CHAPTER III
Torrents of soft grey rain were falling on Fornagh Hill. The furze-bushes were grey with it, the slatey walls gleamed darkly, the streams rushed in yellow fury over the ledges of rock. The new red coat of Dan O’Driscoll the huntsman (familiarly known as Danny-O) had purple patches on it where the wet had soaked through, and, as he himself expressed it to one of his friends, “every step he’d take, the wather was gabblin’ in his boots.” At the time of this remark, he was on foot in the centre of a crowd of men and boys, who had apparently risen from the hillside to point out the precise spot where the fox had gone to ground.
“’Tis within in the gully he is!” shouted one of them. “I heard the dogs yowling, and whin I seen him, there wasn’t the breadth o’ yer nail between himself and the first o’ thim.”
That which the speaker had referred to as “a gully” was a covered-in drain that carried off the waters of a small stream beneath a road and down the hillside, its lower opening being at this moment blocked by a large yellow cur, whose owner was sedulously pinching its tail as a stimulant to its reluctant advance upon the fox. A small group of riders huddled, with turned-up collars, under the lee of a high furzy fence; their muddy horses steamed, with the wet reins hanging loose on their necks. One lady and four men were all that the rocks and fences of Fornagh had left of the field. The dispensary doctor’s chestnut was bleeding from a cut on the fetlock, Mr. James Mahony, a hard-riding farmer, had a dark patch of mud on his shoulder, and Major Bunbury was swearing quietly to himself as he examined an over-reach that had stained his mare’s white pastern pink with blood. Lady Susan’s big bay had lost a fore shoe. Lady Susan’s face was an unbecoming, diffused pink; the rain beaded her dark eyebrows and ran down her well-shaped nose; her hunting cravat might as well have been a wet dishclout. Under the circumstances, perhaps, the epithets which she was applying to the weather and the country were excusable.
“What can have become of Hughie?” she said for the twentieth time, bending her head to let the water run out of the brim of her hat; “I don’t remember seeing him since that place where the cow ran after us.”
“Clinkin’ good fencer she was too,” said Major Bunbury, “she went two fields with us. Upon my soul, I don’t know what happened to Hughie. I’d quite enough to do to look out for myself.”
“I hope he’s all right,” said Lady Susan, easily, “that horse wasn’t going very kindly with him.”
“Oh, he’s all right. Probably he’s done for the horse, though, in this infernal country—bleedin’ to death under a furze-bush somewhere, and no wonder, when they make their fences out of razors and porridge.”
“Glasgow goes well,” remarked Lady Susan, in a lower voice, eying Mr. Glasgow where he stood talking to a countryman. “I was very glad he was there to give me a lead—you weren’t much good to me, Bunny dear!”
“Would it be putting too much delay on your ladyship to send for a tarrier?” said Danny-O, the huntsman, approaching Lady Susan; “there’s one Dinny Hegarty that lives back on the hill here, and they say he have a grand dog.”