“Elsie! Elsie!” she cried, “John Adam has taken Jamie. Jamie fell, and John got him.”
Elsie looked frightened, but Turkey laughed, saying: “Never mind, Elsie. John is better than he looks. He won’t do him the least harm. He must mind his business, you know.”
The Ba’ Hill was covered with a young plantation of firs, which, hardy as they were, had yet in a measure to be coaxed into growing in that inclement region. It was amongst their small stems that the coveted bilberries grew, in company with cranberries and crowberries, and dwarf junipers. The children of the village thus attracted to the place were no doubt careless of the young trees, and might sometimes even amuse themselves with doing them damage. Hence the keeper, John Adam, whose business it was to look after them, found it his duty to wage war upon the annual hordes of these invaders; and in their eyes Adam was a terrible man. He was very long and very lean, with a flattish yet Roman nose, and rather ill-tempered mouth, while his face was dead-white and much pitted with the small-pox. He wore corduroy breeches, a blue coat, and a nightcap striped horizontally with black and red. The youngsters pretended to determine, by the direction in which the tassel of it hung, what mood its owner was in; nor is it for me to deny that their inductions may have led them to conclusions quite as correct as those of some other scientific observers. At all events the tassel was a warning, a terror, and a hope. He could not run very fast, fortunately, for the lean legs within those ribbed grey stockings were subject to rheumatism, and could take only long not rapid strides; and if the children had a tolerable start, and had not the misfortune to choose in their terror an impassable direction, they were pretty sure to get off. Jamie Duff, the most harmless and conscientious creature, who would not have injured a young fir upon any temptation, did take a wrong direction, caught his foot in a hole, fell into a furze bush, and, nearly paralysed with terror, was seized by the long fingers of Adam, and ignominiously lifted by a portion of his garments into the vast aërial space between the ground and the white, pock-pitted face of the keeper. Too frightened to scream, too conscious of trespass to make any resistance, he was borne off as a warning to the rest of the very improbable fate which awaited them.