It was a typical Irish winter’s evening, the sky threatening and forgetting to rain, the air damp and filled with the scent of the earth, near things indistinct in the gathering twilight, and far things seeming near.
From where Mr Fanshawe stood, with his pipe in his mouth and his gun under his arm, you might have started with a brave heart to walk to the hills of Cloyne. Ten miles distant, or at most twelve, they seemed, those hills that lay thirty Irish miles away.
Fanshawe was staying for the hunting with Mr Trench of Dunboyne House. He had come out to-day to have a shot at the snipe, and he had not done badly, to judge by the weight of the bag Micky Finn, the old keeper, was carrying.
“Well,” said the young man, refilling and lighting his pipe, “we’d better be getting back. How far are we from the house, Micky?”
“A matter of five mile be the boggs, sir, an’ siven be the road; which way would your ’arner be chusin’ to take?”
“The road,” said Mr Fanshawe, and, followed by Micky and the dogs, he struck towards the high-road from Dunbeg which goes across the moors white and straight like a chalk-line drawn by a giant.
“You were afther askin’ me, sir, what time the letters came from Dunbeg,” said Micky, as they stepped on to the highway. “Here’s Larry and the letters now, comin’ as hard as he can pelt two hours late, the blackguyard! He’s been stoppin’ to drink at Billy Sheehan’s, or colloguing wid the girls; musha, but it’s little he cares who waits for their letters whin the bottle’s before him.”
Mr Fanshawe shaded his eyes, and with a constriction of the heart watched the horseman and the horse coming at a furious pace and developing with magical speed against the sunset. The sound of the hoofs, like the sound of castanets in the hands of a madman, came on the breeze.
The horseman, a ragged individual with a leer on his face, no boots on his feet, and a post-bag slung on his back, reined in when he came level with the keeper and the gentleman, bringing his horse literally on its haunches.
“Any letters for Mr Fanshawe, Larry?” asked the keeper.