corner of the side-road that led up to Upperhill, and for ten years now had Rob bided there alone, managing the Mill and reading the books of a coarse creature Ingersoll that made watches and didn’t believe in God. He’d aye two-three fine pigs about the Mill had Rob, and fine might well they be for what did he feed them on but bits of corn and barley he’d nicked out of the sacks folk brought him to the Mill to grind? Nor could a body deny but that Long Rob’s boar was one of the best in the Mearns; and they’d bring their sows from as far afield as Laurencekirk to have them set by that boar of his, a meikle, pretty brute of a beast. Forbye the Mill and his swine and hens Rob had a Clydesdale and a sholtie beast he ploughed his twenty acres with, and a cow or so that never calved, for he’d never time to send them to the bull though well might he have taken the time instead of sweating and chaving like a daft one to tear up the coarse moorland behind the Mill and turn it into a park. He’d started that three years before and wasn’t half through with it yet, it was filled with great holes and ponds and choked with meikle broom-roots thick as the arm of a man, you never saw a dafter ploy. They’d hear Rob out in that coarse ground hard at work when they went to bed, the rest of Kinraddie, whistling away to himself as though it were nine o’clock in the forenoon and the sun shining bravely. He’d whistle Ladies of Spain and There was a young maiden and The lass that made the bed to me, but devil the lass he’d ever taken to his bed, and maybe that was as well for the lass; she’d have seen feint the much of him in it beside her.
For after a night of it like that he’d be out again at the keek of day, and sometimes he’d have the Clydesdale or the sholtie out there with him and they’d be fine friends, the three of them, till the beasts would move off when he didn’t want them or wouldn’t move when he did; and then he’d fair go mad with them and call them all the coarsest names he could lay tongue to till you’d think he’d be heard over half the Mearns; and he’d leather the horses till folk spoke of sending for the Cruelty, though he’d a way with the beasts too, and would be friends with them again in a minute and when he’d been away at the smithy in Drumlithie or the joiner’s in Arbuthnott they’d come running from the other end of the parks at sight of him and he’d get off his bicycle and feed them with lumps of sugar he bought and carried about with him. He thought himself a gey man with horses, did Rob, and God! he’d tell you stories about horses till you’d fair be grey in the head, but he never wearied of them himself, the long, rangy childe. Long he was, with small bones maybe, but gey broad for all that, with a small head on him and a thin nose and eyes smoky blue as an iron coulter on a winter morning, aye glinting, and a long mouser the colour of ripe corn it was, hanging down the sides of his mouth so that the old minister had told him he looked like a Viking and he’d said Ah well, minister, as long as I don’t look like a parson I’ll wrestle through the world right content, and the minister said he was a fool and godless, and his laughter like the thorns crackling under a pot. And Rob said he’d rather be a thorn than a sucker any day, for he didn’t believe in ministers or kirks, he’d learned that from the books of Ingersoll though God knows if the creature’s logic was as poor as his watches he was but a sorry prop to lean on. But Rob said he was fine, and if Christ came down to Kinraddie he’d be welcome enough to a bit meal or milk at the Mill, but damn the thing he’d get at the Manse. So that was Long Rob and the stir at the Mill, some said he wasn’t all there but others said Ay, that he was, and a bit over.
