Miss Larkie McRory.
It was warm and sunny in the shelter of the wood. Although the time was November there were still green leaves on some of the trees; it was a steamy day after a wet night, and I thought to myself that if the hounds did run—Here came a challenge from the wood, answered multitudinously, and the next minute they were driving through the laurels towards the entrance gates, with a cry that stimulated even the many-wintered Daniel to capers quite unbefitting his time of life, or mine. The Castle Knox demesne is a large one, and being surrounded by a prohibitively high and coped wall, it is easier to find a fox there than to get away with one. Mighty galloping on the avenues followed, with interludes in the big demesne fields, where every gate had been considerately left open, and in which every horse with any pretensions to savoir faire stiffened his neck, and put up his back, and pulled. The hounds, a choir invisible, carried their music on through the plantations, with whimpering, scurrying pauses, with strophe and anti-strophe of soprano and bass. Sometimes the cry bore away to the demesne wall, and some one would shout "They're away!" and the question of the Front Gate versus the Western Gate would divide us like a sword. Twice, in the undergrowth, above the sunk fence that separated us from the wood, the quick, composed face of the fox showed itself; at last, when things were getting too hot in the covert, he sprang like a cat over the ditch, and flitted across the park with that gliding gait that dissimulates its own speed, while I and my fellows offered a painful example of the discordance of the human voice when compared with that of the hound, and five or six couple pitched themselves out of the wood and stretched away over the grass.
It was fortunate for the Comte de Pralines that his entirely British view-holloa was projected for the most part into my ear (the drum of which it nearly split) and was merged in the general enthusiasm as we let ourselves go.
"For God's sake, Major Yeates!" said Michael, the Second Whip, thundering up beside me as we neared the covert on the further side of the park, "come into the wood with me and turn them hounds! Mr. Flurry's back on another fox with the body of the pack, and he's very near his curse!"
I followed Michael into the covert, and was myself followed by a section of the Field, who might, with great advantage, have remained outside. In the twinkling of an eye Michael was absorbed into the depths of the wood; so also were the six couple, but not so my retinue, who pursued me like sleuth-hounds, as I traversed the covert at such speed as the narrow rides permitted. I made at length the negative discovery that it contained nothing save myself and my followers, a select party, consisting of the Comte de Pralines, Miss McRory, Miss Bobbie Bennett, Lady Knox's coachman on a three-year-old, and a little boy in knickerbockers, on a midget pony with the bearing of a war-horse and a soul to match. We had come to a baffled pause at the cross-ways, when faint and far away, an indisputable holloa was borne to us.
"They've gone out the West Gate," said the coachman, from among the tree-trunks into which he had considerately manoeuvred the kicking end of the three-year-old. "It must be they ran him straight out into the country——"
We made for the West Gate, reached it without sight or sound of Flurry or anyone else, and, on the farm road outside it, pulled up to listen.
The holloa was repeated; half a mile ahead a gesticulating figure signalled to us to come on. I wish to put it on record that I said I could not hear the hounds. The Comte de Pralines (excitable, like all Frenchmen) spurred his hireling at the opposite bank, saying, as he shot past me:
"It's no damned use humbugging here any longer!"
As I turned Daniel to follow him, my eyes met those of Miss Larkie McRory, alight with infernal intelligence; they challenged, but at the same time they offered confederacy. I jumped into the field after the Count; Miss McRory followed.
"I'll tell Lady Knox on you!" she murmured, as she pounded beside me on the long-legged spectre, who, it may be remembered, had been described as "the latther end of a car-horse."
The holloa had come to us from the side of a smooth green hill, and between us and it was a shallow valley, neatly fenced with banks that did credit to Sir Valentine Knox's farming. The horses were fresh, the valley smiled in the conventional way, and spread sleek pastures before us; we took the down grade at a cheerful pace, and the banks a shade faster than was orthodox, and the coachman's three-year-old made up in enthusiasm what he lacked in skill, and the pony, who from the first was running away, got over everything by methods known only to itself. The Comte de Pralines held an undeviating line for the spot whence the holloa had proceeded; when we reached it there was no one to be seen, but there was another holloa further on. The pursuit of this took us on to a road, and here the Castle Knox coachman, who had scouted on ahead, yelled something to the effect that he saw a rider out before him, accompanying the statement by an application of the spurs to the dripping but undaunted three-year-old. A stretching gallop up the road ensued, headed by the little boy and the coachman, who had both secured a commanding lead. The pace held for about a hundred yards, when the road bent sharply to the left, more sharply indeed than was anticipated by the leaders, who, as their mounts skidded as it were on one wheel round the corner, sailed from their saddles with singular unanimity and landed in the ditch. At the same moment the rider we had been following came into view; he was a priest, in immaculate black coat and top-hat, seated on a tall chestnut horse, and proceeding at a tranquil footpace on his own affairs.
He had seen the fox, he admitted (I am inclined to think he had headed him), and he had heard a man shouting, but no hounds had come his way. He was entirely sympathetic, and, warm as I was at the moment, a chill apprehension warned me that we might presently need sympathy.
"It's my belief," said Miss Bennett, voicing that which I had not put into words, "we've been riding after the fox, and the hounds didn't leave the covert at all!"
An elaborate French oath from the Count fell, theatrical as a drop-scene, on the close of the first act. Miss Larkie McRory looked at him admiringly, and allowed just the last rays of her glance to include me.
It was when we had retraced our steps to the bend of the road that we had a full view of the Castle Knox coverts, crowning in gold and brown those pleasant green slopes, easy as the descent to Avernus, down which we had galloped with such generous ardour some fifteen minutes ago. Outside the West Gate, through which we had emerged from the demesne, were three motionless figures in scarlet; Lady Knox and her grey horse were also recognisable; a few hounds were straying undecidedly in the first of the grass fields that we had traversed.
A note of the horn leaped to us across the valley, an angry and peremptory note. One of the scarlet figures started at a canter and turned the hounds. Another and longer blast followed. As if in obedience to its summoning, the coachman's three-year-old came ramping, riderless, down the road; he passed us with his head high in air and his flashing eye fixed upon the distant group, and, with a long shrill neigh, put his tail over his back and directed his flight for his owner and her grey horse.
"God help poor Tierney!" said Miss Bennett, in a stricken voice, "and ourselves too! I believe they saw us all the time, and we galloping away on the line of the fox!"
"I'm going home," I said. "Will you kindly make my apologies to the Master?"
"I'll kindly do no such thing," replied Miss Bennett. "I'll let Flurry Knox cool off a bit before I meet him again, and that won't be this side of Christmas, if I can help it! Good-bye, dear friends!"
She turned her mare, and set her face for her own country.
There now remained only the Count, Miss McRory, and myself, and to remove ourselves from the field of vision of the party at the gate was our first care. We had, no doubt, been thoroughly identified, nevertheless the immediate sensation of getting a furzy hill between us and Flurry was akin to that of escaping from the rays of a burning-glass. In shelter we paused and surveyed each other.
