Conny was in the kitchen, polishing the silver, and listening to Biddy's raptures. "Sure, thin, Conny, and it's a young gintleman ye'll be seein' as there isn't the likes in ahl this miserable coontry, bad luck till it!"
"Is he like the master?" asked Conny.
"Indade, thin, I couldn't be sayin' whidder it's likest the masther or the misthress he is. Tahl an' straight, an' sooch a look in the two eyes of 'im."
"Conny," said the doctor, coming to the door, "I am obliged to go to Hampton to see a very sick man. You will have to go for Master Joe and the other gentleman to-night."
"Yes, sir," said Conny, well pleased with the commission.
"Be sure you start in season. Put Doll into the sulky, and lead Prince behind. The young gentlemen can drive themselves back, unless Joe chooses to ride Prince. He was always such a boy for a horse!"
The doctor's rugged face softened, as it always did at the thought of his boy, and it was no small self-denial to go away to the bedside of some poor old wreck of humanity, delaying for hours the delight of greeting his prince.
Early in the afternoon Conny started on his long ride of ten miles to meet the young gentlemen at Kilbourne, the nearest railroad station. It was almost November, but the blue haze of the Indian summer hung over the landscape, and the air was warm and mellow with sunshine. Any eye but Conny's would have said that the long mountain gorges, and the thickly wooded glens into which they opened, were deserted of all life save the squirrels and a few wood birds, but Conny heard a hawk's note from above the cliff, and caught sight of a man silently watching him from behind a mossy log. He laughed a little to himself to think how often he had played the spy in that very hollow, watching to see who came or went from Kilbourne, and then with a word started Doll into a quicker pace. He was at Kilbourne in ample time to meet his passengers, and, as the doctor had anticipated, Joe decided that he would ride Prince, as he had so often done before, while Conny should take his friend Douglass in the sulky.
The brief sunshine was already vanishing when they started, and the warmth rapidly leaving the frosty air. Douglass wrapped himself closely in his cloak, and Master Joe was glad to start Prince into a brisk canter. Almost without warning the night shut down, and they found the deeper cuts among the mountains quite dark. Doll was a swift traveller, and old Prince could not keep up his pace, so Master Joe gradually fell back, and kept near the sulky, exchanging words with his friend, and plying Conny with questions about home.
"We shall soon be there now," he said, as they entered a narrow gorge. "We really ought to show you some sort of an adventure, Douglass, to give the proper spice to your first visit to the mountains. If it was summer, now, we could get something terrific in the shape of a storm, and slide a few rods of road down the mountain, or pile up the track with big trees and rocks."