And it was this final move that was the key to James's footballing career. On moving to the Glasgow's southern suburbs he joined Kerrland F.C., which played on nearby Queen's Park. And from there in 1878 at eighteen, whilst training to be a teacher, he stepped up to Third Lanark, where he remained for three seasons, a forward, who clearly, even at such a tender age was soon seen as a rising talent. Three days before his twentieth birthday he was chosen to play for Scotland against Wales, scoring in what was to be his only cap. 

Yet his top-flight, football career was to come to an end just a year later as he qualified and found a teaching post at the Public School in Millport on the Isle of Cumbrae. And, whilst he would return for the occasional start for The Thirds his energies were from then directed to the local game on the island and with some success. In 1882 Millport won the Rothesay Challenge Cup. 

However, in 1884 it all went badly wrong at school. He was suspended, resigned and essentially disappeared. His parents continued to live at the old Shawland address with three of their youngest children and then seemed to retire to Rothesay, where they both would pass away, but there is no sign of James, with at least two possibilities. The first derives from research done by Andy Mitchell. It is that he emigrated to the United States, his elder brother having done so in 1879, and that he died, unmarried, in a New York mental hospital in 1911. But there are questions. The second comes from possible family connections and points to him moving to Liverpool, perhaps understandably given given his mother's birth, and dying in West Derby at the age of seventy-three in 1933 to be buried there too. Yet here again there are incompatibilities with the mystery remaining in reality just that.