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Bob, Son of Battle

Alfred Ollivant

Chapter II. A SON OF HAGAR

It is a lonely country, that about the Wastreldale.

Parson Leggy Hornbut will tell you that his is the smallest church
in the biggest parish north of the Derwent, and that his cure
numbers more square miles than parishioners. Of fells and ghylls it
consists, of becks and lakes; with here a scattered hamlet and there
a solitary hill sheep-farm. It is a country in which sheep are
paramount; and every other Dalesman is engaged in that
profession which is as old as Abel. And the talk of the men of the
land is of wethers and gimmers, of tup-hoggs, ewe tegs in wool,
and other things which are but fearsome names to you and me; and
always of the doings or misdoings, the intelligence or stupidity, of
their adjutants, the sheep-dogs.

Of all the Daleland, the country from the Black Water to
Grammoch Pike is the wildest. Above the tiny stone-built village
of Wastrel-- dale the Muir Pike nods its massive head. Westward,
the desolate Mere Marches, froni which the Sylvesters' great estate
derives its name, reach away in mAe on mile of sheep infested,
wind-swept moorland. On the far side of the Marches is that twin
dale where. flows the gentle Silver Lea. And it is there in the
paddocks at the back of the Dalesman's Daughter, that, in the late
summer months, the famous sheep-dog Trials of the North are
held. There that the battle for the Dale Cup, the world-known
Shepherds' Trophy, is fought out.

Past the little inn leads the turnpike road to the market-centre of
the district--Grammoch-town. At the bottom of the paddocks at
the back of the inn winds the Silver Lea. Just there a plank bridge
crosses the stream, and, beyond, the Murk Muir Pass. crawls up
the sheer side of the Scaur on to the Mere Marches.

At the head of the Pass, before it debouches. on to those lonely
sheep-walks which divide. the two dales, is that hollow,
shuddering with gloomy possibilities, aptly called the Devil's.
Bowl. In its centre the Lone Tarn, weirdly suggestive pool, lifts its
still face to the sky. It was beside that black, frozen water, across.
whose cold surface the storm was swirling in white snow-wraiths,
that, many, many years ago (not in this century), old Andrew
Moore-came upon the mother of the Gray Dogs of Kenmuir.

In the North, every one who has heard of the Muir Pike--and who
has not?--has heard. of the Gray Dogs of Kenmuir, every one who
has heard of the Shepherd's Trophy--and who has not?--knows
their fame. In that country of good dogs and jealous masters the
pride of place has long been held unchallenged. Whatever line may
claim to follow the Gray Dogs always lead the van. And there is a
saying in the land: "Faithfu' as the Moores and their tykes."

On the top dresser to the right of the fireplace in the kitchen of
Kenmuir lies the family Bible. At the end you will find a loose
sheet-- the pedigree of the Gray Dogs; at the beginning, pasted on
the inside, an almost similar śheet, long since yellow with age--the
family register of the Moores of Kenmuir.

Running your eye down the loose leaf, once, twice, and again it
will be caught by a small red cross beneath a name, and under the
cross the one word "Cup." Lastly, opposite the name of Rex son of
Rally, are two of those proud, tell-tale marks. The cup referred to
is the renowned Dale Cup--Champion Challenge Dale Cup, open
to the world. Had Rex won it but once again the Shepherds'
Trophy, which many men have lived to win, and died still striving
after, would have come to rest forever in the little gray house
below the Pike.

It was not to be, however. Comparing the two sheets, you read
beneath the dog's name a date and a pathetic legend; and on the
other sheet, written in his son's boyish hand, beneath the name of
Andrew Moore the same date and the same legend.

From that day James Moore, then but a boy, was master of
Kenmuir.

So past Grip and Rex and Rally, and a hundred others, until at the
foot of the page you come to that last name--Bob, son of Battle.

From the very first the young dog took t& his work in a manner to
amaze even James Moore. For a while he watched his mother,
Meg, at her business, and with that seemed to have mastered the
essentials of sheep tactics.

Rarely had such fiery ‚lan been seen on the sides of the Pike; and
with it the young dog combined a strange sobriety, an admirable
patience, that justified, indeed, the epithet. "Owd." Silent he
worked, and resolute; and even in those days had that famous trick
of coaxing the sheep to do his wishes;--blending, in short, as
Tammas put it, the brains of a man with the way of a woman.

Parson Leggy, who was reckoned the best judge of a sheep or
sheep-dog 'twixt Tyne and Tweed, summed him up in the one
word "Genius." And James Moore himself, cautious man, was
more than pleased.

In the village, the Dalesmen, who took a personal pride in the Gray
Dogs of Kenmuir, began to nod sage heads when "oor" Bob was
mentioned. Jim Mason, the postman, whose word went as far with
the villagers as Parson Leggy's with the gentry, reckoned he'd
never seen a young un as so took his fancy.

