The sitting-room at the inn is a place of comfort, and while Thirlstone warmed his long back at the fire I sank contentedly into one of the well-rubbed leather armchairs. The company of a friend made the weather and scarcity of salmon less the intolerable grievance they had seemed an hour ago than a joke to be laughed at. The landlord came in with whisky, and banked up the peats till they glowed beneath a pall of blue smoke.
“I hope to goodness we are alone,” said Thirlstone, and he turned to the retreating landlord and asked the question.
“There’s naebody bidin’ the nicht forbye yoursels,” he said, “but the morn there’s a gentleman comin’. I got a letter frae him the day. Maister Wiston, they ca him. Maybe ye ken him?”
I started at the name, which I knew very well. Thirlstone, who knew it better, stopped warming himself and walked to the window, where he stood pulling his moustache and staring at the snow. When the man had left the room, he turned to me with the face of one whose mind is made up on a course but uncertain of the best method.
“Do you know this sort of weather looks infernally unpromising? I’ve half a mind to chuck it and go back to town.”
I gave him no encouragement, finding amusement in his difficulties. “Oh, it’s not so bad,” I said, “and it won’t last. Tomorrow we may have the day of our lives.”
He was silent for a little, staring at the fire. “Anyhow,” he said at last, “we were fools to be so far up the valley. Why shouldn’t we go down to the Forest Lodge? They’ll take us in, and we should be deucedly comfortable, and the water’s better.”
“There’s not a pool on the river to touch the stretch here,” I said. “I know, for I’ve fished every inch of it.”
He had no reply to this, so he lit a pipe and held his peace for a time. Then, with some embarrassment but the air of having made a discovery, he announced that his conscience was troubling him about his work, and he thought he ought to get back to it at once. “There are several things I have forgotten to see to, and they’re rather important. I feel a beast behaving like this, but you won’t mind, will you?”
“My dear Thirlstone,” I said, “what is the good of hedging? Why can’t you say you won’t meet Wiston!”
His face cleared. “Well, that’s the fact—I won’t. It would be too infernally unpleasant. You see, I was once by way of being his friend, and he was in my regiment. I couldn’t do it.”
The landlord came in at the moment with a basket of peats. “How long is Capt.—Mr. Wiston staying here?” I asked.
“He’s no bidin’ ony time. He’s just comin’ here in the middle o’ the day for his denner, and then drivin’ up the water to Altbreac. He has the fishin’ there.”
Thirlstone’s face showed profound relief. “Thank God!” I heard him mutter under his breath, and when the landlord had gone he fell to talking of salmon with enthusiasm. “We must make a big day of it tomorrow, dark to dark, you know. Thank Heaven, our beat’s downstream, too.” And thereafter he made frequent excursions to the door, and bulletins on the weather were issued regularly.
Dinner over, we drew our chairs to the hearth, and fell to talk and the slow consumption of tobacco. When two men from the ends of the earth meet by a winter fire, their thoughts are certain to drift overseas. We spoke of the racing tides off Vancouver, and the lonely pine-clad ridges running up to the snow-peaks of the Selkirks, to which we had both travelled once upon a time in search of sport. Thirlstone on his own account had gone wandering to Alaska, and brought back some bearskins and a frostbitten toe as trophies, and from his tales had consorted with the finest band of rogues which survives unhanged on this planet. Then some casual word took our thoughts to the south, and our memories dallied with Africa. Thirlstone had hunted in Somaliland and done mighty slaughter; while I had spent some never-to-be forgotten weeks long ago in the hinterland of Zanzibar, in the days before railways and game-preserves. I have gone through life with a keen eye for the discovery of earthly paradises, to which I intend to retire when my work is over, and the fairest I thought I had found above the Rift valley, where you had a hundred miles of blue horizon and the weather of Scotland. Thirlstone, not having been there, naturally differed, and urged the claim of a certain glen in Kashmir, where you may hunt two varieties of bear and three of buck in thickets of rhododendron, and see the mightiest mountain-wall on earth from your tent door. The mention of the Indian frontier brought us back to our professions, and for a little we talked “shop” with the unblushing confidence of those who know each other’s work and approve it. As a very young soldier Thirlstone had gone shooting in the Pamirs, and had blundered into a Russian party of exploration which contained Kuropatkin. He had in consequence grossly outstayed his leave, having been detained for a fortnight by an arbitrary hospitality; but he had learned many things, and the experience had given him strong views on frontier questions. Half an hour was devoted to a masterly survey of the East, until a word pulled us up.
“I went there in ’99” Thirlstone was saying—“the time Wiston and I were sent—” and then he stopped, and his eager face clouded. Wiston’s name cast a shadow over our reminiscences.
“What did he actually do?” I asked after a short silence.
“Pretty bad! He seemed a commonplace, good sort of fellow, popular, fairly competent, a little bad-tempered perhaps.
