"'LET ME LOOK AT HIM,' SHE SAID."
"Say, chaps, did you hear her? She said she'd 'sneak' the ointment from the stables. I tell 'ee what, she'll be a rare good plucked one that. And her a beak's daughter! Her mother mun ha' been a piece!"
It was half-an-hour before Cissy got back with the pot of boracic dressing and some lint.
"I had to wait till the coachman had gone to his tea," she explained, "and then send the stable boy with a message to the village to get him out of the way."
The youth on the stone heap secretly signalled his delight to the appreciative audience hiding in the broom bushes.
Then Cissy ordered him to get her some warm water, which he brought from one of the kettles swinging on the birchen tripods scattered here and there about the encampment.
Whereupon, taking the fox-terrier firmly on her knee and turning up the skirt of her dress, she washed away all the dirt and matted hair, cleansing the wound thoroughly.
The poor beast only made a faint whining sound at intervals. Then she applied the antiseptic dressing, and bound the lint tightly down with a cincture about the animal. She fitted his neck with a neat collar of her own invention, made out of the wicker covering of a Chianti wine flask which she brought with her from Oaklands.