'No, thanks; I never drink when I'm out shooting. And if I were you, I wouldn't take any more either. It won't improve your aim.'
'Which is bad enough already. Right you are, my boy. But I admire your cheek in saying so to me, seeing that I'm twenty years your senior. I suppose I ought to be offended, only I'm not. But where's the harm in a flask of whisky in a day?'
'Not the least in life, I suppose, only I've known good men broken in my time through taking less so early in the day as this. Anyway it doesn't make either your hand or your eye any the steadier, and one never knows when he may want all the nerve he's got.'
The speaker was a District Inspector in the Irish Constabulary, the other was his host, one of that race of gentlemen farmers so fast dying out in Ireland, who had offered him a day on his grouse mountain, the only portion of the estate that was not mortgaged up to the hilt.
'It's about time that I was going home in any case,' continued Fitzgerald.
'Nonsense, man,' cried his companion, 'why, the day is yet young, there'll be light enough to shoot for another two hours, it's hardly four o'clock. What's the hurry?'
'Well, you know that the Home Rule Bill passed its third reading in the House of Commons last night.'
'Yes, and a nice fuss those blackguards are kicking up over it. A mole couldn't help knowing that.'
'That's just it, on the borderland here between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, the Celtic and Saxon element, party feeling runs extraordinarily high, and the people are so excited that I expect there'll be a row to-night. They're going to have bonfires in the streets and all kinds of games, and we'll be lucky if we get through it without a faction fight. I have to be home and get into uniform before the fun begins, so I hope you don't mind, but I've ordered my man to have the car to meet me at the shebeen by the cross-roads at half-past four.'
'Very well, in that case we'd better be making tracks. Call the dogs to heel, Jimmie.'