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OBSTRUCTION.
All this time Cosmo had never written again to Joan; both his
father and he thought it better the former only should for the
present keep up the correspondence. But months had passed without
their hearing from her. The laird had written the third time, and
received no answer.
The day was now close upon them when the last of their land would
be taken, leaving them nothing but the kitchen-garden--a piece of
ground of about half an acre, the little terraced flower-garden to
the south of the castle, and the croft tenanted by James Gracie.
They applied to Lord Lick-my-loof to grant them a lease of the one
field next the castle, which the laird with the help of the two
women had cultivated the spring before, but he would not--his
resentment being as strong as ever, and his design deeper than they
saw.
The formal proceedings took their legal course; and upon and after
a certain day Lord Lick-my-loof might have been seen from not a few
of the windows of the castle, walking the fields to the north and
east, and giving orders to his bailiff concerning them. Within a
fortnight those to the north were no more to be entered from the
precincts of the castle except by climbing over a DRY-STANE DYKE;
and before many additional days were gone by, they found him more
determined than they could have imagined, to give them annoyance.
He had procured a copy of an old plan of the property, and therein
discovered, as he had expected and hoped, that that part of the
road from the glen of the Warlock which passed the gate of the
castle, had been made by the present laird only about thirty years
before; whereupon--whether he was within his legal rights or not, I
do not know, but everybody knew the laird could not go to law--he
gave orders that it should be broken up from the old point of
departure, and a dry dyke built across the gate. But the persons to
whom the job was committed, either ashamed or afraid, took
advantage of an evening on which Cosmo had a class for
farm-labourers, to do the work after dark; whence it came that,
plodding homewards without a suspicion, he found himself as he
approached the gate all at once floundering among stones and broken
ground, and presently brought up standing, a man built out from his
own house by a mushroom wall--the entrance gone which seemed to him
as old as the hills around it, for it was older than his earthly
life. With a great shove he hurled half the height of it over, and
walking in, appeared before his father in such a rage as bewildered
and troubled him far more than any insolence of Lord Lick-my--loof
could have done.
"The scoundrel!" cried Cosmo; "I should like to give him a good
drubbing--only he's an old man! But I'll make him repent it--and
heartily, too!"
"Cosmo, my boy," said the old man, "you are meddling with what does
not belong to you."
"I know it's your business, father, not mine; but--"
"It's no more my business than yours, my son!'VENGEANCE IS MINE,
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