SOME EXPERIENCES OF AN IRISH R.M.

by

E. Œ. SOMERVILLE

and

MARTIN ROSS

THOMAS NELSON & SONS LTD
LONDON EDINBURGH PARIS MELBOURNE
TORONTO AND NEW YORK

  Reprinted by permission of
  Messrs. Longmans Green & Co., Ltd.

CONTENTS

    I. GREAT-UNCLE MCCARTHY
   II. IN THE CURRANHILTY COUNTRY
  III. TRINKET'S COLT
   IV. THE WATERS OF STRIFE
    V. LISHEEN RACES, SECOND-HAND
   VI. PHILIPPA'S FOX-HUNT
  VII. A MISDEAL
 VIII. THE HOLY ISLAND
   IX. THE POLICY OF THE CLOSED DOOR
    X. THE HOUSE OF FAHY
   XI. OCCASIONAL LICENSES
  XII. "OH LOVE! OH FIRE!"

SOME EXPERIENCES OF AN IRISH R.M.

GREAT-UNCLE McCARTHY

A Resident Magistracy in Ireland is not an easy thing to come by
nowadays; neither is it a very attractive job; yet on the evening when
I first propounded the idea to the young lady who had recently
consented to become Mrs. Sinclair Yeates, it seemed glittering with
possibilities. There was, on that occasion, a sunset, and a string
band playing "The Gondoliers," and there was also an ingenuous belief
in the omnipotence of a godfather of Philippa's--(Philippa was the
young lady)--who had once been a member of the Government.

I was then climbing the steep ascent of the Captains towards my
Majority. I have no fault to find with Philippa's godfather; he did
all and more than even Philippa had expected; nevertheless, I had
attained to the dignity of mud major, and had spent a good deal on
postage stamps, and on railway fares to interview people of influence,
before I found myself in the hotel at Skebawn, opening long envelopes
addressed to "Major Yeates, R.M."

My most immediate concern, as any one who has spent nine weeks at Mrs.
Raverty's hotel will readily believe, was to leave it at the earliest
opportunity; but in those nine weeks I had learned, amongst other
painful things, a little, a very little, of the methods of the artisan
in the West of Ireland. Finding a house had been easy enough. I had
had my choice of several, each with some hundreds of acres of shooting,
thoroughly poached, and a considerable portion of the roof intact. I
had selected one; the one that had the largest extent of roof in
proportion to the shooting, and had been assured by my landlord that in
a fortnight or so it would be fit for occupation.

"There's a few little odd things to be done," he said easily; "a lick
of paint here and there, and a slap of plaster----"

I am short-sighted; I am also of Irish extraction; both facts that make
for toleration--but even I thought he was understating the case. So
did the contractor.

At the end of three weeks the latter reported progress, which mainly
consisted of the facts that the plumber had accused the carpenter of
stealing sixteen feet of his inch-pipe to run a bell wire through, and
that the carpenter had replied that he wished the divil might run the
plumber through a wran's quill. The plumber having reflected upon the
carpenter's parentage, the work of renovation had merged in battle, and
at the next Petty Sessions I was reluctantly compelled to allot to each
combatant seven days, without the option of a fine.

These and kindred difficulties extended in an unbroken chain through
the summer months, until a certain wet and windy day in October, when,
with my baggage, I drove over to establish myself at Shreelane. It was
a tall, ugly house of three storeys high, its walls faced with
weather-beaten slates, its windows staring, narrow, and vacant. Round
the house ran an area, in which grew some laurustinus and holly bushes
among ash heaps, and nettles, and broken bottles. I stood on the
steps, waiting for the door to be opened, while the rain sluiced upon
me from a broken eaveshoot that had, amongst many other things, escaped
the notice of my landlord. I thought of Philippa, and of her plan,
broached in to-day's letter, of having the hall done up as a
sitting-room.

The door opened, and revealed the hall. It struck me that I had
perhaps overestimated its possibilities. Among them I had certainly
not included a flagged floor, sweating with damp, and a reek of cabbage
from the adjacent kitchen stairs. A large elderly woman, with a red
face, and a cap worn helmet-wise on her forehead, swept me a
magnificent curtsey as I crossed the threshold.

"Your honour's welcome----" she began, and then every door in the house
slammed in obedience to the gust that drove through it. With something
that sounded like "Mend ye for a back door!" Mrs. Cadogan abandoned her
opening speech and made for the kitchen stairs. (Improbable as it may
appear, my housekeeper was called Cadogan, a name made locally possible
by being pronounced Caydogawn.)

Only those who have been through a similar experience can know what
manner of afternoon I spent. I am a martyr to colds in the head, and I
felt one coming on. I made a laager in front of the dining-room fire,
with a tattered leather screen and the dinner table, and gradually,
with cigarettes and strong tea, baffled the smell of must and cats, and
fervently trusted that the rain might avert a threatened visit from my
landlord. I was then but superficially acquainted with Mr. Florence
McCarthy Knox and his habits.

At about 4.30, when the room had warmed up, and my cold was yielding to
treatment, Mrs. Cadogan entered and informed me that "Mr. Flurry" was
in the yard, and would be thankful if I'd go out to him, for he
couldn't come in. Many are the privileges of the female sex; had I
been a woman I should unhesitatingly have said that I had a cold in my
head. Being a man, I huddled on a mackintosh, and went out into the
yard.

My landlord was there on horseback, and with him there was a man
standing at the head of a stout grey animal. I recognised with despair
that I was about to be compelled to buy a horse.

"Good afternoon, Major," said Mr. Knox in his slow, sing-song brogue;
"it's rather soon to be paying you a visit, but I thought you might be
in a hurry to see the horse I was telling you of."

I could have laughed. As if I were ever in a hurry to see a horse! I
thanked him, and suggested that it was rather wet for horse-dealing.

"Oh, it's nothing when you're used to it," replied Mr. Knox. His
gloveless hands were red and wet, the rain ran down his nose, and his
covert coat was soaked to a sodden brown. I thought that I did not
want to become used to it. My relations with horses have been of a
purely military character, I have endured the Sandhurst riding-school,
I have galloped for an impetuous general, I have been steward at
regimental races, but none of these feats have altered my opinion that
the horse, as a means of locomotion, is obsolete. Nevertheless, the
man who accepts a resident magistracy in the south-west of Ireland
voluntarily retires into the prehistoric age; to institute a stable
became inevitable.

"You ought to throw a leg over him," said Mr. Knox, "and you're welcome
to take him over a fence or two if you like. He's a nice flippant
jumper."

Even to my unexacting eye the grey horse did not seem to promise
flippancy, nor did I at all desire to find that quality in him. I
explained that I wanted something to drive, and not to ride.

"Well, that's a fine raking horse in harness," said Mr. Knox, looking
at me with his serious grey eyes, "and you'd drive him with a sop of
hay in his mouth. Bring him up here, Michael."

