“Oh, come,” I said, “I’m a bit of a liar myself——”
“Well, she has a dozen of them, anyhow, rattling good colts, too, some of them, but they might as well be donkeys for all the good they are to me or any one. It’s not once in three years she sells one, and there she has them walking after her for bits of sugar, like a lot of dirty lapdogs,” ended Flurry with disgust.
“Well, what’s your plan? Do you want me to make her a bid for one of the lapdogs?”
“I was thinking,” replied Flurry, with great deliberation, “that my birthday’s this week, and maybe I could work a four-year-old colt of Trinket’s she has out of her in honour of the occasion.”
“And sell your grandmother’s birthday present to me?”
“Just that, I suppose,” answered Flurry, with a slow wink.
A few days afterwards a letter from Mr. Knox informed me that he had “squared the old lady, and it would be all right about the colt!” He further told me that Mrs. Knox had been good enough to offer me, with him, a day’s snipe shooting on the celebrated Aussolas bogs, and he proposed to drive me there the following Monday, if convenient, to shoot the Aussolas snipe bog when they got the chance. Eight o’clock on the following Monday morning saw Flurry, myself, and a groom packed into a dog-cart, with portmanteaus, gun-cases, and two rampant red setters.
It was a long drive, twelve miles at least, and a very cold one. We passed through long tracts of pasture country, filled for Flurry, with memories of runs, which were recorded for me, fence by fence, in every one of which the biggest dog-fox in the country had gone to ground, with not two feet—measured accurately on the handle of the whip—between him and the leading hound; through bogs that imperceptibly melted into lakes, and finally down and down into a valley, where the fir-trees of Aussolas clustered darkly round a glittering lake, and all but hid the grey roofs and pointed gables of Aussolas Castle.
“There’s a nice stretch of a demesne for you,” remarked Flurry, pointing downwards with the whip, “and one little old woman holding it all in the heel of her fist. Well able to hold it she is, too, and always was, and she’ll live twenty years yet, if it’s only to spite the whole lot of us, and when all’s said and done, goodness knows how she’ll leave it!”
“It strikes me you were lucky to keep her up to her promise about the colt,” said I.