A meet of the hounds without Billy the Buck would have been a function robbed of most of its picturesqueness and colour.
He was a dark gipsy-looking personage, in an old red waistcoat with tarnished brass buttons; he lived in hayricks and such places, caught rats, sold rabbit skins, trapped moles, did a bit of petty thieving when times were bad, and a bit of poaching whenever he could get the chance. He followed the hounds on foot, and was always in at the death, for he could run like a hare and jump like a horse. He was “near seven fut”—that is to say, he measured six feet six, and, to use the local expression, he was as “thin as a barber’s pole.”
“The top of the marnin’ to you!” cried Billy, vaulting over the low stone wall separating the road from the fields.
“Oh, it’s yourself, is it?” said the sweep. “And what’s the news?”
“There’s an ould grey dog-fox in Rafferty’s Clump,” cried Billy. “He’s the wan that took earth at Kilgobbin last year, whin Mr Moriarty broke his back over the sunk fence beyant Highberries Barn; I knowed him by the ring on his tail and the thrap mark on his lift shoulder, where the hair’s grown a different colour. ‘Good-marnin,’ says I, whin I see him ten minits ago. ‘It’s you that’ll be sweepin’ the country-side with your brush before you’re an hour older, or me names not Billy the Buck,’ I says. And with that he livels it at me like a gun, and into the bushes he pops, with his eye over his shoulder at me. Who’s this comin’ on the big brown horse?”
“One of the quality from the Big House,” replied the sweep, as Mr Fanshawe, in spotless pink and mounted on a superb hunter, turned the corner of the road from Glen Druid.
After Mr Fanshawe, and some way behind, came the governess-cart driven by Patsy.
Now along all the four roads horsemen could be seen converging towards Castle Knock cross. All sorts of nags, good, bad, and indifferent, ridden by all sorts of people, small farmers, sporting squireens from Tullagh, a sprinkling of gentry, so that in five minutes the space of the cross-roads presented a lively enough picture; and you could scarcely hear yourself speak, for every one seemed to know every one else, and the shouting and the laughing was enough to have raised the old malefactors who for centuries had been buried at the cross-roads with stakes through their middles.
Suddenly the talking and the laughing ceased, for away down the road leading to Kilgobbin might be seen the hounds coming along like a moving furze bush and the pink-clad figures of the master and the two whips.
“Here they come!” cried Patsy, who had been endeavouring to keep the hog-maned pony from the vicious attentions of the sweep’s donkey. “Misther Mahony, will yiz keep your dunkey to yourself, for he’s tryin’ to bite the pony’s nose off. Miss Doris, sit back a bit and trim the cart, for it’s kickin’ us in flinders he’ll be if the shoulderstrap presses too hard on him.”