Dead Mens Money | Page 5

all. And--how will you get out there,
now?--it's a goodish way."
"I have a bicycle," I answered, and at his question a thought struck me.
"How did you intend to get out there yourself, Mr. Gilverthwaite?" I
asked. "That far--and at that time of night?"
"Aye!" he said. "Just so--but I'd ha' done it easy enough, my lad--if I
hadn't been laid here. I'd ha' gone out by the last train to the nighest
station, and it being summer I'd ha' shifted for myself somehow during
the rest of the night--I'm used to night work. But--that's neither here nor
there. You'll go? And--private?"
"I'll go--and privately," I answered him. "Make yourself easy."
"And not a word to your mother?" he asked anxiously.
"Just so," I replied. "Leave it to me."
He looked vastly relieved at that, and after assuring him that I had the
message by heart I left his chamber and went downstairs. After all, it
was no great task that he had put on me. I had often stayed until very
late at the office, where I had the privilege of reading law-books at
nights, and it was an easy business to mention to my mother that I
wouldn't be in that night so very early. That part of my contract with
the sick man upstairs I could keep well enough, in letter and spirit--all

the same, I was not going out along Tweed-side at that hour of the
night without some safeguard, and though I would tell no one of what
my business for Mr. Gilverthwaite precisely amounted to, I would tell
one person where it would take me, in case anything untoward
happened and I had to be looked for. That person was the proper one
for a lad to go to under the circumstances--my sweetheart, Maisie
Dunlop.
And here I'll take you into confidence and say that at that time Maisie
and I had been sweethearting a good two years, and were as certain of
each other as if the two had been twelve. I doubt if there was such
another old-fashioned couple as we were anywhere else in the British
Islands, for already we were as much bound up in each other as if we
had been married half a lifetime, and there was not an affair of mine
that I did not tell her of, nor had she a secret that she did not share with
me. But then, to be sure, we had been neighbours all our lives, for her
father, Andrew Dunlop, kept a grocer's shop not fifty yards from our
house, and she and I had been playmates ever since our school-days,
and had fallen to sober and serious love as soon as we arrived at what
we at any rate called years of discretion--which means that I was
nineteen, and she seventeen, when we first spoke definitely about
getting married. And two years had gone by since then, and one reason
why I had no objection to earning Mr. Gilverthwaite's ten pounds was
that Maisie and I meant to wed as soon as my salary was lifted to three
pounds a week, as it soon was to be, and we were saving money for our
furnishing--and ten pounds, of course, would be a nice help.
So presently I went along the street to Dunlop's and called Maisie out,
and we went down to the walls by the river mouth, which was a regular
evening performance of ours. And in a quiet corner, where there was a
seat on which we often sat whispering together of our future, I told her
that I had to do a piece of business for our lodger that night and that the
precise nature of it was a secret which I must not let out even to her.
"But here's this much in it, Maisie," I went on, taking care that there
was no one near us that could catch a word of what I was saying; "I can
tell you where the spot is that I'm to do the business at, for a fine lonely

spot it is to be in at the time of night I'm to be there--an hour before
midnight, and the place is that old ruin that's close by where Till meets
Tweed--you know it well enough yourself."
I felt her shiver a bit at that, and I knew what it was that was in her
mind, for Maisie was a girl of imagination, and the mention of a lonely
place like that, to be visited at such an hour, set it working.
"Yon's a queer man, that lodger of your mother's, Hughie," she said.
"And it's a strange time and place you're talking of. I hope nothing'll
come to you in the way of mischance."
"Oh, it's nothing, nothing at