Michael abandoned his efforts to kick the grey horse's forelegs into a
becoming position, and led him up to me.

I regarded him from under my umbrella with a quite unreasonable
disfavour. He had the dreadful beauty of a horse in a toy-shop, as
chubby, as wooden, and as conscientiously dappled, but it was
unreasonable to urge this as an objection, and I was incapable of
finding any more technical drawback. Yielding to circumstance, I
"threw my leg" over the brute, and after pacing gravely round the
quadrangle that formed the yard, and jolting to my entrance gate and
back, I decided that as he had neither fallen down nor kicked me off,
it was worth paying twenty-five pounds for him, if only to get in out
of the rain.

Mr. Knox accompanied me into the house and had a drink. He was a fair,
spare young man, who looked like a stable boy among gentlemen, and a
gentleman among stable boys. He belonged to a clan that cropped up in
every grade of society in the county, from Sir Valentine Knox of Castle
Knox down to the auctioneer Knox, who bore the attractive title of
Larry the Liar. So far as I could judge, Florence McCarthy of that ilk
occupied a shifting position about midway in the tribe. I had met him
at dinner at Sir Valentine's, I had heard of him at an illicit auction,
held by Larry the Liar, of brandy stolen from a wreck. They were
"Black Protestants," all of them, in virtue of their descent from a
godly soldier of Cromwell, and all were prepared at any moment of the
day or night to sell a horse.

"You'll be apt to find this place a bit lonesome after the hotel,"
remarked Mr. Flurry, sympathetically, as he placed his foot in its
steaming boot on the hob, "but it's a fine sound house anyway, and lots
of rooms in it, though indeed, to tell you the truth, I never was
through the whole of them since the time my great-uncle, Denis
McCarthy, died here. The dear knows I had enough of it that time." He
paused, and lit a cigarette--one of my best, and quite thrown away upon
him. "Those top floors, now," he resumed, "I wouldn't make too free
with them. There's some of them would jump under you like a spring
bed. Many's the night I was in and out of those attics, following my
poor uncle when he had a bad turn on him--the horrors, y' know--there
were nights he never stopped walking through the house. Good Lord!
will I ever forget the morning he said he saw the devil coming up the
avenue! 'Look at the two horns on him,' says he, and he out with his
gun and shot him, and, begad, it was his own donkey!"

Mr. Knox gave a couple of short laughs. He seldom laughed, having in
unusual perfection, the gravity of manner that is bred by
horse-dealing, probably from the habitual repression of all emotion
save disparagement.

The autumn evening, grey with rain, was darkening in the tall windows,
and the wind was beginning to make bullying rushes among the shrubs in
the area; a shower of soot rattled down the chimney and fell on the
hearthrug.

"More rain coming," said Mr. Knox, rising composedly; "you'll have to
put a goose down these chimneys some day soon, it's the only way in the
world to clean them. Well, I'm for the road. You'll come out on the
grey next week, I hope; the hounds'll be meeting here. Give a roar at
him coming in at his jumps." He threw his cigarette into the fire and
extended a hand to me. "Good-bye, Major, you'll see plenty of me and
my hounds before you're done. There's a power of foxes in the
plantations here."

This was scarcely reassuring for a man who hoped to shoot woodcock, and
I hinted as much.

"Oh, is it the cock?" said Mr. Flurry; "b'leeve me, there never was a
woodcock yet that minded hounds, now, no more than they'd mind rabbits!
The best shoots ever I had here, the hounds were in it the day before."

When Mr. Knox had gone, I began to picture myself going across country
roaring, like a man on a fire-engine, while Philippa put the goose down
the chimney; but when I sat down to write to her I did not feel equal
to being humorous about it. I dilated ponderously on my cold, my hard
work, and my loneliness, and eventually went to bed at ten o'clock full
of cold shivers and hot whisky-and-water.

After a couple of hours of feverish dozing, I began to understand what
had driven Great-Uncle McCarthy to perambulate the house by night.
Mrs. Cadogan had assured me that the Pope of Rome hadn't a betther bed
undher him than myself; wasn't I down on the new flog mattherass the
old masther bought in Father Scanlan's auction? By the smell I
recognised that "flog" meant flock, otherwise I should have said my
couch was stuffed with old boots. I have seldom spent a more wretched
night. The rain drummed with soft fingers on my window panes; the
house was full of noises. I seemed to see Great-Uncle McCarthy ranging
the passages with Flurry at his heels; several times I thought I heard
him. Whisperings seemed borne on the wind through my keyhole, boards
creaked in the room overhead, and once I could have sworn that a hand
passed, groping, over the panels of my door. I am, I may admit, a
believer in ghosts; I even take in a paper that deals with their
culture, but I cannot pretend that on that night I looked forward to a
manifestation of Great-Uncle McCarthy with any enthusiasm.

The morning broke stormily, and I woke to find Mrs. Cadogan's
understudy, a grimy nephew of about eighteen, standing by my bedside,
with a black bottle in his hand.

"There's no bath in the house, sir," was his reply to my command; "but
me A'nt said, would ye like a taggeen?"

This alternative proved to be a glass of raw whisky. I declined it.

I look back to that first week of housekeeping at Shreelane as to a
comedy excessively badly staged, and striped with lurid melodrama.
Towards its close I was positively home-sick for Mrs. Raverty's, and I
had not a single clean pair of boots. I am not one of those who hold
the convention that in Ireland the rain never ceases, day or night, but
I must say that my first November at Shreelane was composed of weather
of which my friend Flurry Knox remarked that you wouldn't meet a
Christian out of doors, unless it was a snipe or a dispensary doctor.
To this lamentable category might be added a resident magistrate.
Daily, shrouded in mackintosh, I set forth for the Petty Sessions
Courts of my wide district; daily, in the inevitable atmosphere of wet
frieze and perjury, I listened to indictments of old women who plucked
geese alive, of publicans whose hospitality to their friends broke
forth uncontrollably on Sunday afternoons, of "parties" who, in the
language of the police sergeant, were subtly defined as "not to say
dhrunk, but in good fighting thrim."

I got used to it all in time--I suppose one can get used to anything--I
even became callous to the surprises of Mrs. Cadogan's cooking. As the
weather hardened and the woodcock came in, and one by one I discovered
and nailed up the rat holes, I began to find life endurable, and even
to feel some remote sensation of home-coming when the grey horse turned
in at the gate of Shreelane.

The one feature of my establishment to which I could not become inured
was the pervading sub-presence of some thing or things which, for my
own convenience, I summarised as Great-Uncle McCarthy. There were
nights on which I was certain that I heard the inebriate shuffle of his
foot overhead, the touch of his fumbling hand against the walls. There
were dark times before the dawn when sounds went to and fro, the moving
of weights, the creaking of doors, a far-away rapping in which was a
workmanlike suggestion of the undertaker, a rumble of wheels on the
avenue. Once I was impelled to the perhaps imprudent measure of
cross-examining Mrs. Cadogan. Mrs. Cadogan, taking the preliminary
precaution of crossing herself, asked me fatefully what day of the week
it was.

