"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.