" The caretaker was trying
to console the self-accusing man.
"Could I no'? Ye dinna ken me as weel as ye micht." The disgusted
landlord tumbled into broad Scotch. "Gie me to do it ance mair,
an' I'd chairge Auld Jock wi' thievin' ma siller, wi' a wink o'
the ee at the police to mak' them ken I was leein'; an' syne
they'd hae hustled 'im aff, willy-nilly, to a snug bed."
The energetic little man looked so entirely capable of any daring
deed that he fired the caretaker into enthusiastic search for
Bobby. It was not entirely dark, for the sky was studded with
stars, snow lay in broad patches on the slope, and all about the
lower end of the kirkyard supper candles burned at every rear
window of the tall tenements.
The two men searched among the near-by slabs and table-tombs and
scattered thorn bushes. They circled the monument to all the
martyrs who had died heroically, in the Grassmarket and
elsewhere, for their faith. They hunted in the deep shadows of
the buttresses along the side of the auld kirk and among the
pillars of the octagonal portico to the new. At the rear of the
long, low building, that was clumsily partitioned across for two
pulpits, stood the ornate tomb of "Bluidy" McKenzie. But Bobby
had not committed himself to the mercy of the hanging judge, nor
yet to the care of the doughty minister, who, from the pulpit of
Greyfriars auld kirk, had flung the blood and tear stained
Covenant in the teeth of persecution.
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