NOW UPPERHILL rose above the Mill, with its larch woods crowning it, and folk told that a hundred years before five of the crofter places had crowded there till Lord Kenneth threw their biggings down and drove them from the parish and built the fine farm of Upperhill. And twenty years later a son of one of the crofters had come back and rented the place, Gordon was the name of him, they called him Upprums for short and he didn’t like that, being near to gentry with his meikle farm and forgetting his father the crofter that had cried like a bairn all the way from Kinraddie that night the Lord Kenneth drove them out. He was a small bit man with a white face on him, and he’d long, thin hair and a nose that wasn’t straight but peeked away to one side of his face and no moustache and wee feet and hands; and he liked to wear leggings and breeks and carry a bit stick and look as proud as a cock on a midden. Mistress Gordon was a Stonehaven woman, her father had been a bit post-office creature there, but God! to hear her speak you’d think he’d invented the post office himself and taken out a patent for it. She was a meikle sow of a woman, but aye well-dressed, and with eyes like the eyes of a fish, fair cod-like they were, and she tried to speak English and to make her two bit daughters, Nellie and Maggie Jean, them that went to Stonehaven Academy, speak English as well. And God! they made a right muck of it, and if you met the bit things on the road and said Well, Nellie, and how are your mother’s hens laying? the quean would more than likely answer you Not very meikle the day and look so proud it was all you could do to stop yourself catching the futret across your knee and giving her a bit skelp.
Though she’d only a dove’s flitting of a family herself you’d think to hear Mistress Gordon speak that she’d been clecking bairns a litter a month since the day she married. It was Now, how I brought up Nellie —or And the specialist in Aberdeen, said about Maggie Jean —till folk were so scunnered they’d never mention a bairn within a mile of Upperhill. But Rob of the Mill, the coarse brute, he fair mocked her to her face and he’d tell a story. Now, when I took my boar to the specialist in Edinburgh, he up and said ‘Mister Rob, this is a gey unusual boar, awful delicate, but so intelligent, and you should send him to the Academy and some day he’ll be a real credit to you.’ And Mistress Gordon when she heard that story she turned as red as a fire and forget her English and said Rob was an orra tink brute.
Forbye the two queans there was the son, John Gordon, as coarse a devil as you’d meet, he’d already had two-three queans in trouble and him but barely eighteen years old. But with one of them he’d met a sore stammy-gaster, her brother was a gardener down Glenbervie way and when he heard of it he came over to Upperhill and caught young Gordon out by the cattle-court. You’ll be Jock? he said, and young Gordon said Keep your damned hands to yourself, and the billy said Ay, but first I’ll wipe them on a dirty clout, and with that he up with a handful of sharn and splattered it all over young Gordon and then rolled him in the greip till he was a sight to sicken a sow from its supper. The bothy men heard the ongoing and came tearing out but soon as they saw it was only young Gordon that was being mischieved they did no more than laugh and stand around and cry one to the other that here was a real fine barrow-load of dung lying loose in the greip. So the Drumlithie billy, minding his sister and her shame, wasn’t sharp to finish with his tormenting, young Gordon looked like a half-dead cat and smelt like a whole-dead one for a week after, a sore affront to Upperhill’s mistress. She went tearing round to the bothy and made at the foreman, a dour young devil of a Highlandman, Ewan Tavendale, Why didn’t you help my Johnnie? and Ewan said I was fee’d as the foreman here, not as the nursemaid, he was an impudent brute, calm as you please, but an awful good worker, folk said he could smell the weather and had fair the land in his bones.
NOW THE EIGHTH of the Kinraddie places you could call hardly a place at all, for that was Pooty’s, midway along the Kinraddie road between the Mill and Bridge End. It was no more than a butt and a ben, with a rickle of sheds behind it where old Pooty kept his cow and bit donkey that was nearly as old as himself and faith! twice as good-looking; and folk said the cuddy had bided so long with Pooty that whenever it opened its mouth to give a bit bray it started to stutter. For old Pooty was maybe the worst stutterer ever heard in the Mearns and the worst of that worst was that he didn’t know it and he’d clean compel any minister creature organising a concert miles around to give him a platform part. Then up he’d get on the platform, the doitered old fool, and recite Weeeee, ssss-leek-ed, ccccccowering timrous beastie or such-like poem and it was fair agony to hear him. He’d lived at Pooty’s a good fifty years they said, his father the crofter of the Knapp before that time, hardly a soul knew his name, maybe he’d forgotten it himself. He was the oldest inhabitant of Kinraddie and fell proud of it, though what there was to be proud of in biding all that while in a damp, sour house that a goat would hardly have stopped to ease itself in God knows. He
