But I'm sure that it is so, and it wouldn't surprise me if both these men, Crone and Phillips, met their deaths at the hands of the gang I'm thinking of.

It's a notion that's worth following up, anyway, and I'll have a word with Murray about it when I'm in the town tomorrow." Then, with a brief good night, he left me and went into the house, and I got outside Hathercleugh and rode home in a whirl of thoughts.

And I'll confess readily that those thoughts had little to do with what Sir Gilbert Carstairs had last talked about--they were not so much of Phillips, nor of Crone, nor of his suggestion of a possible gang of night-poachers, as about myself and this sudden chance of a great change in my fortunes.

For, when all is said and done, we must needs look after ourselves, and when a young man of the age I was then arrived at is asked if he would like to exchange a clerkship of a hundred and twenty a year for a stewardship at more than four times as much--as a permanency--you must agree that his mind will fix itself on what such an exchange means to him, to the exclusion of all other affairs.

Five hundred a year to me meant all sorts of fine things--independence, and a house of my own, and, not least by a long way, marriage with Maisie Dunlop.