"Friday!" she repeated after me. "Friday! The Lord save us! 'Twas a
Friday the old masther was buried!"

At this point a saucepan opportunely boiled over, and Mrs. Cadogan fled
with it to the scullery, and was seen no more.

In the process of time I brought Great-Uncle McCarthy down to a fine
point. On Friday nights he made coffins and drove hearses; during the
rest of the week he rarely did more than patter and shuffle in the
attics over my head.

One night, about the middle of December, I awoke, suddenly aware that
some noise had fallen like a heavy stone into my dreams. As I felt for
the matches it came again, the long, grudging groan and the
uncompromising bang of the cross door at the head of the kitchen
stairs. I told myself that it was a draught that had done it, but it
was a perfectly still night. Even as I listened, a sound of wheels on
the avenue shook the stillness. The thing was getting past a joke. In
a few minutes I was stealthily groping my way down my own staircase,
with a box of matches in my hand, enforced by scientific curiosity, but
none the less armed with a stick. I stood in the dark at the top of
the back stairs and listened; the snores of Mrs. Cadogan and her nephew
Peter rose tranquilly from their respective lairs. I descended to the
kitchen and lit a candle; there was nothing unusual there, except a
great portion of the Cadogan wearing apparel, which was arranged at the
fire, and was being serenaded by two crickets. Whatever had opened the
door, my household was blameless. The kitchen was not attractive, yet
I felt indisposed to leave it. None the less, it appeared to be my
duty to inspect the yard. I put the candle on the table and went forth
into the outer darkness. Not a sound was to be heard. The night was
very cold, and so dark, that I could scarcely distinguish the roofs of
the stables against the sky; the house loomed tall and oppressive above
me; I was conscious of how lonely it stood in the dumb and barren
country. Spirits were certainly futile creatures, childish in their
manifestations, stupidly content with the old machinery of raps and
rumbles. I thought how fine a scene might be played on a stage like
this; if I were a ghost, how bluely I would glimmer at the windows, how
whimperingly chatter in the wind. Something whirled out of the
darkness above me, and fell with a flop on the ground, just at my feet.
I jumped backwards, in point of fact I made for the kitchen door, and,
with my hand on the latch, stood still and waited. Nothing further
happened; the thing that lay there did not stir. I struck a match.
The moment of tension turned to bathos as the light flickered on
nothing more fateful than a dead crow.

Dead it certainly was. I could have told that without looking at it;
but why should it, at some considerable period after its death, fall
from the clouds at my feet. But did it fall from the clouds? I struck
another match, and stared up at the impenetrable face of the house.
There was no hint of solution in the dark windows, but I determined to
go up and search the rooms that gave upon the yard.

How cold it was! I can feel now the frozen musty air of those attics,
with their rat-eaten floors and wall-papers furred with damp. I went
softly from one to another, feeling like a burglar in my own house, and
found nothing in elucidation of the mystery. The windows were
hermetically shut, and sealed with cobwebs. There was no furniture,
except in the end room, where a wardrobe without doors stood in a
corner, empty save for the solemn presence of a monstrous tall hat. I
went back to bed, cursing those powers of darkness that had got me out
of it, and heard no more.

My landlord had not failed of his promise to visit my coverts with his
hounds; in fact, he fulfilled it rather more conscientiously than
seemed to me quite wholesome for the cock-shooting. I maintained a
silence which I felt to be magnanimous on the part of a man who cared
nothing for hunting and a great deal for shooting, and wished the
hounds more success in the slaughter of my foxes than seemed to be
granted to them. I met them all, one red frosty evening, as I drove
down the long hill to my demesne gates, Flurry at their head, in his
shabby pink coat and dingy breeches, the hounds trailing dejectedly
behind him and his half-dozen companions.

"What luck?" I called out, drawing rein as I met them.

"None," said Mr. Flurry briefly. He did not stop, neither did he
remove his pipe from the down-twisted corner of his mouth; his eye at
me was cold and sour. The other members of the hunt passed me with
equal hauteur; I thought they took their ill luck very badly.

On foot, among the last of the straggling hounds, cracking a carman's
whip, and swearing comprehensively at them all, slouched my friend
Slipper. Our friendship had begun in Court, the relative positions of
the dock and the judgment-seat forming no obstacle to its progress, and
had been cemented during several days' tramping after snipe. He was,
as usual, a little drunk, and he hailed me as though I were a ship.

"Ahoy, Major Yeates!" he shouted, bringing himself up with a lurch
against my cart; "it's hunting you should be, in place of sending poor
divils to gaol!"

"But I hear you had no hunting," I said.

"Ye heard that, did ye?" Slipper rolled upon me an eye like that of a
profligate pug. "Well, begor, ye heard no more than the thruth."

"But where are all the foxes?" said I.

"Begor, I don't know no more than your honour. And Shreelane--that
there used to be as many foxes in it as there's crosses in a yard of
check! Well, well, I'll say nothin' for it, only that it's quare!
Here, Vaynus! Naygress!" Slipper uttered a yell, hoarse with whisky,
in adjuration of two elderly ladies of the pack who had profited by our
conversation to stray away into an adjacent cottage. "Well,
good-night, Major. Mr. Flurry's as cross as briars, and he'll have me
ate!"

He set off at a surprisingly steady run, cracking his whip, and
whooping like a madman. I hope that when I also am fifty I shall be
able to run like Slipper.

That frosty evening was followed by three others like unto it, and a
flight of woodcock came in. I calculated that I could do with five
guns, and I despatched invitations to shoot and dine on the following
day to four of the local sportsmen, among whom was, of course, my
landlord. I remember that in my letter to the latter I expressed a
facetious hope that my bag of cock would be more successful than his of
foxes had been.

The answers to my invitations were not what I expected. All, without
so much as a conventional regret, declined my invitation; Mr. Knox
added that he hoped the bag of cock would be to my liking, and that I
need not be "affraid" that the hounds would trouble my coverts any
more. Here was war! I gazed in stupefaction at the crooked scrawl in
which my landlord had declared it. It was wholly and entirely
inexplicable, and instead of going to sleep comfortably over the fire
and my newspaper as a gentleman should, I spent the evening in
irritated ponderings over this bewildering and exasperating change of
front on the part of my friendly squireens.

My shoot the next day was scarcely a success. I shot the woods in
company with my gamekeeper, Tim Connor, a gentleman whose duties mainly
consisted in limiting the poaching privileges to his personal friends,
and whatever my offence might have been, Mr. Knox could have wished me
no bitterer punishment than hearing the unavailing shouts of "Mark
cock!" and seeing my birds winging their way from the coverts, far out
of shot. Tim Connor and I got ten couple between us; it might have
been thirty if my neighbours had not boycotted me, for what I could
only suppose was the slackness of their hounds.

