and get to work in that very place.”

      Palliser-Yeates whistled. “That wants thinking over…How about yourself?”

      “I’ve studied the river, and you never in your life saw such a hopeless proposition, All the good pools are as open as the Serpentine. Wattie stated the odds correctly.”

      “Nothing doing there?”

      “Nothing doing, unless I take steps to shorten the odds. So I’ve taken in a partner.”

      The others stared, and even Lamancha woke up.

      “Yes. I interviewed him in the stable before dinner. It’s the little ragamuffin who sells fish—Fish Benjie is the name he goes by. Archie, I hope you don’t mind, but I told him to resume his morning visits. They’re my best chance for consultations.”

      “You’re taking a pretty big risk, Ned,” said his host. “D’you mean to say you’ve let that boy into the whole secret?”

      “I’ve told him everything. It was the only way, for he had begun to suspect. I admit it’s a gamble, but I believe I can trust the child. I think I know a sportsman when I see him.”

      Archie still shook his head. “There’s something else I may as well tell you. I met one of the Raden girls to-day—the younger—she was on the bank when I fell into the Larrig. She asked me point-blank if I knew anybody called John Macnab?”

      Lamancha was wide awake. “What did you say?” he asked sharply.

      “Oh, lied of course. Said I supposed she meant the distiller. Then she told me the whole story—said she had written the letter her father signed. She’s mad keen to win the extra fifty quid. For it means a hunter for her this winter down in Warwickshire. Yes, and she asked me to help. I talked a lot of rot about my game leg and that sort of thing, but I sort of promised to go and lunch at Glenraden the day after to-morrow.”

      “That’s impossible,” said Lamancha.

      “I know it is, but there’s only one way out of it. I’ve got to have smallpox again.”

      “You’ve got to go to bed and stay there for a month,” said Palliser-Yeates severely. “Now, look here, Archie. We simply can’t have you getting mixed up with the enemy, especially the enemy women. You’re much too susceptible and far too great an ass.”

      “Of course not,” said Archie, with a touch of protest in his voice. “I see that well enough, but it’s a black look-out for me. I wish to Heaven you fellows had chosen to take your cure somewhere else. I’m simply wreckin’ all my political career. I had a letter from my agent to-night, and I should be touring the constituency instead of playin’ the goat here. All I’ve got to say is that you’ve a dashed lot more than old Raden against you. You’ve got that girl, crazy about her hunter, and anyone can see that she’s clever as a monkey.”

      But the laird of Crask was not thinking of Miss Janet Raden’s wits as he went meditatively to bed. He was wondering why her eyes were so blue, and as he ascended the stairs he thought he had discovered the reason. Her hair was spun-gold, but she had dark eye-lashes.

      IV.

       FISH BENJIE

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      On the roads of the north of Scotland, any time after the last snow-wreaths have melted behind the dykes, you will meet a peculiar kind of tinker. They are not the copper-nosed scarecrows of the lowlands, sullen and cringing, attended by sad infants in ramshackle perambulators. Nor are they in any sense gipsies, for they have not the Romany speech or colouring. They travel the roads with an establishment, usually a covered cart and one or more lean horses, and you may find their encampments any day by any burnside. Of a rainy night you can see their queer little tents, shaped like a segment of sausage, with a fire hissing at the door, and the horses cropping the roadside grass; of a fine morning the women will be washing their duds on the loch shore and their young fighting like ferrets among the shingle. You will meet with them in the back streets of the little towns, and at the back doors of wayside inns, but mostly in sheltered hollows of the moor or green nooks among the birches, for they are artists in choosing camping-grounds. They are children of Esau who combine a dozen crafts—tinkering, fish-hawking, besom-making, and the like—with their natural trades of horse-coping and poaching. At once brazen and obsequious, they beg rather as an art than a necessity; they will whine to a keeper with pockets full of pheasant’s eggs, and seek permission to camp from a laird with a melting tale of hardships, while one of his salmon lies hidden in the bracken on their cart floor. The men are an upstanding race, keen-eyed, resourceful, with humour in their cunning; the women, till life bears too hardly on them, are handsome and soft-spoken; and the children are burned and weathered like imps of the desert. Their speech is neither lowland nor highland, but a sing-song Scots of their own, and if they show the Celt in their secret ways there is a hint of Norse blood in the tawny hair and blue eyes so common among them.

      Ebenezer Bogle was born into this life, and for fifty-five years travelled the roads from the Reay country to the Mearns and from John o’ Groats to the sea-lochs of Appin. Sickness overtook him one October when camped in the Black Isle, and, feeling the hand of death on him, he sent for two people. One was the nearest Free Kirk minister—for Ebenezer was theologically of the old school; the other was a banker from Muirtown. What he said to the minister I do not know; but what the banker said to him may be gathered from the fact that he informed his wife before he died that in the Muirtown bank there lay to his credit a sum of nearly three thousand pounds. Ebenezer had been a sober and careful man, and a genius at horse-coping. He had bought the little rough shelties of the North and the Isles, and sold them at lowland fairs, he had dabbled in black cattle, he had done big trade in sheep-skins when a snowstorm decimated the Sutherland flocks, and he had engaged, perhaps, in less reputable ventures, which might be forbidden by the law of the land, but were not contrary, so he believed, to the Bible. Year by year his bank balance had mounted, for he spent little, and now he had a fortune to bequeath. He made no will; all went to his wife, with the understanding that it would be kept intact for his son; and in this confidence Ebenezer closed his eyes.

      The wife did not change her habit of life. The son Benjamin accompanied her as before in the long rounds between May and October, and in the winter abode in the fishing quarter of Muirtown, and intermittently attended school. Presently his mother took a second husband, a Catholic Macdonald from the West, for the road is a lonely occupation for a solitary woman. Her new man was a cheerful being—very little like the provident Ebenezer— much addicted to the bottle and a lover of all things but legitimate trade. But he respected the dead man’s wishes and made no attempt to touch the hoard in the Muirtown bank; he was kind, too, to the boy, and taught him many things that are not provided for in the educational system of Scotland. From him Benjie learned how to take a nesting grouse, how to snare a dozen things, from hares to roebuck, how to sniggle salmon in the clear pools,