“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.