I said he probably had a simpler telegraphic address, and that, no matter where he was, it was now my duty to overtake Mr. Knox and offer him my horse; "and you," I added, "had better get this little boy to show you the way to the road."
Miss McRory replied confidently that she'd sooner stay with me.
I said, as well as I remember, that her preference was highly flattering, but that she might live to regret it.
Miss McRory answered that she wished I wouldn't be spying at her through that old glass of mine; she knew well enough she was a show, and her hair was coming down, and she'd as soon trust herself to the cat as to that little urchin.
As I made my way downwards over the knife-edged ridges of rock and along their intervening boggy furrows, I should myself have been grateful for the guidance of the cat. Even the grey cob accepted the matter as serious, and kept the brake hard on, accomplishing the last horrid incident of the descent—a leap from the slant of the hill on to the summit of a heathery bank—without frivolity, even with anxiety. We had now arrived at the plateau above the cliffs—a place of brown, low-growing ling, complicated by boggy runnels, and heavily sprinkled with round stones. The mist was blowing in thicker than ever, Flurry and his retinue were lost as though they had never been, and the near thunder of the breakers, combined with the wind, made an impenetrable din round me and Miss McRory.
After perhaps a mile, in the course of which I got off several times to pull down loose walls for the benefit of my companion, I discovered the rudiments of a lane, which gradually developed into a narrow but indubitable road. The rain had gone down the back of my neck and into my boots: I determined that if Flurry had to finish the run on all-fours, I would stick to the lane until it took me to a road. What it took me to was, as might have been foreseen in any County Cork bohireen, a pole jammed across it from wall to wall and reinforced by furze-bushes—not a very high pole, but not one easy to remove. I pulled up and looked dubiously from it to Miss McRory.
"D'ye dare me?" she said.
"I bet you sixpence you take a toss if you do," I replied firmly, preparing to dismount.
"Done with you!" said Miss McRory, suddenly smiting the grey cob with a venomous little cutting whip (one that probably dated from the sixties, and had for a handle an ivory greyhound's head with a plaited silver collar round its neck).
I have seldom seen a pole better and more liberally dealt with, as far as the grey cob's share of the transaction went, and seldom, indeed, have I seen a rider sail more freely from a saddle than Miss McRory sailed. She alighted on her hands and knees, and the cob, with the sting of the whip still enlivening her movements, galloped on up the lane and was lost in the mist.