ose."

"Stout fellow," said Heritage; "and what did you find there?"

"I got inside that Hoose, but it wasn't once or twice I tried. I found
a corner where I was out o' sight o' anybody unless they had come there
seekin' me, and I sklimmed up a rone pipe, but a' the windies were
lockit and I verra near broke my neck. Syne I tried the roof, and a
sore sklim I had, but when I got there there were no skylights. At the
end I got in by the coal-hole. That's why ye're maybe thinkin' I'm no'
very clean."

Heritage's patience was nearly exhausted.

"I don't want to hear how you got in. What did you find, you little
devil?"

"Inside the Hoose," said Dougal slowly (and there was a melancholy
sense of anti-climax in his voice, as of one who had hoped to speak of
gold and jewels and armed men)--"inside that Hoose there's nothing but
two women."

Heritage sat down before him with a stern face.

"Describe them," he commanded.

"One o' them is dead auld, as auld as the wife here. She didn't look
to me very right in the head."

"And the other?"

"Oh, just a lassie."

"What was she like?"

Dougal seemed to be searching for adequate words. "She is..." he
began. Then a popular song gave him inspiration. "She's pure as the
lully in the dell!"

In no way discomposed by Heritage's fierce interrogatory air, he
continued: "She's either foreign or English, for she couldn't
understand what I said, and I could make nothing o' her clippit tongue.
But I could see she had been greetin'. She looked feared, yet kind o'
determined. I speired if I could do anything for her, and when she got
my meaning she was terrible anxious to ken if I had seen a man--a big
man, she said, wi' a yellow beard. She didn't seem to ken his name, or
else she wouldna' tell me. The auld wife was mortal feared, and was
aye speakin' in a foreign langwidge. I seen at once that what
frightened them was Lean and his friends, and I was just starting to
speir about them when there came a sound like a man walkin' along the
passage. She was for hidin' me in behind a sofy, but I wasn't going to
be trapped like that, so I got out by the other door and down the
kitchen stairs and into the coal-hole. Gosh, it was a near thing!"

The boy was on his feet. "I must be off to the camp to give out the
orders for the morn. I'm going back to that Hoose, for it's a fight
atween the Gorbals Die-Hards and the scoondrels that are frightenin'
thae women. The que