One day he produced my belt from a lockfast drawer. “There’s a terrible heap o’ siller in’t,” he said. “Ye’d better coont it to see it’s a’ there.”

He never even sought my name. I asked him if anybody had been around making inquiries subsequent to my spell at the road-making.

“Ay, there was a man in a motor-cawr. He speired whae had ta’en my place that day, and I let on I thocht him daft. But he keepit on at me, and syne I said he maun be thinkin’ o’ my gude-brither frae the Cleuch that whiles lent me a haun’. He was a wersh-lookin’ sowl, and I couldna understand the half o’ his English tongue.”

I was getting restless those last days, and as soon as I felt myself fit I decided to be off. That was not till the twelfth day of June , and as luck would have it a drover went past that morning taking some cattle to Moffat. He was a man named Hislop, a friend of Turnbull’s, and he came in to his breakfast with us and offered to take me with him.