"Tally-ho!" I bellowed, rising in my place and waving my cap high in air. "Tally-ho, over!"
The forked lightning ceased.
"What way is he?" came an answering bellow from Flurry.
"This way, over the hill!"
The hounds were already coming to the holloa. I achieved some very creditable falsetto screeches; I leaped from the car, and cheered and capped them over the fence; I shouted precise directions to the Master and Whip, who were now, with the clamours proper to their calling, steeplechasing into the road and out of it again, followed by two or three of the Field, including the new District Inspector of the Royal Irish Constabulary (recently come from Meath with a high reputation as a goer). They scrambled and struggled up the hill-side, through rocks and furze (in connection with which I heard the new D.I. making some strenuous comments to his Meath hunter), the hounds streamed and screamed over the ridge of the hill, the riders shoved their puffing horses after them, topped it, and dropped behind it. The furzy skyline and the pleasant blue and white sky above it remained serene and silent.
I returned to the car, and my passenger, who, as I now realised, had remained very still during these excitements.
"That was a bit of luck!" I said happily, inflated by the sense of personal merit that is the portion of one who has viewed a fox away. As I spoke I became aware of something fixed in Mrs. Knox's expression, something rigid, as though she were repressing emotion; a fear flashed through my mind that she was overtired, and that the cry of the hounds had brought back to her the days when she too had known what a first burst away with a fox out of Killoge Wood had felt like.
"Major Yeates," she said sepulchrally, and yet with some inward thrill in her voice, "I think the sooner we start for home the better."
I could not turn the car, but, rather than lose time, I ran it backwards towards the cross-roads; it was a branch of the art in which I had not become proficient, and as, with my head over my shoulder, I dodged the ditches, I found myself continually encountering Mrs. Knox's eye, and was startled by something in it that was both jubilant and compassionate. I also surprised her in the act of wiping her eyes. I wondered if she were becoming hysterical, and yearned for Mullins as the policeman (no doubt) yearns for the mother of the lost child.
On the road near the public-house we came upon M'Sweeny, Goggin, and Casey, obviously awaiting us. I stopped the car, not without reluctance.