“You show me,” he chuckled. “I write an essay on Yorkshire moor farms, and perhaps earn a new suit of clo’es, yes? Our Cherman magazines print dose tings.”
That same afternoon a party of guns on a Scottish moor had been shooting driven grouse flying low and fast over the butts before a strong wind. The sportsmen, five in number, were all experts. Around each shelter, with its solitary marksman and his attendant loader, lay a deep crescent of game, every bird shot cleanly.
The last drive of the day was the most successful. One man, whose bronzed skin and military bearing told his profession, handed the empty 12-bore to the gillie when the line of beaters came over the crest of the hill, and betook himself, filling his pipe the while, to a group of ponies waiting on the moorland road in the valley beneath.
He joined another, the earliest arrival.
“Capital ground, this,” he said. “I don’t know whose lot is the more enviable, Heronsdale—yours, who have the pains as well as the pleasure of ownership, or that of wandering vagabonds like myself whom you make your guests.”
Lord Heronsdale smiled.
“You may call yourself a wandering vagabond, Grant—the envy rests with me,” he said. “It’s all very well to have large estates, but I feel like degenerating into a sort of head gamekeeper and farm bailiff combined. Of course, I’m proud of Cairn-corrie, yet I pine sometimes for the excitement of a life that does not travel in grooves.”
The other shook his head.