"My name is de Brydde," I replied, ignoring his criticisms of my person.
"De Brydde," he repeated. "It sounds French. Ye’d better ca’ yersel’ Bryden. It’s a guid Scots name, and less kenspeckle. Pu’ yer shouthers back, and haud up yer heid."
Two dragoons entered the tavern, and the sergeant was on his dignity.
"Tak’ this recruit," he said, "to heidquarters, and hand him ower to the sergeant-major. He’s a likely chiel."
I rose to accompany the men, but the sergeant tapped me on the shoulder:
"Ye’ve forgotten to pay the score," he said. "Hey, Mary," and the tavern maid came forward.
The King’s shilling that was mine paid for the sergeant’s hospitality. It’s the way of the army.
So I became Trooper Bryden of Lag’s Horse.
After the cloistered quiet of Balliol I found my new life passing strange.
Sir Robert Grierson of Lag, our Commanding Officer, was a good soldier, a martinet and a firm believer in the power of the iron hand. He was, we knew, held in high favour by the authorities, and he had been granted a commission to stamp out, by all means in his power, the pestilent and bigoted pack of rebels in Dumfriesshire and Galloway who called themselves Covenanters. He was quick of temper, but he did not lack a kind of sardonic humour, nor was he without bravery. A King’s man to the core, he never troubled his mind with empty questionings; his orders were to put down rebellion and to crush the Covenanters, and that was enough for him.
My fellow-troopers interested me. Some of them were soldiers of fortune who had fought upon the Continent of Europe--hard-bitten men, full of strange oaths and stranger tales of bloody fights fought on alien soil. In their eyes the life of a soldier was the only life worth living, and they held in contempt less bellicose mortals who were content to spend their days in the paths of peace. Of the rest, some were Highlanders, dreamy-eyed creatures of their emotions, in which they reined in with a firm hand in the presence of any Lowlander, but to which they gave free vent when much liquor had loosened their tongues. Brave men all--from their youth accustomed to hardship and bloodshed--fighting was as the breath of their nostrils. To me, accustomed to the milder ales of England, their capacity for the strong waters of the North was a revelation. They could drink, undiluted, fiery spirits of a potency and in a quantity that would have killed me. I never saw one drunk; and at the end of an evening of heavy indulgence there was not a man among them but could stand steady upon his feet and find his way unaided back to billets. So far as I could see the only effect of their potations was that after the fourth or fifth pot they became musical and would sing love-songs in the Gaelic tongue with a moisture gathering in their eyes like dewdrops. After that they tended to become theological, and would argue angrily on points of doctrine too abstruse for me to follow. The Lowlanders were a curious mixture of sentimentality and sound common-sense. They carried their drink less well than the Highlanders, but they too were men of unusual capacity--at least to my way of thinking--and always passed through a theological phase on their way to a condition of drunkenness.