He was a true friend in need, that old roadman. His wife was dead years ago, and since his daughter’s marriage he lived alone.

For the better part of ten days he did all the rough nursing I needed. I simply wanted to be left in peace while the fever took its course, and when my skin was cool again I found that the bout had more or less cured my shoulder. But it was a baddish go, and though I was out of bed in five days, it took me some time to get my legs again.

He went out each morning, leaving me milk for the day, and locking the door behind him; and came in in the evening to sit silent in the chimney corner. Not a soul came near the place. When I was getting better, he never bothered me with a question. Several times he fetched me a two days’ old Scotsman , and I noticed that the interest in the Portland Place murder seemed to have died down. There was no mention of it, and I could find very little about anything except a thing called the General Assembly⁠—some ecclesiastical spree, I gathered.

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.