I was dog-tired that night, having walked enough for three men, and I
slept the deep, insatiable sleep that I had earned. It was somewhere
about 3 A.M. that I was gradually awakened by a continuous knocking,
interspersed with muffled calls. Great-Uncle McCarthy had never before
given tongue, and I freed one ear from blankets to listen. Then I
remembered that Peter had told me the sweep had promised to arrive that
morning, and to arrive early. Blind with sleep and fury I went to the
passage window, and thence desired the sweep to go to the devil. It
availed me little. For the remainder of the night I could hear him
pacing round the house, trying the windows, banging at the doors, and
calling upon Peter Cadogan as the priests of Baal called upon their
god. At six o'clock I had fallen into a troubled doze, when Mrs.
Cadogan knocked at my door and imparted the information that the sweep
had arrived. My answer need not be recorded, but in spite of it the
door opened, and my housekeeper, in a weird _déshabille_, effectively
lighted by the orange beams of her candle, entered my room.

"God forgive me, I never seen one I'd hate as much as that sweep!" she
began; "he's these three hours--arrah, what, three hours!--no, but all
night, raising tallywack and tandem round the house to get at the
chimbleys."

"Well, for Heaven's sake let him get at the chimneys and let me go to
sleep," I answered, goaded to desperation, "and you may tell him from
me that if I hear his voice again I'll shoot him!"

Mrs. Cadogan silently left my bedside, and as she closed the door she
said to herself, "The Lord save us!"

Subsequent events may be briefly summarised. At 7.30 I was awakened
anew by a thunderous sound in the chimney, and a brick crashed into the
fireplace, followed at a short interval by two dead jackdaws and their
nests. At eight, I was informed by Peter that there was no hot water,
and that he wished the divil would roast the same sweep. At 9.30, when
I came down to breakfast, there was no fire anywhere, and my coffee,
made in the coachhouse, tasted of soot. I put on an overcoat and
opened my letters. About fourth or fifth in the uninteresting heap
came one in an egregiously disguised hand.

"Sir," it began, "this is to inform you your unsportsmanlike conduct
has been discovered. You have been suspected this good while of
shooting the Shreelane foxes, it is known now you do worse. Parties
have seen your gamekeeper going regular to meet the Saturday early
train at Salters Hill Station, with your grey horse under a cart, and
your labels on the boxes, and we know as well as _your agent in Cork_
what it is you have in those boxes. Be warned in time.--Your
Wellwisher."

I read this through twice before its drift became apparent, and I
realised that I was accused of improving my shooting and my finances by
the simple expedient of selling my foxes. That is to say, I was in a
worse position than if I had stolen a horse, or murdered Mrs. Cadogan,
or got drunk three times a week in Skebawn.

For a few moments I fell into wild laughter, and then, aware that it
was rather a bad business to let a lie of this kind get a start, I sat
down to demolish the preposterous charge in a letter to Flurry Knox.
Somehow, as I selected my sentences, it was borne in upon me that, if
the letter spoke the truth, circumstantial evidence was rather against
me. Mere lofty repudiation would be unavailing, and by my infernal
facetiousness about the woodcock I had effectively filled in the case
against myself. At all events, the first thing to do was to establish
a basis, and have it out with Tim Connor. I rang the bell.

"Peter, is Tim Connor about the place?"

"He is not, sir. I heard him say he was going west the hill to mend
the bounds fence." Peter's face was covered with soot, his eyes were
red, and he coughed ostentatiously. "The sweep's after breaking one of
his brushes within in yer bedroom chimney, sir," he went on, with all
the satisfaction of his class in announcing domestic calamity; "he's
above on the roof now, and he'd be thankful to you to go up to him."

I followed him upstairs in that state of simmering patience that any
employer of Irish labour must know and sympathise with. I climbed the
rickety ladder and squeezed through the dirty trapdoor involved in the
ascent to the roof, and was confronted by the hideous face of the
sweep, black against the frosty blue sky. He had encamped with all his
paraphernalia on the flat top of the roof, and was good enough to rise
and put his pipe in his pocket on my arrival.

"Good morning, Major. That's a grand view you have up here," said the
sweep. He was evidently far too well bred to talk shop. "I thravelled
every roof in this counthry, and there isn't one where you'd get as
handsome a prospect!"

Theoretically he was right, but I had not come up to the roof to
discuss scenery, and demanded brutally why he had sent for me. The
explanation involved a recital of the special genius required to sweep
the Shreelane chimneys; of the fact that the sweep had in infancy been
sent up and down every one of them by Great-Uncle McCarthy; of the
three ass-loads of soot that by his peculiar skill he had this morning
taken from the kitchen chimney; of its present purity, the draught
being such that it would "dhraw up a young cat with it."
Finally--realising that I could endure no more--he explained that my
bedroom chimney had got what he called "a wynd" in it, and he proposed
to climb down a little way in the stack to try "would he get to come at
the brush." The sweep was very small, the chimney very large. I
stipulated that he should have a rope round his waist, and despite the
illegality, I let him go. He went down like a monkey, digging his toes
and fingers into the niches made for the purpose in the old chimney;
Peter held the rope. I lit a cigarette and waited.

Certainly the view from the roof was worth coming up to look at. It
was rough, heathery country on one side, with a string of little blue
lakes running like a turquoise necklet round the base of a firry hill,
and patches of pale green pasture were set amidst the rocks and
heather. A silvery flash behind the undulations of the hills told
where the Atlantic lay in immense plains of sunlight. I turned to
survey with an owner's eye my own grey woods and straggling plantations
of larch, and espied a man coming out of the western wood. He had
something on his back, and he was walking very fast; a rabbit poacher
no doubt. As he passed out of sight into the back avenue he was
beginning to run. At the same instant I saw on the hill beyond my
western boundaries half-a-dozen horsemen scrambling by zigzag ways down
towards the wood. There was one red coat among them; it came first at
the gap in the fence that Tim Connor had gone out to mend, and with the
others was lost to sight in the covert, from which, in another instant,
came clearly through the frosty air a shout of "Gone to ground!"
Tremendous horn blowings followed, then, all in the same moment, I saw
the hounds break in full cry from the wood, and come stringing over the
grass and up the back avenue towards the yard gate. Were they running
a fresh fox into the stables?

I do not profess to be a hunting-man, but I am an Irishman, and so, it
is perhaps superfluous to state, is Peter. We forgot the sweep as if
he had never existed, and precipitated ourselves down the ladder, down
the stairs, and out into the yard. One side of the yard is formed by
the coach-house and a long stable, with a range of lofts above them,
planned on the heroic scale in such matters that obtained in Ireland
formerly. These join the house at the corner by the back door. A long
flight of stone steps leads to the lofts, and up these, as Peter and I
emerged from the back door, the hounds were struggling helter-skelter.
Almost simultaneously there was a confused clatter of hoofs in the back
avenue, and Flurry Knox came stooping at a gallop under the archway
followed by three or four other riders. They flung themselves from
their horses and made for the steps of the loft; more hounds pressed,
yelling, on their heels, the din was indescribable, and justified Mrs.
Cadogan's subsequent remark that "when she heard the noise she thought
'twas the end of the world and the divil collecting his own!"

I jostled in the wake of the party, and found myself in the loft,
wading in hay, and nearly deafened by the clamour that was bandied
about the high roof and walls. At the farther end of the loft the
hounds were raging in the hay, encouraged thereto by the whoops and
screeches of Flurry and his friends. High up in the gable of the loft,
where it joined the main wall of the house, there was a small door, and
I noted with a transient surprise that there was a long ladder leading
up to it. Even as it caught my eye a hound fought his way out of a
drift of hay and began to jump at the ladder, throwing his tongue
vociferously, and even clambering up a few rungs in his excitement.

"There's the way he's gone!" roared Flurry, striving through hounds and
hay towards the ladder, "Trumpeter has him! What's up there, back of
the door, Major? I don't remember it at all."

My crimes had evidently been forgotten in the supremacy of the moment.
While I was futilely asserting that had the fox gone up the ladder he
could not possibly have opened the door and shut it after him, even if
the door led anywhere, which, to the best of my belief, it did not, the
door in question opened, and to my amazement the sweep appeared at it.
He gesticulated violently, and over the tumult was heard to asseverate
that there was nothing above there, only a way into the flue, and any
one would be destroyed with the soot----

"Ah, go to blazes with your soot!" interrupted Flurry, already half-way
up the ladder.

I followed him, the other men pressing up behind me. That Trumpeter
had made no mistake was instantly brought home to our noses by the reek
of fox that met us at the door. Instead of a chimney, we found
ourselves in a dilapidated bedroom full of people. Tim Connor was
there, the sweep was there, and a squalid elderly man and woman on whom
I had never set eyes before. There was a large open fireplace, black
with the soot the sweep had brought down with him, and on the table
stood a bottle of my own special Scotch whisky. In one corner of the
room was a pile of broken packing-cases, and beside these on the floor
lay a bag in which something kicked.

Flurry, looking more uncomfortable and nonplussed than I could have
believed possible, listened in silence to the ceaseless harangue of the
elderly woman. The hounds were yelling like lost spirits in the loft
below, but her voice pierced the uproar like a bagpipe. It was an
unspeakably vulgar voice, yet it was not the voice of a countrywoman,
and there were frowzy remnants of respectability about her general
aspect.

"And is it you, Flurry Knox, that's calling me a disgrace! Disgrace,
indeed, am I? Me that was your poor mother's own uncle's daughter, and
as good a McCarthy as ever stood in Shreelane!"

What followed I could not comprehend, owing to the fact that the sweep
kept up a perpetual undercurrent of explanation to me as to how he had
got down the wrong chimney. I noticed that his breath stank of
whisky--Scotch, not the native variety.

   *   *   *   *   *

Never, as long as Flurry Knox lives to blow a horn, will he hear the
last of the day that he ran his mother's first cousin to ground in the
attic. Never, while Mrs. Cadogan can hold a basting spoon, will she
cease to recount how, on the same occasion, she plucked and roasted ten
couple of woodcock in one torrid hour to provide luncheon for the hunt.
In the glory of this achievement her confederacy with the stowaways in
the attic is wholly slurred over, in much the same manner as the
startling outburst of summons for trespass, brought by Tim Connor
during the remainder of the shooting season, obscured the unfortunate
episode of the bagged fox. It was, of course, zeal for my shooting
that induced him to assist Mr. Knox's disreputable relations in the
deportation of my foxes; and I have allowed it to remain at that.

In fact, the only things not allowed to remain were Mr. and Mrs.
McCarthy Gannon. They, as my landlord informed me, in the midst of
vast apologies, had been permitted to squat at Shreelane until my
tenancy began, and having then ostentatiously and abusively left the
house, they had, with the connivance of the Cadogans, secretly returned
to roost in the corner attic, to sell foxes under the ægis of my name,
and to make inroads on my belongings. They retained connection with
the outer world by means of the ladder and the loft, and with the house
in general, and my whisky in particular, by a door into the other
attics--a door concealed by the wardrobe in which reposed Great-Uncle
McCarthy's tall hat.

It is with the greatest regret that I relinquish the prospect of
writing a monograph on Great-Uncle McCarthy for a Spiritualistic
Journal, but with the departure of his relations he ceased to manifest
himself, and neither the nailing up of packing-cases, nor the rumble of
the cart that took them to the station, disturbed my sleep for the
future.

I understand that the task of clearing out the McCarthy Gannon's
effects was of a nature that necessitated two glasses of whisky per
man; and if the remnants of rabbit and jackdaw disinterred in the
process were anything like the crow that was thrown out of the window
at my feet, I do not grudge the restorative.

As Mrs. Cadogan remarked to the sweep, "A Turk couldn't stand it."

II
IN THE CURRANHILTY COUNTRY

It is hardly credible that I should have been induced to depart from my
usual walk of life by a creature so uninspiring as the grey horse that
I bought from Flurry Knox for £25.

Perhaps it was the monotony of being questioned by every other person
with whom I had five minutes' conversation, as to when I was coming out
with the hounds, and being further informed that in the days when
Captain Browne, the late Coastguard officer, had owned the grey, there
was not a fence between this and Mallow big enough to please them. At
all events, there came an epoch-making day when I mounted the Quaker
and presented myself at a meet of Mr. Knox's hounds. It is my belief
that six out of every dozen people who go out hunting are disagreeably
conscious of a nervous system, and two out of the six are in what is
brutally called "a blue funk." I was not in a blue funk, but I was
conscious not only of a nervous system, but of the anatomical fact that
I possessed large, round legs, handsome in their way, even admirable in
their proper sphere, but singularly ill adapted for adhering to the
slippery surfaces of a saddle. By a fatal intervention of Providence,
the sport, on this my first day in the hunting-field, was such as I
could have enjoyed from a bath-chair. The hunting-field was, on this
occasion, a relative term, implying long stretches of unfenced moorland
and bog, anything, in fact, save a field, the hunt itself might also
have been termed a relative one, being mainly composed of Mr. Knox's
relations in all degrees of cousinhood. It was a day when frost and
sunshine combined went to one's head like iced champagne; the distant
sea looked like the Mediterranean, and for four sunny hours the Knox
relatives and I followed nine couple of hounds at a tranquil footpace
along the hills, our progress mildly enlivened by one or two scrambles
in the shape of jumps. At three o'clock I jogged home, and felt within
me the newborn desire to brag to Peter Cadogan of the Quaker's doings,
as I dismounted rather stiffly in my own yard.

I little thought that the result would be that three weeks later I
should find myself in a railway carriage at an early hour of a December
morning, in company with Flurry Knox and four or five of his clan,
journeying towards an unknown town, named Drumcurran, with an
appropriate number of horses in boxes behind us and a van full of
hounds in front. Mr. Knox's hounds were on their way, by invitation,
to have a day in the country of their neighbours, the Curranhilty
Harriers, and with amazing fatuity I had allowed myself to be cajoled
into joining the party. A northerly shower was striking in long spikes
on the glass of the window, the atmosphere of the carriage was blue
with tobacco smoke, and my feet, in a pair of new blucher boots, had
sunk into a species of Arctic sleep.

"Well, you got my letter about the dance at the hotel to-night?" said
Flurry Knox, breaking off a whispered conversation with his amateur
whip, Dr. Jerome Hickey, and sitting down beside me. "And we're to go
out with the Harriers to-day, and they've a sure fox for our hounds
to-morrow. I tell you you'll have the best fun ever you had. It's a
great country to ride. Fine honest banks, that you can come racing at
anywhere you like."

Dr. Hickey, a saturnine young man, with a long nose and a black torpedo
beard, returned to his pocket the lancet with which he had been
trimming his nails.

"They're like the Tipperary banks," he said; "you climb down nine feet
and you fall the rest."

It occurred to me that the Quaker and I would most probably fall all
the way, but I said nothing.

"I hear Tomsy Flood has a good horse this season," resumed Flurry.

"Then it's not the one you sold him," said the Doctor.

"I'll take my oath it's not," said Flurry with a grin. "I believe he
has it in for me still over that one."

Dr. Jerome's moustache went up under his nose and showed his white
teeth.

"Small blame to him! when you sold him a mare that was wrong of both
her hind-legs. Do you know what he did, Major Yeates? The mare was
lame going into the fair, and he took the two hind-shoes off her and
told poor Flood she kicked them off in the box, and that was why she
was going tender, and he was so drunk he believed him."

The conversation here deepened into trackless obscurities of
horse-dealing. I took out my stylograph pen, and finished a letter to
Philippa, with a feeling that it would probably be my last.

The next step in the day's enjoyment consisted in trotting in cavalcade
through the streets of Drumcurran, with another northerly shower
descending upon us, the mud splashing in my face, and my feet coming
torturingly to life. Every man and boy in the town ran with us; the
Harriers were somewhere in the tumult ahead, and the Quaker began to
pull and hump his back ominously. I arrived at the meet considerably
heated, and found myself one of some thirty or forty riders, who, with
traps and bicycles and footpeople, were jammed in a narrow, muddy road.
We were late, and a move was immediately made across a series of grass
fields, all considerately furnished with gates. There was a glacial
gleam of sunshine and people began to turn down the collars of their
coats. As they spread over the field I observed that Mr. Knox was no
longer riding with old Captain Handcock, the Master of the Harriers,
but had attached himself to a square-shouldered young lady with
effective coils of dark hair and a grey habit. She was riding a
fidgety black mare with great decision and a not disagreeable swagger.

It was at about this moment that the hounds began to run, fast and
silently, and every one began to canter.

"This is nothing at all," said Dr. Hickey, thundering alongside of me
on a huge young chestnut; "there might have been a hare here last week,
or a red herring this morning. I wouldn't care if we only got what'd
warm us. For the matter of that, I'd as soon hunt a cat as a hare."

I was already getting quite enough to warm me. The Quaker's
respectable grey head had twice disappeared between his forelegs in a
brace of most unsettling bucks, and all my experiences at the
riding-school at Sandhurst did not prepare me for the sensation of
jumping a briary wall with a heavy drop into a lane so narrow that each
horse had to turn at right angles as he landed. I did not so turn, but
saved myself from entire disgrace by a timely clutch at the mane. We
scrambled out of the lane over a pile of stones and furze bushes, and
at the end of the next field were confronted by a tall, stone-faced
bank. Everyone, always excepting myself, was riding with that furious
valour which is so conspicuous when neighbouring hunts meet, and the
leading half-dozen charged the obstacle at steeplechase speed. I
caught a glimpse of the young lady in the grey habit, sitting square
and strong as her mare topped the bank, with Flurry and the redoubtable
Mr. Tomsy Flood riding on either hand; I followed in their wake, with a
blind confidence in the Quaker, and none at all in myself. He refused
it. I suppose it was in token of affection and gratitude that I fell
upon his neck; at all events, I had reason to respect his judgment, as,
before I had recovered myself, the hounds were straggling back into the
field by a gap lower down.

It finally appeared that the hounds could do no more with the line they
had been hunting, and we proceeded to jog interminably, I knew not
whither. During this unpleasant process Flurry Knox bestowed on me
many items of information, chiefly as to the pangs of jealousy he was
inflicting on Mr. Flood by his attentions to the lady in the grey
habit, Miss "Bobbie" Bennett.

"She'll have all old Handcock's money one of these days--she's his
niece, y' know--and she's a good girl to ride, but she's not as young
as she was ten years ago. You'd be looking at a chicken a long time
before you thought of her! She might take Tomsy some day if she can't
do any better." He stopped and looked at me with a gleam in his eye.
"Come on, and I'll introduce you to her!"

Before, however, this privilege could be mine, the whole cavalcade was
stopped by a series of distant yells, which apparently conveyed
information to the hunt, though to me they only suggested a Red Indian
scalping his enemy. The yells travelled rapidly nearer, and a young
man with a scarlet face and a long stick sprang upon the fence, and
explained that he and Patsy Lorry were after chasing a hare two miles
down out of the hill above, and ne'er a dog nor a one with them but
themselves, and she was lying, beat out, under a bush, and Patsy Lorry
was minding her until the hounds would come. I had a vision of the
humane Patsy Lorry fanning the hare with his hat, but apparently nobody
else found the fact unusual. The hounds were hurried into the fields,
the hare was again spurred into action, and I was again confronted with
the responsibilities of the chase. After the first five minutes I had
discovered several facts about the Quaker. If the bank was above a
certain height he refused it irrevocably, if it accorded with his ideas
he got his forelegs over and ploughed through the rest of it on his
stifle-joints, or, if a gripe made this inexpedient, he remained poised
on top till the fabric crumbled under his weight. In the case of walls
he butted them down with his knees, or squandered them with his
hind-legs. These operations took time, and the leaders of the hunt
streamed farther and farther away over the crest of a hill, while the
Quaker pursued at the equable gallop of a horse in the Bayeux Tapestry.

