“Turkey! Turkey! wake up,” I cried. “It’s such a beautiful night! It’s a shame to lie sleeping that way.”
Turkey’s answer was immediate. He was wide awake and out of bed with all his wits by him in a moment.
“Sh! sh!” he said, “or you’ll wake Oscar.”
Oscar was a colley (_sheep dog_) which slept in a kennel in the cornyard. He was not much of a watch-dog, for there was no great occasion for watching, and he knew it, and slept like a human child; but he was the most knowing of dogs. Turkey was proceeding to dress.
“Never mind your clothes, Turkey,” I said. “There’s nobody up.”
Willing enough to spare himself trouble, Turkey followed me in his shirt. But once we were out in the cornyard, instead of finding contentment in the sky and the moon, as I did, he wanted to know what we were going to do.
“It’s not a bad sort of night,” he said; “what shall we do with it?”
“Oh, nothing,” I answered; “only look about us a bit.”
“You didn’t hear robbers, did you?” he asked.
“Oh dear, no! I couldn’t sleep, and got down the ladder, and came to wake you--that’s all.”
Now that I had Turkey, there was scarcely more terror in the night than in the day. I consented at once. That we had no shoes on was not of the least consequence to Scotch boys. I often, and Turkey always, went barefooted in summer.
As we left the barn, Turkey had caught up his little whip. He was never to be seen without either that or his club, as we called the stick he carried when he was herding the cattle. Finding him thus armed, I begged him to give me his club. He ran and fetched it, and, thus equipped, we set out for nowhere in the middle of the night. My fancy was full of fragmentary notions of adventure, in which shadows from The Pilgrim’s Progress predominated. I shouldered my club, trying to persuade my imagination that the unchristian weapon had been won from some pagan giant, and therefore was not unfittingly carried. But Turkey was far better armed with his lash of wire than I was with the club. His little whip was like that fearful weapon called the morning star in the hand of some stalwart knight.
We took our way towards the nearest hills, thinking little of where we went so that we were in motion. I guess that the story I have just related must, notwithstanding his unbelief, have been working in Turkey’s brain that night, for after we had walked for a mile or more along the road, and had arrived at the foot of a wooded hill, well known to all the children of the neighbourhood for its bilberries, he turned into the hollow of a broken track, which lost itself in a field as yet only half-redeemed from the moorland. It was plain to me now that Turkey had some goal or other in his view; but I followed his leading, and asked no questions. All at once he stopped, and said, pointing a few yards in front of him: