===============================
THE disasters and humiliations that befell me at Drumcurran Fair may yet be remembered. They certainly have not been forgotten in the regions about Skebawn, where the tale of how Bernard Shute and I stole each other’s horses has passed into history. The grand-daughter of the Mountain Hare, bought by Mr. Shute with such light-hearted enthusiasm, was restored to that position between the shafts of a cart that she was so well fitted to grace; Moonlighter, his other purchase, spent the two months following on the fair in “favouring” a leg with a strained sinew, and in receiving visits from the local vet., who, however uncertain in his diagnosis of Moonlighter’s leg, had accurately estimated the length of Bernard’s foot.
Miss Bennett’s mare Cruiskeen, alone of the trio, was immediately and thoroughly successful. She went in harness like a hero, she carried Philippa like an elder sister, she was never sick or sorry; as Peter Cadogan summed her up, “That one’d live where another ’d die.” In her safe keeping 207 Philippa made her début with hounds at an uneventful morning’s cubbing, with no particular result, except that Philippa returned home so stiff that she had to go to bed for a day, and arose more determined than ever to be a fox-hunter.
The opening meet of Mr. Knox’s foxhounds was on November 1, and on that morning Philippa on Cruiskeen, accompanied by me on the Quaker, set out for Ardmeen Cross, the time-honoured fixture for All Saints’ Day. The weather was grey and quiet, and full of all the moist sweetness of an Irish autumn. There had been a great deal of rain during the past month; it had turned the bracken to a purple brown, and had filled the hollows with shining splashes of water. The dead leaves were slippery under foot, and the branches above were thinly decked with yellow, where the pallid survivors of summer still clung to their posts. As Philippa and I sedately approached the meet the red coats of Flurry Knox and his whip, Dr. Jerome Hickey, were to be seen on the road at the top of the hill; Cruiskeen put her head in the air, and stared at them with eyes that understood all they portended.
“Sinclair,” said my wife hurriedly, as a straggling hound, flogged in by Dr. Hickey, uttered a grievous and melodious howl, “remember, if they find, it’s no use to talk to me, for I shan’t be able to speak.”
I was sufficiently acquainted with Philippa in moments of enthusiasm to exhibit silently the 208 corner of a clean pocket-handkerchief; I have seen her cry when a police constable won a bicycle race in Skebawn; she has wept at hearing Sir Valentine Knox’s health drunk with musical honours at a tenants’ dinner. It is an amiable custom, but, as she herself admits, it is unbecoming.
An imposing throng, in point of numbers, was gathered at the cross-roads, the riders being almost swamped in the crowd of traps, outside cars, bicyclists, and people on foot. The field was an eminently representative one. The Clan Knox was, as usual, there in force, its more aristocratic members dingily respectable in black cats and tall hats that went impartially to weddings, funerals, and hunts, and, like a horse that is past mark of mouth, were no longer to be identified with any special epoch; there was a humbler squireen element in tweeds and flat-trimmed pot-hats, and a good muster of farmers, men of the spare, black-muzzled, West of Ireland type, on horses that ranged from the cart mare, clipped trace high, to shaggy and leggy three-year-olds, none of them hunters, but all of them able to hunt. Philippa and I worked our way to the heart of things, where was Flurry, seated on his brown mare, in what appeared to be a somewhat moody silence. As we exchanged greetings I was aware that his eye was resting with extreme disfavour upon two approaching figures. I put up my eye-glass, and perceived that one of them was Miss Sally Knox, on a tall grey horse; the other was Mr. Bernard Shute, in all the flawless beauty of his first pink 209 coat, mounted on Stockbroker, a well-known, hard-mouthed, big-jumping bay, recently purchased from Dr. Hickey.
During the languors of a damp autumn the neighbourhood had been much nourished and sustained by the privilege of observing and diagnosing the progress of Mr. Shute’s flirtation with Miss Sally Knox. What made it all the more enjoyable for the lookers-on — or most of them — was, that although Bernard’s courtship was of the nature of a proclamation from the housetops, Miss Knox’s attitude left everything to the imagination. To Flurry Knox the romantic but despicable position of slighted rival was comfortably allotted; his sole sympathisers were Philippa and old Mrs. Knox of Aussolas, but no one knew if he needed sympathisers. Flurry was a man of mystery.
Mr. Shute and Miss Knox approached us rapidly, the latter’s mount pulling hard.
“Flurry,” I said, “isn’t that grey the horse Shute bought from you last July at the fair?”
Flurry did not answer me. His face was as black as thunder. He turned his horse round, cursing two country boys who got in his way, with low and concentrated venom, and began to move forward, followed by the hounds. If his wish was to avoid speaking to Miss Sally it was not to be gratified.
“Good-morning, Flurry,” she began, sitting close down to Moonlighter’s ramping jog as she rode up beside her cousin. “What a hurry 210 you’re in! We passed no end of people on the road who won’t be here for another ten minutes.”
“No more will I,” was Mr. Knox’s cryptic reply, as he spurred the brown mare into a trot.
Moonlighter made a vigorous but frustrated effort to buck, and indemnified himself by a successful kick at a hound.
“Bother you, Flurry! Can’t you walk for a minute?” exclaimed Miss Sally, who looked about as large, in relation to her horse, as the conventional tomtit on a round of beef. “You might have more sense than to crack your whip under this horse’s nose! I don’t believe you know what horse it is even!”
I was not near enough to catch Flurry’s reply.
“Well, if you did’nt want him to be lent to me you should’nt have sold him to Mr. Shute!” retorted Miss Knox, in her clear, provoking little voice.
“I suppose he’s afraid to ride him himself,” said Flurry, turning his horse in at a gate. “Get ahead there, Jerome, can’t you? It’s better to put them in at this end than to have every one riding on top of them!”
Miss Sally’s cheeks were still very pink when I came up and began to talk to her, and her grey-green eyes had a look in them like those of an angry kitten.
The riders moved slowly down a rough pasture-field, and took up their position along the brow of Ardmeen covert, into which the hounds had 211 already hurled themselves with their customary contempt for the convenances. Flurry’s hounds, true to their nationality, were in the habit of doing the right thing in the wrong way.
Untouched by autumn, the furze bushes of Ardmeen covert were darkly green, save for a golden fleck of blossom here and there, and the glistening grey cobwebs that stretched from spike to spike. The look of the ordinary gorse covert is familiar to most people as a tidy enclosure of an acre or so, filled with low plants of well-educated gorse; not so many will be found who have experience of it as a rocky, sedgy wilderness, half a mile square, garrisoned with brigades of furze bushes, some of them higher than a horse’s head, lean, strong, and cunning, like the foxes that breed in them, impenetrable, with their bristling spikes, as a hedge of bayonets. By dint of infinite leisure and obstinate greed, the cattle had made paths for themselves through the bushes to the patches of grass that they hemmed in; their hoofprints were guides to the explorer, down muddy staircases of rock, and across black intervals of unplumbed bog. The whole covert slanted gradually down to a small river that raced round three sides of it, and beyond the stream, in agreeable contrast, lay a clean and wholesome country of grass fields and banks.
The hounds drew slowly along and down the hill towards the river, and the riders hung about outside the covert, and tried — I can answer for at least one of them — to decide which was the 212 least odious of the ways through it, in the event of the fox breaking at the far side. Miss Sally took up a position not very far from me, and it was easy to see that she had her hands full with her borrowed mount, on whose temper the delay and suspense were visibly telling. His iron-grey neck was white from the chafing of the reins; had the ground under his feet been red-hot he could hardly have sidled and hopped more uncontrollably; nothing but the most impassioned conjugation of the verb to condemn could have supplied any human equivalent for the manner in which he tore holes in the sedgy grass with a furious forefoot. Those who were even superficial judges of character gave his heels a liberal allowance of sea-room, and Mr. Shute, who could not be numbered among such, and had, as usual, taken up a position as near Miss Sally as possible, was rewarded by a double knock on his horse’s ribs that was a cause of heartless mirth to the lady of his affections.
Not a hound had as yet spoken, but they were forcing their way through the gorse forest and shoving each other jealously aside with growing excitement, and Flurry could be seen at intervals, moving forward in the direction they were indicating. It was at this juncture that the ubiquitous Slipper presented himself at my horse’s shoulder.
“’Tis for the river he’s making, Major,” he said, with an upward roll of his squinting eyes, that nearly made me sea-sick. “He’s a Castle Knox 213 fox that came in this morning, and ye should get ahead down to the ford!”
A tip from Slipper was not to be neglected, and Philippa and I began a cautious progress through the gorse, followed by Miss Knox as quietly as Moonlighter’s nerves would permit.
“Wishful has it!” she exclaimed, as a hound came into view, uttered a sharp yelp, and drove forward.
“Hark! hark!” roared Flurry with at least three r’s reverberating in each “hark;” at the same instant came a holloa from the farther side of the river, and Dr. Hickey’s renowned and blood-curdling screech was uplifted at the bottom of the covert. Then babel broke forth, as the hounds, converging from every quarter, flung themselves shrieking on the line. Moonlighter went straight up on his hind-legs, and dropped again with a bound that sent him crushing past Philippa and Cruiskeen; he did it a second time, and was almost on to the tail of the Quaker, whose bulky person was not to be hurried in any emergency.
“Get on if you can, Major Yeates!” called out Sally, steadying the grey as well as she could in the narrow pathway between the great gorse bushes.
Other horses were thundering behind us, men were shouting to each other in similar passages right and left of us, the cry of the hounds filled the air with a kind of delirium. A low wall with a stick laid along it barred the passage in front 214 of me, and the Quaker firmly and immediately decided not to have it until some else had dislodged the pole.
“Go ahead!” I shouted, squeezing to one side with heroic disregard of the furze bushes and my new tops.
The words were hardly out of my mouth when Moonlighter, mad with thwarted excitement, shot by me, hurtled over the obstacle with extravagant fury, landed twelve feet beyond it on clattering slippery rock, saved himself from falling with an eel-like forward buck on to sedgy ground, and bolted at full speed down the muddy cattle track. There are corners — rocky, most of them — in that cattle track, that Sally has told me she will remember to her dying day; boggy holes of any depth, ranging between two feet and half-way to Australia, that she says she does not fail to mention in the General Thanksgiving; but at the time they occupied mere fractions of the strenuous seconds in which it was hopeless for her to do anything but try to steer, trust to luck, sit hard down into the saddle, and try to stay there. (For my part, I would as soon try to adhere to the horns of a charging bull as to the crutches of a side-saddle, but happily the necessity is not likely to arise.) I saw Flurry Knox a little ahead of her on the same track, jamming his mare into the furze bushes to get out of her way; he shouted something after her about the ford, and started to gallop for it himself by a breakneck short cut.
The hounds were already across the river, and 215 it was obvious that, ford or no ford, Moonlighter’s intentions might be simply expressed in the formula “Be with them I will.” It was all down-hill to the river, and among the furze bushes and rocks there was neither time nor place to turn him. He rushed at it with a shattering slip upon a streak of rock, with a heavy plunge in the deep ground by the brink; it was as bad a take-off for twenty feet of water as could well be found. The grey horse rose out of the boggy stuff with all the impetus that pace and temper could give, but it was not enough. For one instant the twisting, sliding current was under Sally, the next a veil of water sprang up all round her, and Moonlighter was rolling and lurching in the desperate effort to find foothold in the rocky bed of the stream.
I was following at the best pace I could kick out of the Quaker, and saw the water swirl into her lap as her horse rolled to the near-side. She caught the mane to save herself, but he struggled on to his legs again, and came floundering broadside on to the further bank. In three seconds she had got out of the saddle and flung herself at the bank, grasping the rushes, and trying, in spite of the sodden weight of her habit, to drag herself out of the water.
At the same instant I saw Flurry and the brown mare dashing through the ford, twenty yards higher up. He was off his horse and beside her with that uncanny quickness that Flurry reserved for moments of emergency, and, catching her by 216 the arms, swung her on to the bank as easily as if she had been the kennel terrier.
“Catch the horse!” she called out, scrambling to her feet.
“Damn the horse!” returned Flurry, in the rage that is so often the reaction from a bad scare.
I turned along the bank and made for the ford; by this time it was full of hustling, splashing riders, through whom Bernard Shute, furiously picking up a bad start, drove a devastating way. He tried to turn his horse down the bank towards Miss Knox, but the hounds were running hard, and, to my intense amusement, Stockbroker refused to abandon the chase, and swept his rider away in the wake of his stable companion, Dr. Hickey’s young chestnut. By this time two country boys had, as is usual in such cases, risen from the earth, and fished Moonlighter out of the stream. Miss Sally wound up in an acrimonious argument with her cousin by observing that she didn’t care what he said, and placing her water-logged boot in his obviously unwilling hand, in a second was again in the saddle, gathering up the wet reins with the trembling, clumsy fingers of a person who is thoroughly chilled and in a violent hurry. She set Moonlighter going, and was away in a moment, galloping him at the first fence at a pace that suited his steeplechasing ideas.
“Mr. Knox!” panted Philippa, who had by this time joined us, “make her go home!”
217“She can go where she likes as far as I’m concerned,” responded Mr. Knox, pitching himself on his mare’s back and digging in the spurs.
Moonlighter had already glided over the bank in front of us, with a perfunctory flick at it with his heels; Flurry’s mare and Cruiskeen jumped it side by side with equal precision. It was a bank of some five feet high; the Quaker charged it enthusiastically, refused it abruptly, and, according to his infuriating custom at such moments, proceeded to tear hurried mouthfuls of grass.
“Will I give him a couple o’ belts, your Honour?” shouted one of the running accompaniment of country boys.
“You will!” said I, with some further remarks to the Quaker that I need not commit to paper.
Swish! Whack! The sound was music in my ears, as the good, remorseless ash sapling bent round the Quaker’s dappled hind-quarters. At the third stripe he launched both his heels in the operator’s face; at the fourth he reared undecidedly; at the fifth he bundled over the bank in a manner purged of hesitation.
“Ha!” yelled my assistants, “that’ll put the fear o’ God in him!” as the Quaker fled headlong after the hunt. “He’ll be the betther o’ that while he lives!”
“HE’LL BE THE BETTHER O’ THAT WHILE HE LIVES!”
Without going quite as far as this, I must admit that for the next half-hour he was astonishingly the better for it.
218The Castle Knox fox was making a very pretty line of it over the seven miles that separated him from his home. He headed through a grassy country of Ireland’s mild and brilliant green, 219 fenced with sound and buxom banks, enlivened by stone walls, uncompromised by the presence of gates, and yet comfortably laced with lanes for the furtherance of those who had laid to heart Wolsey’s valuable advice: “Fling away ambition: by that sin fell the angels.” The flotsam and jetsam of the hunt pervaded the landscape; standing on one long bank, three dismounted farmers flogged away at the refusing steeds below them, like anglers trying to rise a sulky fish; half-a-dozen hats, bobbing in a string, showed where the road riders followed the delusive windings of a bohireen. It was obvious that in the matter of ambition they would not have caused Cardinal Wolsey a moment’s uneasiness; whether angels or otherwise, they were not going to run any risk of falling.
Flurry’s red coat was like a beacon two fields ahead of me, with Philippa following in his tracks; it was the first run worthy of the name that Philippa had ridden, and I blessed Miss Bobby Bennett as I saw Cruiskeen’s undefeated fencing. An encouraging twang of the Doctor’s horn notified that the hounds were giving us a chance; even the Quaker pricked his blunt ears and swerved in his stride to the sound. A stone wall, a rough patch of heather, a boggy field, dinted deep and black with hoof marks, and the stern chase was at an end. The hounds had checked on the outskirts of a small wood, and the field, thinned down to a panting dozen or so, viewed us with the disfavour shown by the first flight 220 towards those who unexpectedly add to their select number. In the depths of the wood Dr. Hickey might be heard uttering those singular little yelps of encouragement that to the irreverent suggest a milkman in his dotage. Bernard Shute, who neither knew nor cared what the hounds were doing, was expatiating at great length to an uninterested squireen upon the virtues and perfections of his new mount.
“I did all I knew to come and help you at the river,” he said, riding up to the splashed and still dripping Sally, “but Stockbroker wouldn’t hear of it. I pulled his ugly head round till his nose was on my boot, but he galloped away just the same!”
“He was quite right,” said Miss Sally; “I didn’t want you in the least.”
As Miss Sally’s red gold coil of hair was turned towards me during this speech, I could only infer the glance with which it was delivered, from the fact that Mr. Shute responded to it with one of those firm gazes of adoration in which the neighbourhood took such an interest, and crumbled away into incoherency.
A shout from the top of a hill interrupted the amenities of the check; Flurry was out of the wood in half-a-dozen seconds, blowing shattering blasts upon his horn, and the hounds rushed to him, knowing the “gone away” note that was never blown in vain. The brown mare came out through the trees and the undergrowth like a woodcock down the wind, and jumped across 221 a stream on to a more than questionable bank; the hounds splashed and struggled after him, and, as they landed, the first ecstatic whimpers broke forth. In a moment it was full cry, discordant, beautiful, and soul-stirring, as the pack spread and sped, and settled to the line. I saw the absurd dazzle of tears in Philippa’s eyes, and found time for the insulting proffer of the clean pocket-handkerchief, as we all galloped hard to get away on good terms with the hounds.
It was one of those elect moments in fox-hunting when the fittest alone have survived; even the Quaker’s sluggish blood was stirred by good company, and possibly by the remembrance of the singing ash-plant, and he lumbered up tall stone-faced banks and down heavy drops, and across wide ditches, in astounding adherence to the line cut out by Flurry. Cruiskeen went like a book — a story for girls, very pleasant and safe, but rather slow. Moonlighter was pulling Miss Sally on to the sterns of the hounds, flying his banks, rocketing like a pheasant over three-foot walls — committing, in fact, all the crimes induced by youth and over-feeding; he would have done very comfortably with another six or seven stone on his back.
Why Bernard Shute did not come off at every fence and generally die a thousand deaths I cannot explain. Occasionally I rather wished he would, as, from my secure position at the rear, I saw him charging his fences at whatever pace and place seemed good to the thoroughly demoralised 222 Stockbroker, and in so doing cannon heavily against Dr. Hickey on landing over a rotten ditch, jump a wall with his spur rowelling Charlie Knox’s boot, and cut in at top speed in front of Flurry, who was scientifically cramming his mare up a very awkward scramble. In so far as I could think of anything beyond Philippa and myself and the next fence, I thought there would be trouble for Mr. Shute in consequence of this last feat. It was a half-hour long to be remembered, in spite of the Quaker’s ponderous and unalterable gallop, in spite of the thump with which he came down off his banks, in spite of the confiding manner in which he hung upon my hand.
We were nearing Castle Knox, and the riders began to edge away from the hounds toward a gate that broke the long barrier of the demesne wall. Steaming horses and purple-faced riders clattered and crushed in at the gate; there was a moment of pulling up and listening, in which quivering tails and pumping sides told their own story. Cruiskeen’s breathing suggested a cross between a grampus and a gramaphone; Philippa’s hair had come down, and she had a stitch in her side. Moonlighter, fresher than ever, stamped and dragged at his bit; I thought little Miss Sally looked very white. The bewildering clamour of the hounds was all through the wide laurel plantations. At a word from Flurry, Dr. Hickey showed his horse ahead and turned down a ride, followed by most of the field.
223“Philippa,” I said severely, “you’ve had enough, and you know it.”
“Do go up to the house and make them give you something to eat,” struck in Miss Sally, twisting Moonlighter round to keep his mind occupied.
“And as for you, Miss Sally,” I went on, in the manner of Mr. Fairchild, “the sooner you get off that horse and out of those wet things the better.”
Flurry, who was just in front of us, said nothing, but gave a short and disagreeable laugh. Philippa accepted my suggestion with the meekness of exhaustion, but under the circumstances it did not surprise me that Miss Sally did not follow her example.
Then ensued an hour of woodland hunting at its worst and most bewildering. I galloped after Flurry and Miss Sally up and down long glittering lanes of laurel, at every other moment burying my face in the Quaker’s coarse white mane to avoid the slash of the branches, and receiving down the back of my neck showers of drops stored up from the rain of the day before; playing an endless game of hide-and-seek with the hounds, and never getting any nearer to them, as they turned and doubled through the thickets of evergreens. Even to my limited understanding of the situation it became clear at length that two foxes were on foot; most of the hounds were hard at work a quarter of a mile away, but Flurry, with a grim face and a faithful three couple, stuck to the failing line of the hunted fox.
224There came a moment when Miss Sally and I — who through many vicissitudes had clung to each other — found ourselves at a spot where two rides crossed. Flurry was waiting there, and a little way up one of the rides a couple of hounds were hustling to and fro, with the thwarted whimpers half breaking from them; he held up his hand to stop us, and at that identical moment Bernard Shute, like a bolt from the blue, burst upon our visions. It need scarcely be mentioned that he was going at full gallop — I have rarely seen him ride at any other pace — and as he bore down upon Flurry and the hounds, ducking and dodging to avoid the branches, he shouted something about a fox having gone away at the other side of the covert.
“Hold hard!” roared Flurry; “don’t you see the hounds, you fool?”
Mr. Shute, to do him justice, held hard with all the strength in his body, but it was of no avail. The bay horse had got his head down and his tail up, there was a piercing yell from a hound as it was ridden over, and Flurry’s brown mare will not soon forget the moment when Stockbroker’s shoulder took her on the point of the hip and sent her staggering into the laurel branches. As she swung round, Flurry’s whip went up, and with a swift backhander the cane and the looped thong caught Bernard across his broad shoulders.
“O Mr. Shute!” shrieked Miss Sally, as I stared dumfoundered; “did that branch hurt you?”
225“All right! Nothing to signify!” he called out as he bucketed past, tugging at his horse’s head. “Thought some one had hit me at first! Come on, we’ll catch ’em up this way!”
He swung perilously into the main ride and was gone, totally unaware of the position that Miss Sally’s quickness had saved.
Flurry rode straight up to his cousin, with a pale, dangerous face.
“I suppose you think I’m to stand being ridden over and having my hounds killed to please you,” he said; “but you’re mistaken. You were very smart, and you may think you’ve save him his licking, but you needn’t think he won’t get it. He’ll have it in spite of you, before he goes to his bed this night!”
A man who loses his temper badly because he is badly in love is inevitably ridiculous, far though he may be from thinking himself so. He is also a highly unpleasant person to argue with, and Miss Sally and I held our peace respectfully. He turned his horse and rode away.
Almost instantly the three couple of hounds opened in the underwood near us with a deafening crash, and not twenty yards ahead the hunted fox, dark with wet and mud, slunk across the ride. The hounds were almost on his brush; Moonlighter reared and chafed; the din was redoubled, passed away to a little distance, and suddenly seemed stationary in the middle of the laurels.
“Could he have got into the old ice-house?” 226 exclaimed Miss Sally, with reviving excitement. She pushed ahead, and turned down the narrowest of all the rides that had that day been my portion. At the end of the green tunnel there was a comparatively open space; Flurry’s mare was standing in it, riderless, and Flurry himself was hammering with a stone at the padlock of a door that seemed to lead into the heart of a laurel clump. The hounds were baying furiously somewhere back of the entrance, among the laurel stems.
“He’s got in by the old ice drain,” said Flurry, addressing himself sulkily to me, and ignoring Miss Sally. He had not the least idea of how absurd was his scowling face, draped by the luxuriant hart’s-tongues that overhung the doorway.
The padlock yielded, and the opening door revealed a low, dark passage, into which Flurry disappeared, lugging a couple of hounds with him by the scruff of the neck; the remaining two couple bayed implacably at the mouth of the drain. The croak of a rusty bolt told of a second door at the inner end of the passage.
“Look out for the steps, Flurry, they’re all broken,” called out Miss Sally in tones of honey.
There was no answer. Miss Sally looked at me; her face was serious, but her mischievous eyes made a confederate of me.
“He’s in an awful rage!” she said. “I’m afraid there will certainly be a row.”
A row there certainly was, but it was in the 227 cavern of the ice-house, where the fox had evidently been discovered. Miss Sally suddenly flung Moonlighter’s reins to me and slipped off his back.
“Hold him!” she said, and dived into the doorway under the overhanging branches.
Things happened after that with astonishing simultaneousness. There was a shrill exclamation from Miss Sally, the inner door was slammed and bolted, and at one and the same moment the fox darted from the entry, and was away into the wood before one could wink.
“What’s happened?” I called out, playing the refractory Moonlighter like a salmon.
Miss Sally appeared at the doorway, looking half scared and half delighted.
“I’ve bolted him in, and I won’t let him out till he promises to be good! I was only just in time to slam the door after the fox bolted out!”
“Great Scott!” I said helplessly.
Miss Sally vanished again into the passage, and the imprisoned hounds continued to express their emotions in the echoing vault of the ice-house. Their master remained mute as the dead, and I trembled.
“Flurry!” I heard Miss Sally say. “Flurry, I — I’ve locked you in!”
“FLURRY, I — I’VE LOCKED YOU IN!”
This self-evident piece of information met with no response.
“Shall I tell you why?”
A keener note seemed to indicate that a hound had been kicked.
228“I don’t care whether you answer me or not, I’m going to tell you!”
There was a pause; apparently telling him was not as simple as had been expected.
“I won’t let you out till you promise me something. Ah, Flurry, don’t be so cross! What do 229 you say? —— Oh, that’s a ridiculous thing to say. You know quite well it’s not on his account!”
There was another considerable pause.
“Flurry!” said Miss Sally again, in tones that would have wiled a badger from his earth. “Dear Flurry ——”
At this point I hurriedly flung Moonlighter’s bridle over a branch and withdrew.
My own subsequent adventures are quite immaterial, until the moment when I encountered Miss Sally on the steps of the hall door at Castle Knox.
“I’m just going in to take off these wet things,” she said airily.
This was no way to treat a confederate.
“Well?” I said, barring her progress.
“Oh — he — he promised. It’s all right,” she replied, rather breathlessly.
There was no one about; I waited resolutely for further information. It did not come.
“Did he try to make his own terms?” said I, looking hard at her.
“Yes, he did.” She tried to pass me.
“And what did you do?”
“I refused them!” she said, with the sudden stagger of a sob in her voice, as she escaped into the house.
Now what on earth was Sally Knox crying about?
===============================