And the child grew like a fir-tree, straight and tall, full of hot blood, swung about by whim and the moment's fancy. For him it was ever the horse and gun, a snatched dinner and hearty, and off to the wood or hill. He got to know the inner ways of the beasts that hide in the coarse grasses and the whin; at a whistle he could coax flapping birds to come to heel. A loose vest and a naked neck for ever were marring his gentility, and his closest friends were countrymen with hard hands and the loud ready laugh.
One day it came to the captain's mind that something must be made of this young blade, and he sent for him.
"No, but--but I ken a short way with the badgers," the lad made answer.
"Never a lesson," said the lad; "I was too busy living."
"Living. I was at the swimming at the Creags, and beaking in the sun on the braes above the Garron beside the march wall where the hedgehogs creep, and I am new from the shinty," and he shook the shinty-stick in his hand.
The captain took to pondering, his chin on his hand and his elbows on the table, where a bottle and glass lay beside him.
After a bit he said, "Look ye, my son, what are ye meaning to be?"
"I'm for the sword-work," the lad said, in a flash, his face twitching.
"I would sooner see you in hell first!" cried the captain, thumping the board till the glass rang. He had seen foreign wars himself and had a hack on the groin.
That was the first of the feud between them. They fought it dour and they fought it hard, the father for the crafts of peace and the lad for his own way, and at last one day the captain said--
"To the door, brat, and your lair with the Boboons you belong to! Faith, and your grandfather was right when he said there was never a lapdog in a fox's litter."
Who he came of, the lad had no notion, for the swart Macdonalds never came near the town after Boboon left it for the last time; but he put on his bonnet, and went out of the house and on to the highroad.
It was well on to winter, a brawling day, with the leaves of the Duke's trees swishing thick and high over the thatch and through the streets of the Duke's town. Snug stood the gables, friendly and warm, and the window-lozens winked with the light of big peat-fires within. Over the breast the seabirds yelped and crows craked without a stop, stirring about in the branches behind Macvicar's Land. And the salt wind! It blew in from the low bay at one end of the town and through it to the other, and before it went a lad into the wide world that starts at the factor's corner.