The Comte de Pralines, with his shiny hat very much on the back of his head, put down his reins, shoved his crop under his knee, and got out his cigarette case.
"Well," he began philosophically, striking a match, "our luck ain't in——!"
He broke off, the match went out, and a lively glow suffused his unsheltered countenance.
"Vous voyez mon cher—" he resumed, very rapidly. "J'ai appris quelques petits mots——"
"What a lovely English accent he has!" interrupted Miss McRory rapturously; "it's a lot nicer than his French one. To look at him you'd never think he was so clever. It's a pity he wouldn't try to pick up a little more."
"Now, that's hitting a man when he's down," said the Comte de Pralines. "I want some one to be kind to me. I've had a poor day of it; no one would talk to me. I stampeded them wherever I went."
"I didn't notice Miss McRory stampeding to any great extent," I said.
"Wait awhile!" rejoined Miss McRory. "Maybe the stampeding will be going the other way when you and he meet Lady Knox!"
"I shan't wait an instant," said the Comte de Pralines, "you and Major Yeates will explain."
The horses had been moving on, and the covert was again in sight, about a quarter of a mile away on our left. There was nothing to be seen, but hounds were hunting again in the demesne; their cry drove on through the woods inside the grey demesne wall; they were hunting in a body, and they were hunting hard.
At each moment the cry was becoming more remote, but it was still travelling on inside the wall. The fear of Flurry fell from us as a garment, and the only question that presented itself was whether to return to the West Gate or to hold on outside. It was a long-accepted theory at Castle Knox that the demesne wall was not negotiable, and that the foxes always used the gates, like Christians; bearing this in mind, I counselled the Front Gate and the outside of the wall. A couple of lanes favoured us; we presently found ourselves in a series of marshy fields, moving along abreast of the invisible hounds in the wood. They were in the thickest and least accessible part of it, and Flurry's voice and horn came faintly as from a distance.
I explained that it was impossible to ride that part of the wood, but that, if they held on as they were going, the Front Gate would make it all right for us, and of course Flurry would——
"Oh! look, look, look!" shrieked Miss McRory, snatching at my arm and pointing with her whip.
A short way ahead of us a huge elm tree had fallen upon the wall; the greenish-yellow leaves still clinging to its branches showed that the catastrophe was recent. It had broken down the wall to within five or six feet of the ground, and was reclining in the breach that it had made, with its branches sprawling in the field. I followed the line of Miss Larkie's whip, and was just in time to see a fox float like a red leaf from one of these to the ground, and glide straight across our front. He passed out of sight over a bank, and the Count stood up in his stirrups, put his finger in his ear, and screamed in a way that must have been heard in the next county. I contributed a not ineffective bellow, and Miss McRory decorated the occasion with long thin squeals.
The hounds, inside the wall, answered in an agony that was only allayed by the discovery that the trunk of the tree formed as handy a bridge for them as for the fox. They came dropping like ripe fruit through the branches, and, under our rejoicing eyes, swarmed to the fox's line, and flung on, in the fullest of full-cry, over the bank on which we had last seen him. I have not failed to assure Flurry Knox that anything less suggestive of "sneaking away with the hounds" than the manner of our departure could hardly be conceived, but Mr. Knox has not withdrawn the phrase.
It may be conceded that Flurry had grounds for annoyance. Had I had the fox in one hand and the Ordnance Map in the other, I could hardly have improved on the course steered by our pilot. Up hill for a bit, when the horses were fresh, with gradients just steep enough to temper Daniel's well-sustained tug of war, yet not so steep as to make a three-foot bank look like a house, or to guarantee a big knee at each "stone gap." Then high and dry country, with sheep huddled in defensive positions in the corners of the fields, and grass like a series of putting-greens, minus the holes, and fat, comely banks, and thin walls, from which the small round stones rattled harmlessly as Miss McRory's car-horse swept through them. Down into a long valley, with little sky-blue lakes, set in yellow sedge; and there was a helpful bog road there, that nicked nicely with the bending line of the hounds through the accompanying bog, and allayed a spasm of acute anxiety as to whether we should ever get near them again. Then upwards once more, deviously, through rougher going, with patches of low-growing furze sprouting from blackened tracts where the hillside had been set on fire, with the hounds coming to their noses among brakes of briars and bracken; finally, in the wind and sun of the hill-top, a well-timed check.
We looked back for the first time, half in fear that we might find Flurry hot on our track, half in hope that he and his horn were coming to our help; but neither in the green country nor in the brown valley was there any sign or sound of him. There was nothing to be seen but a couple of men standing on a fence to watch us, nothing to be heard except cur dogs vociferating at every cottage.
"Fifteen couple on," said the Count professionally. "How many does Knox usually have out?"
"All he's got," I said, mopping my brow.
"I don't see the two that have no hair on their backs," said Miss McRory, whose eyes, much enhanced by the radiant carmine of her cheeks, beamed at us through wisps and loops of hair. "I know them, they're always scratching, the poor things!"
That Miss McRory and her steed kept, as they did, their place in what is known to history as the Great Castle Knox Run, is a matter that I do not pretend to explain. Some antiquarian has unearthed the fact that the car-horse had three strains of breeding, and had twice been second in a Point-to-Point; but I maintain that credit must be ascribed to Miss Larkie, about whom there is something inevitable; some street-boy quality of being in the movement.
We were now on a heathery table-land, with patches of splashy, rushy ground, from which the snipe flickered out as the hounds cast themselves through it. Presently, on the top of a hard, peaty bank, a hound spoke, hesitatingly, yet hopefully, and plunged down on the other side; the pack crowded over, and drove on through the heather. Daniel changed feet on a mat of ling with a large stone in it, and therefrom ramped carefully out over a deep cut in the peat, unforeseen, and masked by tufts of heather. The hireling of the Comte de Pralines had, up to this, done his work blamelessly, if without originality; he had an anxiousness to oblige that had been matured during a dread winter when he had been the joint property of three subalterns, but he reserved to himself a determination to drop economically off his banks, and boggy slits were not in his list of possibilities.
How the matter occurred I do not know, but, when I looked round, his head alone was visible, and the Count was standing on his in the heather. Miss McRory's car-horse, who had pulled up in the act of following the Count, with a suddenness acquired, no doubt, in the shafts of a Cork covered-car, was viewing the scene with horror from the summit of the bank. The hounds were by this time clear of the heather, and were beginning to run hard; it was not until I was on the further side of the next bank that I cast another fleeting look back; this time the Count was standing on his feet, but the hireling was still engulfed, and Miss McRory was still on the wrong side of the slit. After that I forgot them, wholly and heartlessly, as is invariable in such cases.
