“Ay!” said he. “New back! And they havena nabbed ye yet! Weel, they'll no' be lang, maybe, o' doin' that, for I'll warrant ye've been advertised plenty aboot the country; ony man that has read a gazette or clattered in a public-hoose kens your description and the blackness o' the deed you're chairged wi'. All I did was to sink a bit ship that was rotten onyway, mak' free trade wi' a few ankers o' brandy that wad hae been drunk by the best i' the land includin' the very lords that tried me, and accidentally kill a lad that sair needed a beltin' to gar him dae his honest wark. But you shot a man deliberate and his blood is crying frae the grund. If ye hurry ye'll maybe dance on naethin' sooner nor mysel'.”
There was so much impotent venom in what he said that I lost my anger with the wretch drawing near his end, and looked on him with pity. It seemed to annoy him more than if I had reviled him.
“I'm a white soul.” says he, clasping his hands--the most arrant blasphemy of a gesture from one whose deeds were desperately wicked! “I'm a white soul, praise God! and value not your opinions a docken leaf. Ye micht hae come here to this melancholy place to slip a bit guinea into my hand for some few extra comforts, instead o' which it's jist to anger me.”
He glued his cheek against the bars and stared at me from head to foot, catching at the last a glance of my fateful shoes. He pointed at them with a rigid finger.
“Man! man!” he cried, “there's the sign and token o' the lot o' ye--the bloody shoon. They may weel be red for him and you that wore them. Red shoon! red shoon!” He stopped suddenly. “After a',” said he, “I bear ye nae ill-will, though I hae but to pass the word to the warder on the ither side o' the rails. And oh! abin a' repent----” He was off again into one of his blasphemies, for at my elbow now was an old lady who was doubtless come to confirm the conversion of Daniel Risk. I turned to go.
He cast his unaffected eye piously heavenward, and coolly offered up a brief prayer for “this erring young brother determined on the ways of vice and folly.”
It may be scarce credible that I went forth from the condemned cell with the most shaken mind I had had since the day I fled from the moor of Mearns. The streets were thronged with citizens; the castle ramparts rose up white and fine, the bastions touched by sunset fires, a window blazing like a star. Above the muffled valley, clear, silvery, proud, rang a trumpet on the walls, reminding me of many a morning rouse in far Silesia. Was I not better there? Why should I be the sentimental fool and run my head into a noose? Risk, whom I had gone to see in pity, paid me with a vengeance! He had put into the blunt language of the world all the horror I had never heard in words before, though it had often been in my mind. I saw myself for the first time the hunted outlaw, captured at last. “You that's out there should be in where I am!” It was true! But to sit for weeks in that foul hole within the iron rail, waiting on doom, reflecting on my folks disgraced--I could not bear it!