I began to perceive that I had been adopted as a pioneer by a small
band of followers, who, as one of their number candidly explained
"liked to have some one ahead of them to soften the banks," and
accordingly waited respectfully till the Quaker had made the rough
places smooth, and taken the raw edge off the walls. They, in their
turn, showed me alternative routes when the obstacle proved above the
Quaker's limit; thus, in ignoble confederacy, I and the offscourings of
the Curranhilty hunt pursued our way across some four miles of country.
When at length we parted it was with extreme regret on both sides. A
river crossed our course, with boggy banks pitted deep with the
hoof-marks of our forerunners; I suggested it to the Quaker, and
discovered that Nature had not in vain endued him with the hindquarters
of the hippopotamus. I presume the others had jumped it; the Quaker,
with abysmal flounderings, walked through and heaved himself to safety
on the farther bank. It was the dividing of the ways. My friendly
company turned aside as one man, and I was left with the world before
me, and no guide save the hoof-marks in the grass. These presently led
me to a road, on the other side of which was a bank, that was at once
added to the Quaker's black list. The rain had again begun to fall
heavily, and was soaking in about my elbows; I suddenly asked myself
why, in Heaven's name, I should go any farther. No adequate reason
occurred to me, and I turned in what I believed to be the direction of
Drumcurran.

I rode on for possibly two or three miles without seeing a human being,
until, from the top of a hill I descried a solitary lady rider. I
started in pursuit. The rain kept blurring my eye-glass, but it seemed
to me that the rider was a schoolgirl with hair hanging down her back,
and that her horse was a trifle lame. I pressed on to ask my way, and
discovered that I had been privileged to overtake no less a person than
Miss Bobbie Bennett.

My question as to the route led to information of a varied character.
Miss Bennett was going that way herself; her mare had given her what
she called "a toss and a half," whereby she had strained her arm and
the mare her shoulder, her habit had been torn, and she had lost all
her hairpins.

"I'm an awful object," she concluded; "my hair's the plague of my life
out hunting! I declare I wish to goodness I was bald!"

I struggled to the level of the occasion with an appropriate protest.
She had really very brilliant grey eyes, and her complexion was
undeniable. Philippa has since explained to me that it is a mere male
fallacy that any woman can look well with her hair down her back, but I
have always maintained that Miss Bobbie Bennett, with the rain
glistening on her dark tresses, looked uncommonly well.

"I shall never get it dry for the dance to-night," she complained.

"I wish I could help you," said I.

"Perhaps you've got a hairpin or two about you!" said she, with a
glance that had certainly done great execution before now.

I disclaimed the possession of any such tokens, but volunteered to go
and look for some at a neighbouring cottage.

The cottage door was shut, and my knockings were answered by a
stupefied-looking elderly man. Conscious of my own absurdity, I asked
him if he had any hairpins.

"I didn't see a hare this week!" he responded in a slow bellow.

"Hairpins!" I roared; "has your wife any hairpins?"

"She has not." Then, as an after-thought, "She's dead these ten years."

At this point a young woman emerged from the cottage, and, with many
coy grins, plucked from her own head some half-dozen hairpins, crooked,
and grey with age, but still hairpins, and as such well worth my
shilling. I returned with my spoil to Miss Bennett, only to be
confronted with a fresh difficulty. The arm that she had strained was
too stiff to raise to her head.

Miss Bobbie turned her handsome eyes upon me. "It's no use," she said
plaintively, "I can't do it!"

I looked up and down the road; there was no one in sight. I offered to
do it for her.

Miss Bennett's hair was long, thick, and soft; it was also slippery
with rain. I twisted it conscientiously, as if it were a hay rope,
until Miss Bennett, with an irrepressible shriek, told me it would
break off. I coiled the rope with some success, and proceeded to nail
it to her head with the hairpins. At all the most critical points one,
if not both, of the horses moved; hairpins were driven home into Miss
Bennett's skull, and were with difficulty plucked forth again; in fact,
a more harrowing performance can hardly be imagined, but Miss Bennett
bore it with the heroism of a pin-cushion.

I was putting the finishing touches to the coiffure when some sound
made me look round, and I beheld at a distance of some fifty yards the
entire hunt approaching us at a foot-pace. I lost my head, and,
instead of continuing my task, I dropped the last hairpin as if it were
red-hot, and kicked the Quaker away to the far side of the road, thus,
if it were possible, giving the position away a shade more generously.

There were fifteen riders in the group that overtook us, and fourteen
of them, including the Whip, were grinning from ear to ear; the
fifteenth was Mr. Tomsy Flood, and he showed no sign of appreciation.
He shoved his horse past me and up to Miss Bennett, his red moustache
bristling, truculence in every outline of his heavy shoulders. His
green coat was muddy, and his hat had a cave in it. Things had
apparently gone ill with him.

Flurry's witticisms held out for about two miles and a half; I do not
give them, because they were not amusing, but they all dealt ultimately
with the animosity that I, in common with himself, should henceforth
have to fear from Mr. Flood.

"Oh, he's a holy terror!" he said conclusively; "he was riding the
tails off the hounds to-day to best me. He was near killing me twice.
We had some words about it, I can tell you. I very near took my whip
to him. Such a bull-rider of a fellow I never saw! He wouldn't so
much as stop to catch Bobbie Bennett's horse when I picked her up, he
was riding so jealous. His own girl, mind you! And such a crumpler as
she got too! I declare she knocked a groan out of the road when she
struck it!"

"She doesn't seem so much hurt?" I said.

"Hurt!" said Flurry, flicking casually at a hound. "You couldn't hurt
that one unless you took a hatchet to her!"

The rain had reached a pitch that put further hunting out of the
question, and we bumped home at that intolerable pace known as a
"hound's jog." I spent the remainder of the afternoon over a fire in
my bedroom in the Royal Hotel, Drumcurran, official letters to write
having mercifully provided me with an excuse for seclusion, while the
bar and the billiard-room hummed below, and the Quaker's three-cornered
gallop wreaked its inevitable revenge upon my person. As this process
continued, and I became proportionately embittered, I asked myself, not
for the first time, what Philippa would say when introduced to my
present circle of acquaintances.

I have already mentioned that a dance was to take place at the hotel,
given, as far as I could gather, by the leading lights of the
Curranhilty Hunt. A less jocund guest than the wreck who at the
pastoral hour of nine crept stiffly down to "chase the glowing hours
with flying feet" could hardly have been encountered. The dance was
held in the coffee-room, and a conspicuous object outside the door was
a saucer bath full of something that looked like flour.

"Rub your feet in that," said Flurry; "that's French chalk! They
hadn't time to do the floor, so they hit on this dodge."

I complied with this encouraging direction, and followed him into the
room. Dancing had already begun, and the first sight that met my eyes
was Miss Bennett, in a yellow dress, waltzing with Mr. Tomsy Flood.
She looked very handsome, and, in spite of her accident, she was
getting round the sticky floor and her still more sticky partner with
the swing of a racing cutter. Her eye caught mine immediately, and
with confidence. Clearly our acquaintance that, in the space of twenty
minutes, had blossomed tropically into hair-dressing, was not to be
allowed to wither. Nor was I myself allowed to wither. Men, known and
unknown, plied me with partners, till my shirt cuff was black with
names, and the number of dances stretched away into the blue distance
of to-morrow morning. The music was supplied by the organist of the
church, who played with religious unction and at the pace of a
processional hymn. I put forth into the mêlée with a junior Bennett,
inferior in calibre to Miss Bobbie, but a strong goer, and, I fear,
made but a sorry début in the eyes of Drumcurran. At every other
moment I bumped into the unforeseen orbits of those who reversed, and
of those who walked their partners backwards down the room with faces
of ineffable supremacy. Being unskilled in these intricacies of an
elder civilisation, the younger Miss Bennett fared but ingloriously at
my hands; the music pounded interminably on, until the heel of Mr.
Flood put a period to our sufferings.

