The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales | Page 3

a deadly black humour; for Jim, who was but
fifteen years of age, had trooped off to Berwick at the first alarm with
his father's new fowling piece. All night his dad had chased him, and
now there he was, a prisoner, with the barrel of the stolen gun sticking
out from behind the seat. He looked as sulky as his father, with his
hands thrust into his side-pockets, his brows drawn down, and his
lower lip thrusting out.

"It's all a lie!" shouted the doctor as he passed. "There has been no
landing, and all the fools in Scotland have been gadding about the
roads for nothing."
His son Jim snarled something up at him on this, and his father struck
him a blow with his clenched fist on the side of his head, which sent the
boy's chin forward upon his breast as though he had been stunned. My
father shook his head, for he had a liking for Jim; but we all walked up
to the house again, nodding and blinking, and hardly able to keep our
eyes open now that we knew that all was safe, but with a thrill of joy at
our hearts such as I have only matched once or twice in my lifetime.
Now all this has little enough to do with what I took my pen up to tell
about; but when a man has a good memory and little skill, he cannot
draw one thought from his mind without a dozen others trailing out
behind it. And yet, now that I come to think of it, this had something to
do with it after all; for Jim Horscroft had so deadly a quarrel with his
father, that he was packed off to the Berwick Academy, and as my
father had long wished me to go there, he took advantage of this chance
to send me also.
But before I say a word about this school, I shall go back to where I
should have begun, and give you a hint as to who I am; for it may be
that these words of mine may be read by some folk beyond the border
country who never heard of the Calders of West Inch.
It has a brave sound, West Inch, but it is not a fine estate with a braw
house upon it, but only a great hard-bitten, wind-swept sheep run,
fringing off into links along the sea-shore, where a frugal man might
with hard work just pay his rent and have butter instead of treacle on
Sundays. In the centre there is a grey-stoned slate-roofed house with a
byre behind it, and "1703" scrawled in stonework over the lintel of the
door. There for more than a hundred years our folk have lived, until, for
all their poverty, they came to take a good place among the people; for
in the country parts the old yeoman is often better thought of than the
new laird.
There was one queer thing about the house of West Inch. It has been

reckoned by engineers and other knowing folk that the boundary line
between the two countries ran right through the middle of it, splitting
our second-best bedroom into an English half and a Scotch half. Now
the cot in which I always slept was so placed that my head was to the
north of the line and my feet to the south of it. My friends say that if I
had chanced to lie the other way my hair might not have been so sandy,
nor my mind of so solemn a cast. This I know, that more than once in
my life, when my Scotch head could see no way out of a danger, my
good thick English legs have come to my help, and carried me clear
away. But at school I never heard the end of this, for they would call
me "Half-and-half" and "The Great Britain," and sometimes "Union
Jack." When there was a battle between the Scotch and English boys,
one side would kick my shins and the other cuff my ears, and then they
would both stop and laugh as though it were something funny.
At first I was very miserable at the Berwick Academy. Birtwhistle was
the first master, and Adams the second, and I had no love for either of
them. I was shy and backward by nature, and slow at making a friend
either among masters or boys. It was nine miles as the crow flies, and
eleven and a half by road, from Berwick to West Inch, and my heart
grew heavy at the weary distance that separated me from my mother;
for, mark you, a lad of that age pretends that he has no need of his
mother's caresses, but ah, how