As a matter of fact, I had no attention to spare for anyone but myself, even though we went, for the first twenty minutes or so, as on rubber tyres, through bland dairy farms wherein the sweet influences of the dairy-cow had induced gaps in every fence, and gates into every road. The scent, mercifully for Daniel, was not quite what it had been; the fox had run through cattle, and also through goats (a small and odorous party, on whose behalf, indeed, some slight intervention on my part was required), and it was here, when crossing a road, that a donkey and her foal, moved by some mysterious attraction akin to love at first sight, attached themselves to me. Undeterred by the fact that the mother's foreleg was fettered to her hind, the pair sped from field to field in my wake; at the checks, which just then were frequent, they brayed enthusiastically. I thought to elude them at a steep drop into a road, but they toboganned down it without an effort; when they overtook me the fetter-chain was broken, and clanked from the mother's hind-leg as if she were a family ghost.
There came at length a moment, outside a farm-house, when it seemed as if the fox had beaten us. Here, on the farther side of Castle Knox, I was well out of my own country, and what the fox's point might be was represented by the letter X. Nevertheless it was here that I lifted the hounds and brought off the cast of a life-time; I am inclined to think that he had lain down under a hayrick and was warned of our approach by the voices of my attendant jackasses; my cast was probably not much more of a fluke than such inspirations usually are, but the luck was with me. Old Playboy, sole relic of my deputy Mastership, lifted his white head and endorsed my suggestion with a single bass note; Rally, Philippa's prize puppy, uttered a soprano cadenza, and the pack suddenly slid away over the pasture fields, with the smoothness and unanimity of the Petits Chevaux over their green cloth.
It was now becoming for Daniel and me something of an effort to keep our proud and lonely place in or about the next field to the hounds. The fields were coming smaller, the gaps fewer; Daniel had no intention of chucking it, but he gave me to understand that he meant to take the hills on the second speed. And, unfortunately, the hills were coming. The hounds, by this time three fences ahead, flung over a bank on the upgrade, a bank that would give pause for reflection at the beginning of a run. I tried back, scrambled into a lane, followed it up the hill, with the cry of the hounds coming fainter each minute, dragged a cart wheel and a furze bush out of a gap with my crop, found myself in a boggy patch of turnips, surrounded by towering fuchsia hedges, and realised that the pack had passed in music out of sight.
I stood still and looked at my watch. It was already an hour and twenty minutes from the word "Go!" and the hounds were not only gone but were still going. A man who has lost hounds inevitably follows the line of least resistance. I retired from the turnip field, and abandoned myself to the lane, which seemed not disinclined to follow the direction in which the hounds had been heading. Since the hayrick episode they had been running right-handed, and the lane bent right-handed over the end of the hill, and presently deposited me on a road. It was one of the moments when the greatness of the world is borne in upon the wayfarer. There was a spacious view from the hill-side; three parishes, at least, offered themselves for my selection, and I surveyed them, solitary and remote as the evening star, and with no more reason than it for favouring one more than another. A harrowing, and, by this time, but too familiar cry, broke on my ear, an undulating cry as of a thing that galloped as it roared. My admirers were still on my trail; I gave Daniel a touch of the spurs and trotted on to the right.
No human being was visible, but some way ahead there was a slated house at a cross-roads; there, at all events, I could get my bearings. There were porter-barrels outside it, and from some distance I heard two voices, male and female, engaged in loud and ferocious argument; I had no difficulty in diagnosing a public-house. When Daniel and I darkened the doorway the shouting ceased abruptly, and I saw a farmer, in his Sunday clothes, making an unsteady retreat through a door at the back of the shop. The other disputant, a large, middle-aged woman, remained entrenched behind the counter, and regarded me with a tranquil and commanding eye. She informed me, as from a pulpit, that I was six miles from Castle Knox, and with dignity, as though leaving a pulpit, she moved from behind the counter, and advanced to the door to indicate my road. I asked her if she had seen anything of the hounds.
"There was one of your dogs looked in the door to me a while ago," she replied, "but he got a couple of boxes from the cat that have kittens; I d'no what way he went. Indeed I was bothered at the time with that poor man that came in to thank me for the compliment I paid him in going to his sister's funeral."
I said that he certainly seemed to feel it very much. At which she looked hard at me and said that he was on his way to a wedding, and that it might be he had a drop taken to rise his heart. "He was after getting a half a crown from a gentleman—a huntsman like yourself," she added, "that was striving to get his horse out of a ditch."
"Was there a lady with him?" I asked.
"There was, faith! And the two o' them legged it away then through the country, and they galloping like the deer!"
So, in all love, we parted; before I reached the next turning renewed sounds of battle told me that the compliment was still being pressed home.
My road, bending ever to the right, strolled through an untidy nondescript country, with little bits of bog, and little lumps of hill, and little rags of fields. I had jogged a mile or so when I saw a hound, a few fields away to my right, poking along on what appeared to be a line; he flopped into a boggy ditch, and scrambled from it on to a fence. He stood there undecidedly, like any human being, reviewing the situation, and then I saw his head and stern go up. The next moment I also heard what he had heard, a faint and far-away note of the horn. It came again, a long and questing call.
The road was flat and fairly straight; far away upon it something was moving gradually into my scope of vision, something with specks of red in it. It advanced upon me, firmly, and at a smart pace; heading it, like the ram of a battleship, was Mr. Knox. With him, "of all his halls had nursed," remained only the two hounds with the hairless backs, the two who, according to Miss McRory, were always scratching. Behind him was a small and unsmiling selection from those who, like him, had lost the hunt. Lady Knox headed them; my wife and Bill brought up the rear. The hound whom I had seen in the bog had preceded me, and was now joining himself to his two comrades, putting the best face he could upon it, with a frowning brow and his hackles up. The comrades, in their official position of sole representatives of the pack, received him with orthodox sternness, and though unable, for obvious reasons, to put their hackles up, the bald places on their backs were of an intimidating pink.
My own reception followed the same lines.
"Where are the hounds?" barked Flurry, in the awful tones of a parent addressing a governess who, through gross neglect, has mislaid her charges.
Before I had had time to make up my mind whether to be truculent or pacific, there was a shout away on our left. At some little distance up a by-road, a man was standing on a furze-plumed bank, beckoning to us with a driving-whip. Flurry stood in his stirrups, and held up his cap. The man yelled information that was wholly unintelligible, but the driving-whip indicated a point beyond him, and Flurry's brown mare jumped from a standstill to a gallop, and swung into the by-road.
The little band of followers swung after him. When Lady Knox was well ahead, I followed, and found myself battering between high banks behind Philippa and Bill Cunningham.
"Where's Mossoo?" my wife said breathlessly, as Daniel's head drew level with her sandwich case. "We met the man who pulled him out of the ditch—up in the hills there——"
"Yes, by Jove!" said Bill, "Flurry asked him if it was a Frenchman, and the chap said, 'French or German, he had curses as good as yourself!' I told Flurry it must have been you!"