That winter it grew quite the recognized thing, when they had
gathered of a night round the fire in the Sylvester Arms, with
Tammas in the centre, old Jonas Maddox on his right, Rob
Saunderson of the Holt on the left, and the others radiating away
toward the sides, for some one to begin with:

"Well, and what o' oor Bob, Mr. Thornton?"

To which Tammas would always make reply:

"Oh, yo' ask Sam'l there. He'll tell yo' better'n me, "--and would
forthwith plunge, himself, into a yarn.

And the way in which, as the story proLeeded, Tupper of
Swinsthwaite winked at Ned Hoppin of Fellsgarth, and Long
Kirby, the smith, poked Jem Burton, the publican, in the ribs, and
Sexton Ross said, "Ma word, lad!" spoke more eloquently than
many words.

One man only never joined in the chorus of admiration. Sitting
always alone in the background, little M'Adam would listen with
an incredulous grin on his sallow face.

"Oh, ma certes! The devil's in the dog! It's no cannie ava!" he
would continually exclaim, as Tammas told his tale.

In the Daleland you rarely see a stranger's face. Wandering in the
wild country about the twin dales at the time of this story, you
might have met Parson Leggy, striding along with a couple of
varmint terriers at his heels, and young Cyril Gilbraith, whom he
was teaching to tie flies and fear God, beside him; or Jim Mason,
postman by profession, poacher by predilection, honest man and
sportsman by nature, hurrying along with the mail-bags on his
shoulder, a rabbit in his pocket, and the-faithful Betsy a yard
behind. Besides these you might have hit upon a quiet shepherd
and a wise-faced dog; Squire Sylvester, going his rounds upon a
sturdy cob; or, had you been lucky, sweet Lady Eleanour bent upon
some errand of mercy to one of the many tenants.

It was while the Squire's lady was driving through the village on a
visit* to Tammas's slobbering grandson--it was shortly after Billy
Thornton's advent into the world--that little M'Adam, standing in
the door of the Sylvester Arms, with a twig in his mouth and a
sneer fading from his lips, made his ever-memorable remark:

"Sail!" he said, speaking in low, earnest voice; " 'tis a muckle
wumman."

was this visit which figured in the Grammochtown Argus (local
and radical) under the heading of "Alleged Wholesale Corruption
by Tory Agents." And that is why, on the following market day,
Herbert Trotter, journalist, erstwhile gentleman, and Secretary of
the Dale Trials, found himself trying to swim in the public
horsetrough.

"What? What be sayin', mon?" cried old Jonas, startled out of his
usual apathy.

M'Adam turned sharply on the old man.

"I said the wumman wears a muckle hat!" he snapped.

Blotted out as it was, the observation still remains--a tribute of
honest admiration. Doubtless the Recording Angel did not pass it
by. That one statement anent the gentle lady of the manor is the
only personal remark ever credited to little M'Adam not born of
malice and all uncharitableness. And that is why it is ever
memorable.

The little Scotsman with the sardonic face had been the tenant of
the Grange these many years; yet he had never grown acclimatized
to the land of the Southron. With his shrivelled body and weakly
legs he looked among the sturdy, straight-limbed sons of the
hill-country like some brown, wrinkled leaf holding its place midst
a galaxy of green. And as he differed from them physically, so he
did morally.

He neither understood them nor attempted to. The North-country
character was an unsolved mystery to him, and that after ten years'
study. "One-half o' what ye say they doot, and they let ye see it;
t'ither half they -disbelieve, and they tell ye so," he once said. And
that explained his attitude toward them, and consequently theirs
toward him.

He stood entirely alone; a son of Hagar, mocking. His sharp, ill
tongue was rarely still, and always bitter. There was hardly a. man
in the land, from Langholm How to the market-cross in
Grammoch-town, but had at one time known its sting, endured it in
silence,--for they are slow of speech, these men of the fells and
meres,--and was nursing his resentment till a day should bring that
chance which always comes. And when at the Sylvester Arms, on
one of those rare occasions when M'Adam was not present,
Tammas summed up the little man in that historic phrase of his,
"When he's drunk he's wi'lent, and when he bain't he's wicious,"
there was an applause to gratify the blas‚ heart of even Tammas
Thornton.

Yet it had not been till his wife's death that the little man had
allowed loose rein to his ill-nature. With her firmly gentle hand no
longer on the tiller of his life, it burst into. fresh being. And alone
in the world with David, the whole venom of his vicious
temperament was ever directed against the boy's head. It was as
though he saw in his fair-haired son the unconscious cause of his
ever-living sorrow. All the more strange this, seeing that, during
her life, the boy had been to poor Flora M'Adam as her heart's
core. And the lad was growing up the very antithesis of his father.
Big and hearty, with never an ache or ill in the whole of his sturdy
young body; of frank, open countenance; while even his speech
was slow and burring like any Dale-bred boy's. And the fact of it
all, and that the lad was palpably more Englishman than Scot--ay,
and gloried in it--exasperated the little man, a patriot before
everything, to blows. While, on top of it, David evinced an
amazing pertness fit to have tried a better man than Adam
M'Adam.

