John Splendid | Page 3

crowded with people worth kenning for their graces and the
many things they knew.
I came home now on this night of nights with Munchen and Augsburg,
and the fine cities of all the France, in my mind, and I tell you I could
think shame of this mean rickle of stones I had thought a town, were it
not for the good hearts and kind I knew were under every roof. The
broad street crowded with people, did I say? A little lane rather; and
Elrigmore, with schooling and the wisdom of travel, felt he could see
into the heart's core of the cunningest merchant in the place.
But anyway, here I was, riding into town from the Cromalt end on a
night in autumn. It was after ten by my Paris watch when I got the
length of the Creags, and I knew that there was nothing but a sleeping
town before me, for our folks were always early bedders when the
fishing season was on. The night hung thick with stars, but there was
no moon; a stiff wind from the east prinked at my right ear and cooled
my horse's skin, as he slowed down after a canter of a mile or two on
this side of Pennymore. Out on the loch I could see the lights of a few
herring-boats lift and fall at the end of their trail of nets.
"Too few of you there for the town to be busy and cheerful," said I to
myself; "no doubt the bulk of the boats are down at Otter, damming the
fish in the narrow gut, and keeping them from searching up to our own
good townsmen."
I pressed my brute to a trot, and turned round into the nether part of the
town. It was what I expected--the place was dark, black out. The people

were sleeping; the salt air of Loch Finne went sighing through the place
in a way that made me dowie for old days. We went over the
causeway-stones with a clatter that might have wakened the dead, but
no one put a head out, and I thought of the notion of a cheery
home-coming poor Gavin had--my dear cousin, stroked out and cold
under foreign clods at Velshiem, two leagues below the field of Worms
of Hessen, on the banks of the Rhine, in Low Germanie.
It is a curious business this riding into a town in the dark waste of night;
curious even in a strange town when all are the same for you that sleep
behind those shutters and those doors, but doubly curious when you
know that behind the dark fronts are folk lying that you know well, that
have been thinking, and drinking, and thriving when you were far away.
As I went clattering slowly by, I would say at one house front,
"Yonder's my old comrade, Tearlach, who taught me my one tune on
the pipe-chanter; is his beard grown yet, I wonder?" At another, "There
is the garret window of the schoolmaster's daughter--does she sing so
sweetly nowadays in the old kirk?"
In the dead middle of the street I pulled my horse up, just to study the
full quietness of the hour. Leaning over, I put a hand on his nostrils and
whispered in his ear for a silence, as we do abroad in ambuscade. Town
Innera-ora slept sound, sure enough! All to hear was the spilling of the
river at the cascade under the bridge and the plopping of the waves
against the wall we call the ramparts, that keeps the sea from thrashing
on the Tolbooth. And then over all I could hear a most strange moaning
sound, such as we boys used to make with a piece of lath nicked at the
edges and swung hurriedly round the head by a string. It was made by
the wind, I knew, for it came loudest in the gusty bits of the night and
from the east, and when there was a lull I could hear it soften away and
end for a second or two with a dunt, as if some heavy, soft thing struck
against wood.
Whatever it was, the burghers of Inneraora paid no heed, but slept,
stark and sound, behind their steeked shutters.
The solemnity of the place that I knew so much better in a natural
lively mood annoyed me, and I played there and then a prank more

becoming a boy in his first kilt than a gentleman of education and
travel and some repute for sobriety. I noticed I was opposite the house
of a poor old woman they called Black Kate, whose door was ever the
target in my young days for every lad that could brag of a boot-toe, and
I saw that the