What a to-do about a miserable cat!  To Bobby there was no logic at all in the denouement to this swift, exciting drama.  But he understood Auld Jock’s shame and displeasure perfectly.  Good-tempered as he was gay and clever, the little dog took his punishment meekly, and he remembered it.  Thereafter, he passed the kirk yard gate decorously.  If he saw a cat that needed harrying he merely licked his little red chops—­the outward sign of a desperate self-control.  And, a true sport, he bore no malice toward the caretaker.

During that first summer of his life Bobby learned many things.  He learned that he might chase rabbits, squirrels and moor-fowl, and sea-gulls and whaups that came up to feed in plowed fields.  Rats and mice around byre and dairy were legitimate prey; but he learned that he must not annoy sheep and sheep-dogs, nor cattle, horses and chickens.  And he discovered that, unless he hung close to Auld Jock’s heels, his freedom was in danger from a wee lassie who adored him.  He was no lady’s lap-dog.  From the bairnie’s soft cosseting he aye fled to Auld Jock and the rough hospitality of the sheep fold.  Being exact opposites in temperaments, but alike in tastes, Bobby and Auld Jock were inseparable.  In the quiet corner of Mr. Traill’s crowded dining-room they spent the one idle hour of the week together, happily.  Bobby had the leavings of a herring or haddie, for a rough little Skye will eat anything from smoked fish to moor-fowl eggs, and he had the tidbit of a farthing bone to worry at his leisure.  Auld Jock smoked his cutty pipe, gazed at the fire or into the kirk-yard, and meditated on nothing in particular.

In some strange way that no dog could understand, Bobby had been separated from Auld Jock that November morning.  The tenant of Cauldbrae farm had driven the cart in, himself, and that was unusual.  Immediately he had driven out again, leaving Auld Jock behind, and that was quite outside Bobby’s brief experience of life.  Beguiled to the lofty and coveted driver’s seat where, with lolling tongue, he could view this interesting world between the horse’s ears, Bobby had been spirited out of the city and carried all the way down and up to the hilltop toll-bar of Fairmilehead.  It could not occur to his loyal little heart that this treachery was planned nor, stanch little democrat that he was, that the farmer was really his owner, and that he could not follow a humbler master of his own choosing.  He might have been carried to the distant farm, and shut safely in the byre with the cows for the night, but for an incautious remark of the farmer.  With the first scent of the native heather the horse quickened his pace, and, at sight of the purple slopes of the Pentlands looming homeward, a fond thought at the back of the man’s mind very naturally took shape in speech.

“Eh, Bobby; the wee lassie wull be at the tap o’ the brae to race ye hame.”