“Man, ye dinna ken what ye’re sayin’!” was the shocked response.

“Do I no’?  I’m canny, by the ordinar’, but my fule tongue will get me into trouble with the magistrates one of these days.  It aye wags at both ends, and is no’ tied in the middle.”

Then, stanch Calvinist that he was, and never dreaming that he was indulging in the sinful pleasure of confession, Mr. Traill poured out the story of Auld Jock’s plight and of his own. shortcomings.  It was a bitter, upbraiding thing that he, an uncommonly capable man, had meant so well by a humble old body, and done so ill.  And he had failed again when he tried to undo the mischief.  The very next morning he had gone down into the perilous Cowgate, and inquired in every place where it might be possible for such a timid old shepherd to be known.  But there!  As well look for a burr thistle in a bin of oats, as look for a human atom in the Cowgate and the wynds “juist aff.”

“Weel, noo, ye couldna hae dune aething wi’ the auld body, ava, gin he wouldna gang to the infairmary.”  The caretaker was trying to console the self-accusing man.

“Could I no’?  Ye dinna ken me as weel as ye micht.”  The disgusted landlord tumbled into broad Scotch.  “Gie me to do it ance mair, an’ I’d chairge Auld Jock wi’ thievin’ ma siller, wi’ a wink o’ the ee at the police to mak’ them ken I was leein’; an’ syne they’d hae hustled ’im aff, willy-nilly, to a snug bed.”

The energetic little man looked so entirely capable of any daring deed that he fired the caretaker into enthusiastic search for Bobby.  It was not entirely dark, for the sky was studded with stars, snow lay in broad patches on the slope, and all about the lower end of the kirkyard supper candles burned at every rear window of the tall tenements.

The two men searched among the near-by slabs and table-tombs and scattered thorn bushes.  They circled the monument to all the martyrs who had died heroically, in the Grassmarket and elsewhere, for their faith.  They hunted in the deep shadows of the buttresses along the side of the auld kirk and among the pillars of the octagonal portico to the new.  At the rear of the long, low building, that was clumsily partitioned across for two pulpits, stood the ornate tomb of “Bluidy” McKenzie.  But Bobby had not committed himself to the mercy of the hanging judge, nor yet to the care of the doughty minister, who, from the pulpit of Greyfriars auld kirk, had flung the blood and tear stained Covenant in the teeth of persecution.

The search was continued past the modest Scott family burial plot and on to the west wall.  There was a broad outlook over Heriot’s Hospital grounds, a smooth and shining expanse of unsullied snow about the early Elizabethan pile of buildings.  Returning, they skirted the lowest wall below the tenements, for in the circling line of courtyarded vaults, where the “nobeelity” of Scotland lay haughtily apart under timestained marbles, were many shadowy nooks in which so small a dog could stow himself away.  Skulking cats were flushed there, and sent flying over aristocratic bones, but there was no trace of Bobby.