From the rude loophole of a window that projected from the old Cunzie Neuk, the crippled laddie could see only the shadowy tombs and the long gray wall of the two kirks, through the sunny haze.  But he dropped his crutches over, and climbed out onto the vault.  Never before had Bobby failed to hear that well-known tap-tap-tapping on the graveled path, nor failed to trot down to meet it with friskings of welcome.  But now he lay very still, even when a pair of frail arms tried to lift his dead weight to a heaving breast, and Tammy’s cry of woe rang through the kirkyard.  In a moment Ailie and Mistress Jeanie were in the wet grass beside them, half a hundred casements flew open, and the piping voices of tenement bairns cried-down: 

“Did the bittie doggie come hame?”

Oh yes, the bittie doggie had come hame, indeed, but down such perilous heights as none of them dreamed; and now in what a woeful plight!

Some murmur of the excitement reached an open dormer of the Temple tenements, where Geordie Ross had slept with one ear of the born doctor open.  Snatching up a case of first aids to the injured, he ran down the twisting stairs to the Grassmarket, up to the gate, and around the kirk, to find a huddled group of women and children weeping over a limp little bundle of a senseless dog.  He thrust a bottle of hartshorn under the black muzzle, and with a start and a moan Bobby came back to consciousness.

“Lay him down flat and stop your havers,” ordered the business-like, embryo medicine man.  “Bobby’s no’ dead.  Laddie, you’re a braw soldier for holding your ain feelings, so just hold the wee dog’s head.”  Then, in the reassuring dialect:  “Hoots, Bobby, open the bit mou’ noo, an’ tak’ the medicine like a mannie!” Down the tiny red cavern of a throat Geordie poured a dose that galvanized the small creature into life.

“Noo, then, loup, ye bonny rascal!”

Bobby did his best to jump at Geordie’s bidding.  He was so glad to be at home and to see all these familiar faces of love that he lifted himself on his fore paws, and his happy heart almost put the power to loup into his hind legs.  But when he tried to stand up he cried out with the pains and sank down again, with an apologetic and shamefaced look that was worthy of Auld Jock himself.  Geordie sobered on the instant.

“Weel, now, he’s been hurt.  We’ll just have to see what ails the sonsie doggie.”  He ran his hand down the parting in the thatch to discover if the spine had been injured.  When he suddenly pinched the ball of a hind toe Bobby promptly resented it by jerking his head around and looking at him reproachfully.  The bairns were indignant, too, but Geordie grinned cheerfully and said:  “He’s no’ paralyzed, at ony rate.”  He turned as footsteps were heard coming hastily around the kirk.

“A gude morning to you, Mr. Traill.  Bobby may have been run over by a cart and got internal injuries, but I’m thinking it’s just sprains and bruises from a bad fall.  He was in a state of collapse, and his claws are as broken and his toes as torn as if he had come down Castle Rock.”