On the death of his wife, kindly Elizabeth Moore had, more than
once, offered such help to the lonely little man as a woman only
can give in a house that knows no mistress. On the last of these
occasions, after crossing the 'Stony Bottom, which divides the two
farms, and toiling up the hill to the Grange, she had met M'Adam
in the door.

"Yo' maun let me put yo' bit things straight .for yo', mister," she
had said shyly; for she feared the little man.

"Thank ye, Mrs. Moore," he had answered with the sour smile the
Dalesmen knew so well, "but ye maun think I'm a waefu' cripple."
And there he had stood, grinning sardonically, opposing his small
bulk in the very centre of the door.

Mrs. Moore had turned down the hill, abashed and hurt at the
reception of her offer; and her husband, proud to a fault, had
forbidden her to repeat it. Nevertheless her motherly heart went
out in a great tenderness for the little orphan David. She knew well
the desolateness of his life; his father's aversion from him, and its
inevitable consequences.

It became an institution for the boy to call every morning at
Kenmuir, and trot off to the village school with Maggie Moore.
And soon the lad came to look on Kenmuir as his true home, and
James and Elizabeth Moore as his real parents. His greatest
happiness was to be away from the Grange. And the ferret-eyed
little man there noted the fact, bitterly resented it, and vented his
ill-humor accordingly.

It was this, as he deemed it, uncalled-for trespassing on his
authority which was the chief cause of his animosity against James
Moore. The Master of Kenmuir it was at whom he was aiming
when he remarked one day at the Arms: "Masel', I aye prefaire the
good man who does no go to church, to the bad man who does. But
then, as ye say, Mr. Burton, I'm peculiar."

The little man's treatment of David, exaggerated as it was by eager
credulity, became at length such a scandal to the Dale that Parson
Leggy determined to bring him to task on the matter.

Now M'Adam was the parson's pet antipathy. The bluff old
minister, with his brusque manner and big heart, would have no
truck with the man who never went to church, was perpetually in
liquor, and never spoke good of his neighbors. Yet he entered upon
the interview fully resolved not to be betrayed into an unworthy
expression of feeling; rather to appeal to the little man's better
nature.

The conversation had not been in progress two minutes, however,
before he knew that, where he had meant to be calmly persuasive,
he was fast become hotly abusive.

"You, Mr. Hornbut, wi' James Moore to help ye, look after the
lad's soul, I'll see to his body," the little man was saying.

The parson's thick gray eyebrows lowered threateningly over his
eyes.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself to talk like that. Which
d'you think the more important, soul or body? Oughtn't you, his
father, to be the very first to care for the boy's soul? If not, who
should? Answer me, sir."

The little man stood smirking and sucking his eternal twig, entirely
unmoved by the other's heat.

"Ye're right, Mr. Hombut, as ye aye are. But my argiment is this:
that I get at his soul best through his icetle carcase."

The honest parson brought down his stick with an angry thud.

"M'Adam, you're a brute--a brute!" he shouted. At which outburst
the little man was seized with a spasm of silent merriment,

"A fond dad first, a brute afterward, aiblins--he! he! Ah, Mr.
Hornbut! ye 'ford me vast diversion, ye do indeed, 'my loved, my
honored, much-respected friend."

"If you paid as much heed to your boy's welfare as you do to the
bad poetry of that profligate ploughman--"

An angry gleam shot into the other's eyes. "D'ye ken what
blasphemy is, Mr. Horn-but?" he asked, shouldering a pace
forward.

For the first time in the dispute the parson thought he was about to
score a point, and was calm accordingly.

"I should do; I fancy I've a specimen of the breed before me now.
And d'you know what impertinence is?"

"I should do; I fancy I've--I awd say it's what gentlemen aften are
unless their mammies whipped 'em as lads."

For a moment the parson looked as if about to seize his opponent
and shake him.

"M'Adam," he roared, "I'll not stand your insolences!"

The little man turned, scuttled indoors, and came runnng back with
a chair.

"Permit me!" he said blandly, holding it before him like a
haircutter for a customer.

The parson turned away. At the gap in the hedge he paused.

"I'll only say one thing more," he called slowly. "When your wife,
whom I think we all loved, lay dying in that room above you, she
said to you in my presence--"

It was M'Adam's turn to be angry. He made a step forward with
burning face.

"Aince and for a', Mr. Hornbut," he cried passionately, "onderstand
I'll not ha' you and yer likes lay yer tongues on ma wife's memory
whenever it suits ye. You can say what ye like aboot me--lies,
sneers, snash--and I'll say naethin'. I dinna ask ye to respect me; I
think ye might do sae muckle by her, puir lass. She never harmed
ye. Gin ye canna let her bide in peace where she lies doon
yonder"-- he waved in the direction of the churchyard-- "ye'll no
come on ma land. Though she is dead she's mine."

Standing in front of his house, with flushed face and big eyes, the
little man looked almost noble in his indignation. And the parson,
striding away down the hill, was uneasily conscious that with him
was not the victory.
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