"I don't mind Flurry, it's Lady Knox——" began Philippa.
Here we all came to a violent full-stop. Flurry's advance had been arrested by a covered-car and horse drawn across the road; the horse was eating grass, the driver, with the reins in his hand, was standing with his back to us on the top of the bank from which he had hailed us, howling plaudits, as if he were watching a race. There were distant shouts, and barking dogs, and bellowing cattle, and blended with them was the unmistakable baying of hounds.
I daresay that what Flurry said to the driver did him good—did Flurry good, I mean. The car lurched to one side, and, as we squeezed past it, we saw between its black curtains a vision of a scarlet-faced bride, embedded in female relatives; two outside cars, driverless, and loaded with wedding guests, were drawn up a little farther on. Flurry, still exploding like a shell, thundered on down the lane; the high bank ended at a gateway, he turned in, and as we crushed in after him we were greeted by a long and piercing "Who-whoop!"
We were in a straggling field with furzy patches in it. At the farther end of it was a crowd of country people on horses and on foot, obviously more wedding-guests; back of all, on a road below, was a white-washed chapel, and near it, still on the chestnut horse, was the priest who had headed the morning fox. Close to one of the clumps of furze the Comte de Pralines was standing, knee-deep in baying hounds, holding the body of the fox high above his head, and uttering scream upon scream of the most orthodox quality. He flung the fox to the hounds, the onlookers cheered, Miss McRory, seated on the car-horse, waved the brush above her head, and squealed at the top of her voice something that sounded like "Yoicks!" Her hair was floating freely down her back; a young countryman, in such sacrificial attire as suggested the bridegroom, was running across the field with her hat in his hand.
Flurry pulled up in silence; so did we. We were all quite outside the picture, and we knew it.
"Oh, the finest hunt ever you see!" cried the bridegroom as he passed us; "it was Father Dwyer seen him shnaking into the furze, the villyan!"
"Worry, worry, worry! Tear him and eat him, old fellows!" shouted the Comte de Pralines. "Give the hounds room, can't you, you chaps! I suppose you never saw them break up a fox before!" This to the wedding guests, who had crowded in, horse and foot, on top of the scuffling, growling pack.
Flurry turned an iron face upon me. His eye was no bigger than a pin's head.
"I suppose it's from Larkie McRory he got the English?" he said; "he learnt it quick."
"The McRorys don't speak English!" said Lady Knox, in a voice like a north-east wind.
"Seulement très petit!" Philippa murmured brazenly.
Whether Lady Knox heard her or not, I am unable to say. Her face was averted from me, and remained as inflexible as a profile on a coin—a Roman coin, for choice.
The faculty of not knowing when you are beaten is one that has, I think, been lauded beyond its deserving. Napoleon the Great has condemned manoeuvring before a fixed position, and Lady Knox was clearly a fixed position. Accepting these tenets, I began an unostentatious retirement, in which I was joined by Philippa. We were nearing safety and the gate of the field, when a yearning, choking wail came to us from the lane.
"The Bride?" queried my wife hysterically.
It was repeated; in the same instant my admirers, the jackasses, mère et fils, advanced upon the scene at a delirious gallop, and, sobbing with the ecstasy of reunion, resumed their attendance upon Daniel.
For a moment the attention of the field, including even that of the Roman coin, was diverted from the Comte de Pralines, and was concentrated upon our retreat.
XI
THE SHOOTING OF SHINROE
Mr. Joseph Francis M'Cabe rose stiffly from his basket chair, picked up the cushion on which he had been seated, looked at it with animosity, hit it hard with his fist, and, flinging it into the chair, replaced himself upon it, with the single word:
"Flog!"
I was aware that he referred to the flock with which the cushions in the lounge of Reardon's Hotel were stuffed.
"They have this hotel destroyed altogether with their improvements," went on Mr. M'Cabe between puffs, as he lit his pipe. "God be with the time this was the old smoking-room, before they knocked it and the hall into one and spoilt the two of them! There were fine solid chairs in it that time, that you'd sleep in as good as your bed, but as for these wicker affairs, I declare the wind 'd whistle through them the same as a crow's nest." He paused, and brought his heel down heavily on the top of the fire. "And look at that for a grate! A Well-grate they call it,—I'd say, 'Leave Well alone!' Thirty years I'm coming to Sessions here, and putting up in this house, and in place of old Tim telling me me own room was ready for me, there's a whipper-snapper of a snapdragon in a glass box in the hall, asking me me name in broken English" (it may be mentioned that this happened before the War), "and 'Had I a Cook's ticket?' and down-facing me that I must leave my key in what he called the 'Bew-ro.'"
I said I knew of a lady who always took a Cook's ticket when she went abroad, because when she got to Paris there would be an Englishman on the platform to meet her, or at all events a broken Englishman.
Mr. M'Cabe softened to a temporary smile, but held on to his grievance with the tenacity of his profession. (I don't think I have mentioned that he is a Solicitor, of a type now, unfortunately, becoming obsolete.) He had a long grey face, and a short grey moustache; he dyed his hair, and his age was known to no man.
"There was one of Cook's tourists sat next me at breakfast," he resumed, "and he asked me was I ever in Ireland before, and how long was I in it. 'Wan day,' says I!"
"Did he believe you?" I asked.
"He did," replied Mr. M'Cabe, with something that approached compassion.
I have always found old M'Cabe a mitigating circumstance of Sessions at Owenford, both in Court and out of it. He was a sportsman of the ingrained variety that grows wild in Ireland, and in any of the horse-coping cases that occasionally refresh the innermost soul of Munster, it would be safe to assume that Mr. M'Cabe's special gifts had ensured his being retained, generally on the shady side. He fished when occasion served, he shot whether it did or not. He did not exactly keep horses, but he always knew some one who was prepared to "pass on" a thoroughly useful animal, with some infirmity so insignificant that until you tried to dispose of him you did not realise that he was yours, until his final passing-on to the next world. He had certain shooting privileges in the mountains behind the town of Owenford (bestowed, so he said, by a grateful client), and it had often been suggested by him that he and I should anticipate some November Sessions by a day, and spend it "on the hill." We were now in the act of carrying out the project.
"Ah, these English," M'Cabe began again, mixing himself a glass of whisky and water, "they'd believe anything so long as it wasn't the truth. Talking politics these lads were, and by the time they had their ham and eggs swallowed they had the whole country arranged. 'And look,' says they—they were anglers, God help us!—'look at all the money that's going to waste for want of preserving the rivers!' 'I beg your pardon,' says I, 'there's water-bailiffs on the most of the rivers. I was defending a man not long since, that was cot by the water-bailiff poaching salmon on the Owen. 'And what proof have you?' says I to the water-bailiff. 'How do you know it was a salmon at all?' 'Is it how would I know?' says the bailiff, 'didn't I gaff the fish for him meself!'"
"What did your anglers say to that?" I enquired.
"Well, they didn't quite go so far as to tell me I was a liar," said Mr. M'Cabe tranquilly. "Ah, telling such as them the truth is wasting what isn't plenty! Then they'll meet some fellow that lies like a tooth-drawer, and they'll write to the English Times on the head of him!" He stretched forth a long and bony hand for the tumbler of whisky and water. "And talking of tooth-drawers," he went on, "there's a dentist comes here once a fortnight, Jeffers his name is, and a great sportsman too. I was with him to-day"—he passed his hand consciously over his mouth, and the difference that I had dimly felt in his appearance suddenly, and in all senses of the word, flashed upon me—"and he was telling me how one time, in the summer that's past, he'd been out all night, fishing in the Owen. He was going home before the dawn, and he jumped down off a bank on to what he took to be a white stone—and he aimed for the stone, mind you, because he thought the ground was wet—and what was it but a man's face!" M'Cabe paused to receive my comment. "What did he do, is it? Ran off for his life, roaring out, 'There's a first-rate dentist in Owenford!' The fellow was lying asleep there, and he having bundles of spurge with him to poison the river! He had taken drink, I suppose."
"Was he a water-bailiff too?" said I. "I hope the conservators of the river stood him a set of teeth."
"If they did," said M'Cabe, with an unexpected burst of feeling, "I pity him!" He rose to his feet, and put his tumbler down on the chimney-piece. "Well, we should get away early in the morning, and it's no harm for me to go to bed."
He yawned—a large yawn that ended abruptly with a metallic click. His eyes met mine, full of unspoken things; we parted in a silence that seemed to have been artificially imposed upon Mr. M'Cabe.
The wind boomed intermittently in my chimney during the night, and a far and heavy growling told of the dissatisfaction of the sea. Yet the morning was not unfavourable. There was a broken mist, with shimmers of sun in it, and the carman said it would be a thing of nothing, and would go out with the tide. The Boots, a relic of the old régime, was pessimistic, and mentioned that there were two stars squez up agin the moon last night, and he would have no dependence on the day. M'Cabe offered no opinion, being occupied in bestowing in a species of dog-box beneath the well of the car a young red setter, kindly lent by his friend the dentist. The setter, who had formed at sight an unfavourable opinion of the dog-box, had resolved himself into an invertebrate mass of jelly and lead, and was with difficulty straightened out and rammed home into it.
"Have we all now?" said M'Cabe, slamming the door in the dog's face. "Take care we're not like me uncle, old Tom Duffy, that was going shooting, and was the whole morning slapping his pockets and saying, 'Me powder! me shot! me caps! me wads!' and when he got to the bog, 'O tare an' ouns!' says he, 'I forgot the gun!'"
There are still moments when I can find some special and not-otherwise-to-be-attained flavour in driving on an outside car; a sense of personal achievement in sitting, by some method of instinctive suction, the lurches and swoops peculiar to these vehicles. Reardon's had given us its roomiest car and its best horse, a yellow mare, with a long back and a slinging trot, and a mouth of iron.
"Where did Mr. Reardon get the mare, Jerry?" asked M'Cabe, as we zigzagged in successive hairbreadths through the streets of Owenford.
"D-Dublin, sir," replied the driver, who, with both fists extended in front of him and both heels planted against his narrow footboard, seemed to find utterance difficult.
"She's a goer!" said M'Cabe.
"She is—she killed two men," said Jerry, in two jerks.
"That's a great credit to her. What way did she do it?"
"P-pulled the lungs out o' them!" ejaculated Jerry, turning the last corner and giving the mare a shade more of her head, as a tribute, perhaps, to her prowess.
She swung us for some six miles along the ruts of the coast road at the same unflinching pace, after which, turning inland and uphill, we began the climb of four miles into the mountains. It was about eleven o'clock when we pulled up beside a long and reedy pool, high up in the heather; the road went on, illimitably it seemed, and was lost, with its attendant telegraph posts, in cloud.
"Away with ye now, Jerry," said M'Cabe; "we'll shoot our way home."
He opened the back of the dog-box, and summoned its occupant. The summons was disregarded. Far back in the box two sparks of light and a dead silence indicated the presence of the dog.
"How, snug you are in there!" said M'Cabe; "here, Jerry, pull him out for us. What the deuce is this his name is? Jeffers told me yesterday, and it's gone from me."
"I d'no would he bite me?" said Jerry, taking a cautious observation and giving voice to the feelings of the party. "Here, poor fellow! Here, good lad!"
The good lad remained immovable. The lure of a sandwich produced no better result.
"We can't be losing our day with the brute this way," said M'Cabe. "Tip up the car. He'll come out then, and no thanks to him."
As the shafts rose heavenwards, the law of gravitation proved too many for the setter, and he slowly slid to earth.
"If I only knew your dam name we'd be all right now," said M'Cabe.
The carman dropped the shafts on to the mare, and drove on up the pass, with one side of the car turned up and himself on the other. The yellow mare had, it seemed, only begun her day's work. A prophetic instinct, of the reliable kind that is strictly founded on fact, warned me that we might live to regret her departure.
The dentist's setter had, at sight of the guns, realised that things were better than he had expected, and now preceded us along the edge of the lake with every appearance of enthusiasm. He quartered the ground with professional zeal, he splashed through the sedge, and rattled through thickets of dry reeds, and set successively a heron, a water-hen, and something, unseen, that I believe to have been a water-rat. After each of these efforts he rushed in upon his quarry, and we called him by all the gun-dog names we had ever heard of, from Don to Grouse, from Carlo to Shot, coupled with objurgations on a rising scale. With none of them did we so much as vibrate a chord in his bosom. He was a large dog, with a blunt stupid face, and a faculty for excitement about nothing that impelled him to bound back to us as often as possible, to gaze in our eyes in brilliant enquiry, and to pant and prance before us with all the fatuity of youth. Had he been able to speak, he would have asked idiotic questions, of that special breed that exact from their victim a reply of equal imbecility.
The lake and its environs, for the first time in M'Cabe's experience, yielded nothing; we struck up on to the mountain side, following the course of an angry stream that came racing down from the heights. We worked up through ling and furze, and skirted flocks of pale stones that lay in the heather like petrified sheep, and the dog, ranging deliriously, set water-wagtails and anything else that could fly; I believe he would have set a blue-bottle, and I said so to M'Cabe.
"Ah, give him time; he'll settle down," said M'Cabe, who had a thankfulness for small mercies born of a vast experience of makeshifts; "he might fill the bag for us yet."
We laboured along the flank of the mountain, climbing in and out of small ravines, jumping or wading streams, sloshing through yellow sedgery bog; always with the brown heather running up to the misty skyline, and always with the same atrocious luck. Once a small pack of grouse got up, very wild, and leagues out of range, thanks to the far-reaching activities of the dog, and once a hermit woodcock exploded out of a clump of furze, and sailed away down the slope, followed by four charges of shot and the red setter, in equally innocuous pursuit. And this, up to luncheon time, was the sum of the morning's sport.
We ate our sandwiches on a high ridge, under the lee of a tumbled pile of boulders, that looked as if they had been about to hurl themselves into the valley, and had thought better of it at the last moment. Between the looming, elephant-grey mountains the mist yielded glimpses of the far greenness of the sea, the only green thing in sight in this world of grey and brown. The dog sat opposite to me, and willed me to share my food with him. His steady eyes were charged with the implication that I was a glutton; personally I abhorred him, yet I found it impossible to give him less than twenty-five per cent. of my sandwiches.
"I wonder did Jeffers take him for a bad debt," said M'Cabe reflectively, as he lit his pipe.
I said I should rather take my chance with the bad debt.
"He might have treated me better," M'Cabe grumbled on, "seeing that I paid him seven pound ten the day before yesterday, let alone that it was me that was the first to put him up to this—this bit of Shinroe Mountain that never was what you might call strictly preserved. When he came here first he didn't as much as know what cartridges he'd want for it. 'Six and eight,' says I, 'that's a lawyer's fee, so if you think of me you'll not forget it!' And now, if ye please," went on Mr. Jeffers' preceptor in sport, "he's shooting the whole country and selling all he gets! And he wouldn't as much as ask me to go with him; and the excuse he gives, he wouldn't like to have an old hand like me connyshooring his shots! How modest he is!"
I taunted M'Cabe with having been weak enough thus to cede his rights, and M'Cabe, who was not at all amused, said that after all it wasn't so much Jeffers that did the harm, but an infernal English Syndicate that had taken the Shinroe shooting this season, and paid old Purcell that owned it ten times what it was worth.
"It might be as good for us to get off their ground now," continued M'Cabe, rising slowly to his feet, "and try the Lackagreina Valley. The stream below is their bounds."
This, I hasten to say, was the first I had heard of the Syndicate, and I thought it tactless of M'Cabe to have mentioned it, even though the wrong that we had done them was purely technical. I said to him that I thought the sooner we got off their ground the better, and we descended the hill and crossed the stream, and M'Cabe said that he could always shoot this next stretch of country when he liked. With this assurance, we turned our backs on the sea and struck inland, tramping for an hour or more through country whose entire barrenness could only be explained on the hypothesis that it has been turned inside out to dry. So far it had failed to achieve even this result.
The weather got thicker, and the sport, if possible, thinner; I had long since lost what bearings I possessed, but M'Cabe said he knew of a nice patch of scrub in the next valley that always held a cock. The next valley came at last, not without considerable effort, but no patch of scrub was apparent. Some small black and grey cattle stood and looked at us, and a young bull showed an inclination to stalk the dog; it seemed the only sport the valley was likely to afford. M'Cabe looked round him, and looked at his watch, and looked at the sky, which did not seem to be more than a yard above our heads, and said without emotion:
"Did ye think of telling the lad in the glass box in the hall that we might want some dinner kept hot for us? I d'no from Adam where we've got to!"
There was a cattle track along the side of the valley which might, though not necessarily, lead somewhere. We pursued it, and found that it led, in the first instance, to some blackfaced mountain sheep. A cheerful interlude followed, in which the red setter hunted the sheep, and we hunted the setter, and what M'Cabe said about the dentist in the intervals of the chase was more appropriate to the occasion than to these pages.
When justice had been satiated, and the last echo of the last yell of the dog had trembled into silence among the hills, we resumed the cattle-track, which had become a shade more reliable, and, as we proceeded, began to give an impression that it might lead somewhere. The day was dying in threatening stillness. Lethargic layers of mist bulged low, like the roof of a marquee, and cloaked every outline that could yield us information. The dog, unchastened by recent events, and full of an idiot optimism, continued to range the hillside.
"I suppose I'll never get the chance to tell Jeffers my opinion of that tom-fool," said M'Cabe, following with an eye of steel the perambulations of the dog; "the best barrister that ever wore a wig couldn't argue with a dentist! He has his fist half way down your throat before you can open your mouth; and in any case he'll tell me we couldn't expect any dog would work for us when we forgot his name. What's the brute at now?"
The brute was high above us on the hillside, setting a solitary furze bush with convincing determination, and casting backward looks to see if he were being supported.
"It might be a hare," said M'Cabe, cocking his gun, with a revival of hope that was almost pathetic, and ascending towards the furze bush.
I neither quickened my pace nor deviated from the cattle track, but I may admit that I did so far yield to the theory of the hare as to slip a cartridge into my gun.
M'Cabe put his gun to his shoulder, lowered it abruptly, and walked up to the furze bush. He stooped and picked up something.
"He's not such a fool after all!" he called out; "ye said he'd set a blue-bottle, and b' Jove ye weren't far out!"
He held up a black object that was neither bird nor beast.
I took the cartridge out of my gun as unobtrusively as possible, and M'Cabe and the dog rejoined me with the product of the day's sport. It was a flat-sided bottle, high shouldered, with a short neck; M'Cabe extracted the cork and took a sniff.
"Mountain dew no less!" (Mr. M'Cabe adhered faithfully to the stock phrases of his youth.) "This never paid the King a shilling! Give me the cup off your flask, Major, till we see what sort it is."
It was pretty rank, and even that seasoned vessel, old M'Cabe, admitted that it might be drinkable in another couple of years, but hardly in less; yet as it ran, a rivulet of fire, through my system, it seemed to me that even the water in my boots became less chill.
"In the public interest we're bound to remove it," said M'Cabe, putting the bottle into his game bag; "any man that drank enough of that 'd rob a church! Well, anyway, we're not the only people travelling this path," he continued; "whoever put his afternoon tea to hide there will choose a less fashionable promenade next time. But indeed the poor man couldn't be blamed for not knowing such a universal genius of a dog was coming this way! Didn't I tell you he'd fill the bag for us!"
He extracted from his pockets a pair of knitted gloves, and put them on; it was equivalent to putting up the shutters.
It was shortly after this that we regained touch with civilisation. Above the profile of a hill a telegraph post suddenly showed itself against the grey of the misty twilight. We made as bee-like a line for it as the nature of the ground permitted, and found ourselves on a narrow road, at a point where it was in the act of making a hairpin turn before plunging into a valley.
"The Beacon Bay road, begad!" said M'Cabe; "I didn't think we were so far out of our way. Let me see now, which way is this we'd best go."
He stood still and looked round him, taking his bearings; in the solitude the telegraph posts hummed to each other, full of information and entirely reticent.
The position was worse than I thought. By descending into the valley we should, a couple or three miles farther on, strike the coast road about six miles from home; by ascending the hill and walking four miles, we should arrive at the station of Coppeen Road, and, with luck, there intercept the evening train for Owenford.
"And that's the best of our play, but we'll have to step out," concluded M'Cabe, shortening the strap of his game-bag, and settling it on his back.
"If I were you," I said, "I'd chuck that stuff away. Apart from anything else, it's about half a ton extra to carry."
"There's many a thing, Major, that you might do that I might not do," returned M'Cabe with solemnity, "and in the contrairy sense the statement is equally valid."
He faced the hill with humped shoulders, and fell with no more words into his poacher's stride, and I followed him with the best imitation of it that I could put up after at least six hours of heavy going. M'Cabe is fifteen years older than I am, and I hope that when I am his age I shall have more consideration than he for those who are younger than myself.
It was now nearly half-past five o'clock, and by the time we had covered a mile of puddles and broken stones it was too dark to see which was which. I felt considerable dubiety about catching the train at Coppeen Road, all the more that it was a flag station, demanding an extra five minutes in hand. Probably the engine-driver had long since abandoned any expectation of passengers at Coppeen Road, and, if he even noticed the signal, would treat it as a practical joke. It was after another quarter of an hour's trudge that a distant sound entered into the silence that had fallen upon M'Cabe and me, an intermittent grating of wheels upon patches of broken stone, a steady hammer of hoofs.
M'Cabe halted.
"That car's bound to be going to Owenford," he said; "I wonder could they give us a lift."
A single light (the economical habit of the South of Ireland) began to split the foggy darkness.
"Begad, that's like the go of Reardon's mare!" said M'Cabe, as the light swung down upon us.
We held the road like highwaymen, we called upon the unseen driver to stop, and he answered to the name of Jerry. This is not a proof of identity in a province where every third man is dignified by the name of Jeremiah, but as the car pulled up it was Reardon's yellow mare on which the lamplight fell, and we knew that the fates had relented.
We should certainly not catch the train at Coppeen Road, Jerry assured us; "she had," he said, "a fashion of running early on Monday nights, and in any case if you'd want to catch that thrain, you should make like an amber-bush for her."
We agreed that it was too late for the preparation of an ambush.
"If the Sergeant had no objections," continued Jerry, progressing smoothly towards the tip that would finally be his, "it would be no trouble at all to oblige the gentlemen. Sure it's the big car I have, and it's often I took six, yes, and seven on it, going to the races."
I was now aware of two helmeted presences on the car, and a decorous voice said that the gentlemen were welcome to a side of the car if they liked.
"Is that Sergeant Leonard?" asked M'Cabe, who knew every policeman in the country. "Well, Sergeant, you've a knack of being on the spot when you're wanted!"
"And sometimes when he's not!" said I.
There was a third and unhelmeted presence on the car, and something of stillness and aloofness in it had led me to diagnose a prisoner.
The suggested dispositions were accomplished. The two policemen and the prisoner wedged themselves on one side of the car, M'Cabe and I mounted the other, and put the dog on the cushion of the well behind us (his late quarters in the dog-box being occupied by half a mountain sheep, destined for the hotel larder). The yellow mare went gallantly up to her collar, regardless of her augmented load; M'Cabe and the Sergeant leaned to each other across the back of the car, and fell into profound and low-toned converse; I smoked, and the dog, propping his wet back against mine, made friends with the prisoner. It may be the Irish blood in me that is responsible for the illicit sympathy with a prisoner that sometimes incommodes me; I certainly bestowed some of it upon the captive, sandwiched between two stalwarts of the R.I.C., and learning that the strong arm of the Law was a trifle compared with the rest of its person.
"What sport had you, Major?" enquired Jerry, as we slackened speed at a hill.
I was sitting at the top of the car, under his elbow, and he probably thought that I was feeling neglected during the heart-to-heart confidences of M'Cabe and the Sergeant.
"Not a feather," I replied.
"Sure the birds couldn't be in it this weather," said Jerry considerately; he had in his time condoled with many sportsmen. "I'm after talking to a man in Coppeen Road station, that was carrying the game bag for them gentlemen that has Mr. Purcell's shooting on Shinroe Mountain, and what had the four o' them after the day—only one jack-snipe!"
"They went one better than we did," I said, but, as was intended, I felt cheered—"what day were they there?"
"To-day, sure!" answered Jerry, with faint surprise, "and they hadn't their luncheon hardly ate when they met one on the mountain that told them he seen two fellas walking it, with guns and a dog, no more than an hour before them. 'That'll do!' says they, and they turned about and back with them to Coppeen Road to tell the police."
"Did they see the fellows?" I asked lightly, after a panic-stricken pause.
"They did not. Sure they said if they seen them, they'd shoot them like rooks," replied Jerry, "and they would too. It's what the man was saying if they cot them lads to-day they'd have left them in the way they'd be given up by both doctor and priest! Oh, they're fierce altogether!"
I received this information in a silence that was filled to bursting with the desire to strangle M'Cabe.
Jerry leaned over my shoulder, and lowered his voice.
"They were saying in Coppeen Road that there was a gentleman that came on a mothor-bike this morning early, and he had Shinroe shot out by ten o'clock, and on with him then up the country; and it isn't the first time he was in it. It's a pity those gentlemen couldn't ketch him! They'd mothor-bike him!"
It was apparent that the poaching of the motor-bicycle upon the legitimate preserves of carmen was responsible for this remarkable sympathy with the law; I, at all events, had it to my credit that I had not gone poaching on a motor-bicycle.
Just here M'Cabe emerged from the heart-to-heart, and nudged me in the ribs with a confederate elbow. I did not respond, being in no mood for confederacy, certainly not with M'Cabe.
"The Sergeant is after telling me this prisoner he has here is prosecuted at the instance of that Syndicate I was telling you about," he whispered hoarsely in my ear, "for hunting Shinroe with greyhounds. He was cited to appear last week, and he didn't turn up; he'll be before you to-morrow. I hope the Bench will have a fellow-feeling for a fellow-creature!"
The whisper ended in the wheezy cough that was Mr. M'Cabe's equivalent for a laugh. It was very close to my ear, and it had somewhere in it the metallic click that I had noticed before.
I grunted forbiddingly, and turned my back upon M'Cabe, as far as it is possible to do so on an outside car, and we hammered on through the darkness. Once the solitary lamp illumined the prolonged countenance of a donkey, and once or twice we came upon a party of sheep lying on the road; they melted into the night at the minatory whistle that is dedicated to sheep, and on each of these occasions the dentist's dog was shaken by strong shudders, and made a convulsive attempt to spring from the car in pursuit. We were making good travelling on a long down-grade, a smell of sea-weed was in the mist, and a salt taste was on my lips. It was very cold; I had no overcoat, my boots had plumbed the depths of many bogholes, and I found myself shivering like the dog.
It was at this point that I felt M'Cabe fumbling at his game-bag, that lay between us on the seat. By dint of a sympathy that I would have died rather than betray, I divined that he was going to tap that fount of contraband fire that he owed to the dentist's dog. It was, apparently, a matter of some difficulty; I felt him groping and tugging at the straps.
I said to myself, waveringly: "Old blackguard! I won't touch it if he offers it to me."
M'Cabe went on fumbling:
"Damn these woolly gloves! I can't do a hand's turn with them."
In the dark I could not see what followed, but I felt him raise his arm. There was a jerk, followed by a howl.
"Hold on!" roared M'Cabe, with a new and strange utterance, "Thtop the horth! I've dropped me teeth!"
The driver did his best, but with the push of the hill behind her the mare took some stopping.
"Oh, murder! oh, murder!" wailed M'Cabe, lisping thickly, "I pulled them out o' me head with the glove, trying to get it off!" He scrambled off the car. "Give me the lamp! Me lovely new teeth——"
I detached the lamp from its socket with all speed, and handed it to M'Cabe, who hurried back on our tracks. From motives of delicacy I remained on the car, as did also the rest of the party. A minute or two passed in awed silence, while the patch of light went to and fro on the dark road. It seemed an intrusion to offer assistance, and an uncertainty as to whether to allude to the loss as "them," or "it," made enquiries a difficulty.
"For goodneth'ake have none o' ye any matcheth, that ye couldn't come and help me?" demanded the voice of M'Cabe, in indignation blurred pathetically by his gosling-like lisp.
I went to his assistance, and refrained with an effort from suggesting the employment of that all-accomplished setter, the dentist's dog, in the search; it was not the moment for pleasantry. Not yet.
We crept along, bent double, like gorillas; the long strips of broken stones yielded nothing, the long puddles between them were examined in vain.
"What the dooth will I do to-morrow?" raged M'Cabe, pawing in the heather at the road's edge. "How can I plead when I haven't a blathted tooth in me head?"
"I'll give you half a crown this minute, M'Cabe," said I brutally, "if you'll say 'Sessions'!"
Here the Sergeant joined us, striking matches as he came. He worked his way into the sphere of the car-lamp, he was most painstaking and sympathetic, and his oblique allusions to the object of the search were a miracle of tact.
"I see something white beyond you, Mr. M'Cabe,"' he said respectfully, "might that be them?"
M'Cabe swung the lamp as indicated.
"No, it might not. It's a pebble," he replied, with pardonable irascibility.
Silence followed, and we worked our way up the hill.
"What's that, sir?" ventured the Sergeant, with some excitement, stopping again and pointing. "I think I see the gleam of the gold!"
"Ah, nonthenth, man! They're vulcanite!" snapped M'Cabe, more irascibly than ever.
The word nonsense was a disastrous effort, and I withdrew into the darkness to enjoy it.
"What colour might vulcanite be, sir?" murmured a voice beside me.
Jerry had joined the search-party; he lighted, as he spoke, an inch of candle. On hearing my explanation he remarked that it was a bad chance, and at the same instant the inch of candle slipped from his fingers and fell into a puddle.
"Divil mend ye for a candle! Have ye a match, sir? I haven't a one left!"
As it happened, I had no matches, my only means of making a light being a patent tinder-box.
"Have you a match there?" I called out to the invisible occupants of the car, which was about fifteen or twenty yards away, advancing towards it as I spoke. The constable politely jumped off and came to meet me.
As he was in the act of handing me his match-box, the car drove away down the hill.
I state the fact with the bald simplicity that is appropriate to great disaster. To be exact, the yellow mare sprang from inaction into a gallop, as if she had been stung by a wasp, and had a start of at least fifty yards before either the carman or the constable could get under weigh. The carman, uttering shrill and menacing whistles, led the chase, the constable, though badly hampered by his greatcoat, was a good second, and the Sergeant, making the best of a bad start, followed them into the night.
The yellow mare's head was for home, and her load was on its own legs on the road behind her; hysterical yelps from the dentist's dog indicated that he also was on his own legs, and was, in all human probability, jumping at the mare's nose. As the rapturous beat of her hoofs died away on the down-grade, I recalled the assertion that she had pulled the lungs out of two men, and it seemed to me that the prisoner had caught the psychological moment on the hop.
"They'll not ketch him," said M'Cabe, with the flat calm of a broken man, "not to-night anyway. Nor for a week maybe. He'll take to the mountains."
The silence of the hills closed in upon us, and we were left in our original position, plus the lamp of the car, and minus our guns, the dentist's dog, and M'Cabe's teeth.
Far, far away, from the direction of Coppeen Road, that sinister outpost, where evil rumours were launched, and the night trains were waylaid by the amber-bushes, a steady tapping sound advanced towards us. Over the crest of the hill, a quarter of a mile away, a blazing and many-pointed star sprang into being, and bore down upon us. "A motor-bike!" ejaculated M'Cabe. "Take the light and thtop him—he wouldn't know what I wath thaying—if he ran over them they're done for! For the love o' Merthy tell him to keep the left thide of the road!"
I took the lamp, and ran towards the bicyclist, waving it as I ran. The star, now a moon of acetylene ferocity, slackened speed, and a voice behind it said:
"What's up?"
I stated the case with telegraphic brevity, and the motor-bicycle slid slowly past me. Its rider had a gun slung across his back, my lamp revealed a crammed game-bag on the carrier behind him.
"Sorry I can't assist you," he called back to me, keeping carefully at the left-hand side of the road, "but I have an appointment." Then, as an afterthought, "There's a first-rate dentist in Owenford!"
The red eye of the tail light glowed a farewell and passed on, like all the rest, into the night.
I rejoined M'Cabe.
He clutched my arm, and shook it.
"That wath Jefferth! Jefferth, I tell ye! The dirty poacher! And hith bag full of our birdth!"
It was not till the lamp went out, which it did some ten minutes afterwards, that I drew M 'Cabe from the scene of his loss, gently, as one deals with the bereaved, and faced with him the six-mile walk to Owenford.
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SOME EXPERIENCES OF AN IRISH R.M. With 31 Illustrations by E. Œ. SOMERVILLE. Crown 8vo.
FURTHER EXPERIENCES OF AN IRISH R.M. With 35 Illustrations by E. Œ. SOMERVILLE. Crown 8vo.
SOME IRISH YESTERDAYS. With 51 Illustrations by E. Œ. SOMERVILLE. Crown 8vo.
*** In this volume is included a reprint of "Slipper's ABC of Fox-hunting" with numerous illustrations.
ALL ON THE IRISH SHORE: Irish Sketches. With 10 Illustrations by E. Œ. SOMERVILLE. Crown 8vo.
AN IRISH COUSIN. Crown 8vo.
THE REAL CHARLOTTE. Crown 8vo.
THE SILVER FOX. Crown 8vo.
BY E. Œ. SOMERVILLE
THE STORY OF THE DISCONTENTED LITTLE ELEPHANT. Told in Pictures and Rhyme. With 7 coloured, and many other Illustrations. Oblong 4to.
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS