"By the shore-side to the low country, or by the woods to the hills?" the lad asked himself. He had the _caman_ still in his hand, and he tossed it in the air. "Bas for the highway, _cas_ for the low," said he. The shinty fell _bos_, and our hero took to it for the highway to the north. He swithered at the Arches, and looked back on the front of the town and the quay with the oil-lights on it. He was half in the humour to bide, but he put the notion behind him and stretched to the brae, whistling a piper's march. At the head of the brae the town houses were lost to him, and this so soon he could not put up with, so he went down on a way to the right a little and stood on the grass of the Winterton field.
Fast and dark the night was falling, a heavy smirr of rain was drooking the grass, and the trees on every hand shook the water in blobs from the branches. Through them the lights of the finest town in the world shone damp and woe-begone.
"There are good folk in't, and bad folk in't," said the lad to himself; "but somehow 'twas never the place for me!"
He turned and went into the road through the wood, savage at heart, without a thought of where his sleep would be. When he came to Kennachregan, there was the scad of a fire above the trees beside the roaring river, and he went down and looked over a march dyke at a band of wanderers under the trees. Young and old, men and women, they lay steaming on soft beds of springy spruce-branches with their toes to the crackling logs, snoring as snore sound sleepers, sheltered from the rain by the thick branches, the side of the hill, and here and there a canvas covering. There was but one of them up--a long old man with lank jaws and black eyes--John Fine Macdonald. He was stirring up the logs with the shod of a crutch and humming a Perth song, and before the hottest of the fire a plucked bird was roasting.
The smell of the meat and the wood-fire rose to the dykeside where the lad stood shivering in his wet clothes, and the comfort of the camp was something he could not pass by.
He took a jump over the dyke and went out in the light of the fire, wondering what would be his welcome. Old Boboon looked up with his hand over his eyes, then rose on his crutches and put a hand on the young fellow's shoulder.