The click of the wicket gate was another sort of alarm altogether.  At that the little dog slipped under the fallen table-tomb and lay hidden there until any strange visitor had taken himself away.  Except for two more forced returns and ingenious escapes from the sheepfarm on the Pentlands, Bobby had lived in the kirkyard undisturbed for six months.  The caretaker had neither the heart to put him out nor the courage to face the minister and the kirk officers with a plea for him to remain.  The little dog’s presence there was known, apparently, only to Mr. Traill, to a few of the tenement dwellers, and to the Heriot boys.  If his life was clandestine in a way, it was as regular of hour and duty and as well ordered as that of the garrison in the Castle.

When the time-gun boomed, Bobby was let out for his midday meal at Mr. Traill’s and for a noisy run about the neighborhood to exercise his lungs and legs.  On Wednesdays he haunted the Grassmarket, sniffing at horses, carts and mired boots.  Edinburgh had so many shaggy little Skye and Scotch terriers that one more could go about unremarked.  Bobby returned to the kirkyard at his own good pleasure.  In the evening he was given a supper of porridge and broo, or milk, at the kitchen door of the lodge, and the nights he spent on Auld Jock’s grave.  The morning drum and bugle woke him to the chase, and all his other hours were spent in close attendance on the labors of the caretaker.  The click of the wicket gate was the signal for instant disappearance.

A scramble up the wall from Heriot’s Hospital grounds, or the patter of bare feet on the gravel, however, was notice to come out and greet a friend.  Bobby was host to the disinherited children of the tenements.  Now, at the tap-tap-tapping of Tammy Barr’s crutches, he scampered up the slope, and he suited his pace to the crippled boy’s in coming down again.  Tammy chose a heap of cut grass on which to sit enthroned and play king, a grand new crutch for a scepter, and Bobby for a courtier.  At command, the little dog rolled over and over, begged, and walked on his hind legs.  He even permitted a pair of thin little arms to come near strangling him, in an excess of affection.  Then he wagged his tail and lolled his tongue to show that he was friendly, and trotted away about his business.  Tammy took an oat-cake from his pocket to nibble, and began a conversation with Mistress Jeanie.

“I broucht a picnic wi’ me.”

“Did ye, noo?  An’ hoo did ye ken aboot picnics, laddie?”

“Maister Traill was tellin’ Ailie an’ me.  There’s ilka thing to mak’ a picnic i’ the kirkyaird.  They couldna mak’ my legs gude i’ the infairmary, but I’m gangin’ to Heriot’s.  I’ll juist hae to airn ma leevin’ wi’ ma heid, an’ no’ remember aboot ma legs, ava.  Is he no’ a bonny doggie?”

“Ay, he’s bonny.  An’ ye’re a braw laddie no’ to fash yersel’ aboot what canna be helped.”

The wifie took his ragged jacket and mended it, dropped a tear in an impossible hole, and a ha’penny in the one good pocket.  And by and by the pale laddie slept there among the bright graves, in the sun.  After another false alarm from the gate she asked her gude-mon, as she had asked many times before: