CHAPTER XI
KATHLEEN EARNS A POUND
“There’s to be a big meet to-day,” Patrick said, as Danny and Kathleen were getting ready to start for the bog the next morning.
There had been a shower or two in the night, and raindrops sparkled on every blade of grass and twinkled among the green leaves of the trees; but the sun was breaking through the clouds and promised a fair day for the turf-cutting.
It was, indeed, a fair day and a fair green country, and Patrick, who had started for the barn with his milk pails, began singing in his hearty voice:
“Oh, Ireland, isn’t it grand you look,
Like a bride in her rich adornin’!
And with all the pent-up love of my heart,
I bid you the top of the mornin’.”
“What is a meet?” Kathleen asked, as she and her brother trudged down the road to the bog.
“It’s a hunting-party, and the ladies and gentlemen from the country round about meet together for it,” Danny answered, stopping a moment to look at the tiny green sloes on the blackthorn hedge.
“What do they hunt?” she asked.
“Sometimes they hunt a deer; and sometimes it’s foxes or rabbits they are after,” he replied.
“If they are hunting a deer I hope they won’t catch it,” Kathleen said earnestly.
But when the sound of the hunting-horn rang merrily across the bog, from the direction of Uncle Barney’s house in Killaraght, she was full of excitement over the chase.
“Listen!” she cried, standing with outstretched arms to catch the brick of turf Danny was ready to throw to her; “listen, there’s the horn now! It sounds so sweet I’d almost think it was the fairies.”
Danny waited until they heard the baying of the hounds and the halloo of the riders, and then he went on with his work.
“They may kill harmless animals if they like; but I’d rather be able to hit your hands with a brick of turf,” he said, suiting the action to the word, “than to hit a handsome deer with a bullet.”
Kathleen’s thoughts were busy with the hunters for a long time and she asked her brother endless questions about them,—Where did they live? What did they do with the deer? How did the horses go over the stone walls and fences? Why did the riders wear scarlet coats?
“How many hunters are there?” she asked at last.
“Oh, fifteen or more,” Danny answered carelessly. “But if they needed thirty men to catch one poor deer, they could find them easily. There’s the surgeon from the hospital in Boyle, for one. Bee says he is over here to-day for the hunting.”
“The surgeon from the Boyle hospital,” Kathleen repeated, under her breath.
“Oh, if I could just see him, and tell him about Mary Ellen’s eyes!” she thought. “Perhaps he could make her well before I have to go to Kilkenny, if I only had the money.”
She forgot the hunters for a while, and gave all her thought to her work, and to planning how she could earn more shillings after the turf-cutting was finished. Over and over again, as she trudged from the bog to the stack of wet turf, she heard the music of the horn,—now near, now far. When it grew faint her hope died away, but when it rang loud and clear her heart grew light, as if she had received a promise of help for her sister.
Once she saw a flash of scarlet-coated riders far beyond the bog, the horses at a gallop; and again a stray hound bounded past her, within a few yards of the mound where she was stacking the turf.
A little before noon Danny sent her home for her dinner. “You are too little to work as steadily as you did yesterday,” he said kindly. “Uncle Barney and Patrick are coming down this afternoon, and they are going to bring two more to help, so the work will go faster.”
So Kathleen left her work and hurried down the road, little dreaming that she herself was soon to take part in the hunt.
Just as she reached the little lane that led up to Cousin Bee’s house she heard a noise, and looking off across the fields she saw a horseman coming towards her, shouting and waving his arms.
At first she took him for one of the hunters; but he wore a dark suit and an old straw hat, and his horse looked as if it could do better at drawing a plow than at jumping a fence.
Kathleen ran to the barn and stood beside the open door to see which way the rider was going, when suddenly she saw something else that made her heart stand still with excitement.
A beautiful deer was bounding across the fields! He leaped the wall into the road, and came down the little lane toward the house at a gallop.
The horseman pounded down the road behind him, the hounds were baying in the distance, and almost before Kathleen knew what was happening, the deer had run into the wide-open barn door and she had closed it behind him and was listening in terror to the sound of his plunging hoofs.
Then the excitement really began, for the strange hunter, who was no one but Tim Keefe himself, rode into the yard on his old farm-horse, and Patrick, Bee and Mary Ellen ran out of the house to see what was the matter.
Patrick heard the noise in the barn and ran to see if his cows had gone crazy; Kathleen ran to hold the door and tell him about the deer, and Tim Keefe began to shout at the top of his voice that it was his deer because he had seen it first.
He had been riding to the Kingsland bog to hire a bank of turf, he said, and the deer had crossed his path. He remembered that a pound reward is always given to the one who holds the deer for the hunters, and he had ridden after it, hoping by some means to gain the reward.
Patrick smiled his broad smile. “It will be Kathleen who will get the pound, after all,” he said.
“But it was myself that whipped him down the road,” said Tim hotly.
Patrick’s smile broke into a laugh. “’Twas Kathleen that shut him into the barn,” he said, “and ’tis a fine whipper-in you make, Tim Keefe.”
Tim’s coat was ragged and his trousers had seen the rains of many an Irish summer, an old pipe smoked in his mouth, and he was such a sorry-looking figure altogether that even Bee laughed at the sight of him.
And while they all laughed, there came the “tally-ho!” of the hunters just beyond the old fort; the dogs swept into sight, and the real whipper-in rode up to the very door of the barn.
In a moment the yard turned red to Kathleen’s eyes, for a dozen mounted horsemen in scarlet coats and buff riding-breeches galloped close behind him, with ladies in gray and ladies in black, all riding splendid horses.
Patrick sent the children out of the way of the horses’ feet, while he explained how it happened that his barn was stabling a deer.
Then the whipper-in quieted his hounds, and the ladies and gentlemen looked at bashful Kathleen, who had quite lost her voice in the midst of so much excitement. But when she was offered the pound that Tim Keefe had expected to receive, she shook her head.
“Tell them I want the deer to go free,” she whispered to Patrick.
How everyone laughed at the idea! But in the end they agreed to it, telling her that she might open the barn door whenever she pleased. Then they all went away down the boreen, “as goodly a cavalcade as ever rode on Irish soil,” Bee said.
As for Patrick, in one breath he laughed at Kathleen’s wit and courage, and in the next he praised her tender heart. “You’re a good lass,” he said, “and you’ve earned a good dinner anyway. Come into the house and we’ll see what Bee has been baking the morn. Then, after the hounds are well out of the way, we’ll open the barn door and see the deer take himself off to the woods.”
That afternoon, when they were all working in the bog, Kathleen heard Patrick telling Danny and Uncle Barney the story of her deer hunt. “There was Tim Keefe, on his old nag, with his pipe in his mouth,” he said, “thinking he was the grand whipper-in, and would get the pound for himself.”
“It’s a fine day that sees Tim Keefe outwitted for once,” exclaimed Uncle Barney, slapping his knee with his hand.
Kathleen heard his words and turned to him quickly. “You said that you would give a pound to hear that Tim Keefe had been outwitted,” she said.
Uncle Barney laughed till his sides shook. “Good for you! Good for you!” he said, and actually took out the money and gave it to her.
She looked at it doubtfully, and he laughed again. “You earned it fair, and ’twas worth it,” he told her.
So Kathleen folded the money and put it carefully away in her pocket, thinking as she did so that, after all, the hunting-horn had brought a promise of help for little Mary Ellen.