“A tramp? Oh, I see! Is he old and white-haired?” said the gentleman, remembering the scene at the toll-keeper’s house, and the queer character he had assisted there. “Excuse me; I’ll be back in a minute,” he said to the others in the room; and he ran out, expecting to find the man in the hall. “He wouldn’t come in; he said he’d wait outside,” said the girl, noticing her young master’s look of disappointment. “P’r’aps he’s away by this time.” The young laird stepped briskly through the hall and looked out into the dusk. The sun had just set, and there was still light enough to see any one near the spot. At the head of the walk leading to the house there was a clump of laurels and a drooping ash, and Stephen Barbour fancied he saw a white-haired head look out from behind that, and quickly cleared the space to find his suspicions correct. The queer tramp stood before him, with his right hand hidden down among the rags by his side. “Oh, it’s you again?” said the gentleman frankly, at the same time extending his hand to be shaken. “You’re Stephen Barbour, eldest son of Russel Barbour, aren’t you?” said the tramp, taking no notice of the proffered hand, and glaring on the young man with a ferocity which startled the other. “I am, sir—what then?” “Then I’ve come to pay you back for what you did to Meg,” said the old man, with suppressed fury. “Take that!” and instantly he raised his right hand, and a pistol-shot rang out on the soft evening air. Quickly as the hand was raised the victim had time to throw out his own in a futile grasp at the old man’s arm; then, when the bullet reached him, though desperately wounded, Barbour, with a loud cry, threw himself upon his assailant, grasping him tightly in his arms as if he would have squeezed the breath out of the man’s body. The tramp had made no attempt to escape, and probably meant to make none; but the grasp annoyed him, and he struggled violently for a moment, and at length, as the senses of the wounded man were leaving him, succeeded in throwing Barbour backwards. At the same moment a coachman, turning a corner of the house with a pitchfork in his hands, ran forward to learn the cause of the disturbance, and seeing his young master in the act of being thrown down by a ragged tramp, he ran at the old man full tilt with the prongs of the fork, one of which passed clean through the tramp’s arm. This assault seemed to rouse the old man to a pitch of insane fury, which gave him an unnatural strength. He rushed at the coachman, wrenched the pitchfork from his hands, smashed him furiously over the head with the long pole, and then, throwing down the new weapon, turned and vanished.