hem: but they ate, drank, and were merry. At the
end of the repast the two gentlemen rose to light their cigars in the
lee of the wall.

"I suppose you know all about Malcolm?" said Custer, after an awkward
pause.

"My dear fellow," said the consul, somewhat impatiently, "I know nothing
about him, and you ought to know that by this time."

"I thought YOUR FRIEND, Sir James, might have told you," continued
Custer, with significant emphasis.

"I have not seen Sir James for two months."

"Well, Malcolm's a crank--always was one, I reckon, and is reg'larly
off his head now. Yes, sir; Scotch whiskey and your friend Sir James
finished him. After that dinner at MacFen's he was done for--went wild.
Danced a sword-dance, or a strathspey, or some other blamed thing, on
the table, and yelled louder than the pipes. So they all did. Jack, I've
painted the town red once myself; I thought I knew what a first-class
jamboree was: but they were prayer-meetings to that show. Everybody was
blind drunk--but they all got over it except HIM. THEY were a different
lot of men the next day, as cool and cautious as you please, but HE was
shut up for a week, and came out crazy."

"But what's that to do with his claim?"

"Well, there ain't much use 'whooping up the boys' when only the whooper
gets wild."

"Still, that does not affect any right he may have in the property."

"But it affects the syndicate," said Custer gloomily; "and when we found
that he was whooping up some shopkeepers and factory hands who claimed
to belong to the clan,--and you can't heave a stone at a dog around here
without hitting a McHulish,--we concluded we hadn't much use for him
ornamentally. So we shipped him home last steamer."

"And the property?"

"Oh, that's all right," said Custer, still gloomily. "We've effected an
amicable compromise, as Sir James calls it. That means we've taken a lot
of land somewhere north, that you can shoot over--that is, you needn't
be afraid of hitting a house, or a tree, or a man anywhere; and we've
got a strip more of the same sort on the seashore somewhere off here,
occupied only by some gay galoots called crofters, and you can raise
a lawsuit and an imprecation on every acre. Then there's this
soul-subduing, sequestered spot, and what's left of the old bone-boiling
establishment, and the rights of fishing and peat-burning, and otherwise
creating a nuisance off the mainland. It cost the syndicate only a
hundred thousand doll