"The nasty dirty filthy brute!" shrieked the younger Miss Bennett in a
single breath; "he's torn the gown off my back!"

She whirled me to the cloak-room; we parted, mutually unregretted, at
its door, and by, I fear, common consent, evaded our second dance
together.

Many, many times during the evening I asked myself why I did not go to
bed. Perhaps it was the remembrance that my bed was situated some ten
feet above the piano in a direct line; but, whatever was the reason,
the night wore on and found me still working my way down my shirt cuff.
I sat out as much as possible, and found my partners to be, as a body,
pretty, talkative, and ill dressed, and during the evening I had many
and varied opportunities of observing the rapid progress of Mr. Knox's
flirtation with Miss Bobbie Bennett. From No. 4 to No. 8 they were
invisible; that they were behind a screen in the commercial-room might
be inferred from Mr. Flood's thundercloud presence in the passage
outside.

At No. 9 the young lady emerged for one of her dances with me; it was a
barn dance, and particularly trying to my momently stiffening muscles;
but Miss Bobbie, whether in dancing or sitting out, went in for "the
rigour of the game." She was in as hard condition as one of her
uncle's hounds, and for a full fifteen minutes I capered and swooped
beside her, larding the lean earth as I went, and replying but
spasmodically to her even flow of conversation.

"That'll take the stiffness out of you!" she exclaimed, as the organist
slowed down reverentially to a conclusion. "I had a bet with Flurry
Knox over that dance. He said you weren't up to my weight at the pace!"

I led her forth to the refreshment table, and was watching with awe her
fearless consumption of claret cup that I would not have touched for a
sovereign, when Flurry, with a partner on his arm, strolled past us.

"Well, you won the gloves, Miss Bobbie!" he said. "Don't you wish you
may get them!"

"Gloves without the _g_, Mr. Knox!" replied Miss Bennett, in a voice
loud enough to reach the end of the passage, where Mr. Thomas Flood was
burying his nose in a very brown whisky-and-soda.

"Your hair's coming down!" retorted Flurry. "Ask Major Yeates if he
can spare you a few hairpins!"

Swifter than lightning Miss Bennett hurled a macaroon at her retreating
foe, missed him, and subsided laughing on to a sofa. I mopped my brow
and took my seat beside her, wondering how much longer I could live up
to the social exigencies of Drumcurran.

Miss Bennett, however, proved excellent company. She told me artfully,
and inch by inch, all that Mr. Flood had said to her on the subject of
my hair-dressing; she admitted that she had, as a punishment, cut him
out of three dances and given them to Flurry Knox. When I remarked
that in fairness they should have been given to me, she darted a very
attractive glance at me, and pertinently observed that I had not asked
for them.

 As steals the dawn into a fevered room,
 And says "Be of good cheer, the day is born!"

so did the rumour of supper pass among the chaperons, male and female.
It was obviously due to a sense of the fitness of things that Mrs.
Bennett was apportioned to me, and I found myself in the gratifying
position of heading with her the procession to supper. My impressions
of Mrs. Bennett are few but salient. She wore an apple-green satin
dress and filled it tightly; wisely mistrusting the hotel supper, she
had imported sandwiches and cake in a pocket-handkerchief, and, warmed
by two glasses of sherry, she made me the recipient of the remarkable
confidence that she had but two back teeth in her head, but, thank God,
they met. When, with the other starving men, I fell upon the remains
of the feast, I regretted that I had declined her offer of a sandwich.

Of the remainder of the evening I am unable to give a detailed account.
Let it not for one instant be imagined that I had looked upon the wine
of the Royal Hotel when it was red, or, indeed, any other colour; as a
matter of fact, I had espied an inconspicuous corner in the entrance
hall, and there I first smoked a cigarette, and subsequently sank into
uneasy sleep. Through my dreams I was aware of the measured pounding
of the piano, of the clatter of glasses at the bar, of wheels in the
street, and then, more clearly, of Flurry's voice assuring Miss Bennett
that if she'd only wait for another dance he'd get the R.M. out of bed
to do her hair for her--then again oblivion.

At some later period I was dropping down a chasm on the Quaker's back,
and landing with a shock; I was twisting his mane into a chignon, when
he turned round his head and caught my arm in his teeth. I awoke with
the dew of terror on my forehead, to find Miss Bennett leaning over me
in a scarlet cloak with a hood over her head, and shaking me by my coat
sleeve.

"Major Yeates," she began at once in a hurried whisper, "I want you to
find Flurry Knox, and tell him there's a plan to feed his hounds at six
o'clock this morning so as to spoil their hunting!"

"How do you know?" I asked, jumping up.

"My little brother told me. He came in with us to-night to see the
dance, and he was hanging round in the stables, and he heard one of the
men telling another there was a dead mule in an outhouse in Bride's
Alley, all cut up ready to give to Mr. Knox's hounds."

"But why shouldn't they get it?" I asked in sleepy stupidity.

"Is it fill them up with an old mule just before they're going out
hunting?" flashed Miss Bennett. "Hurry and tell Mr. Knox; don't let
Tomsy Flood see you telling him--or any one else."

"Oh, then it's Mr. Flood's game?" I said, grasping the situation at
length.

"It is," said Miss Bennett, suddenly turning scarlet; "he's a disgrace!
I'm ashamed of him! I'm done with him!"

I resisted a strong disposition to shake Miss Bennett by the hand.

"I can't wait," she continued. "I made my mother drive back a
mile--she doesn't know a thing about it--I said I'd left my purse in
the cloak-room. Good-night! Don't tell a soul but Flurry!"

She was off, and upon my incapable shoulders rested the responsibility
of the enterprise.

It was past four o'clock, and the last bars of the last waltz were
being played. At the bar a knot of men, with Flurry in their midst,
were tossing "Odd man out" for a bottle of champagne. Flurry was not
in the least drunk, a circumstance worthy of remark in his present
company, and I got him out into the hall and unfolded my tidings. The
light of battle lit in his eye as he listened.

"I knew by Tomsy he was shaping for mischief," he said coolly; "he's
taken as much liquor as'd stiffen a tinker, and he's only half-drunk
this minute. Hold on till I get Jerome Hickey and Charlie
Knox--they're sober; I'll be back in a minute."

I was not present at the council of war thus hurriedly convened; I was
merely informed when they returned that we were all to "hurry on." My
best evening pumps have never recovered the subsequent proceedings.
They, with my swelled and aching feet inside them, were raced down one
filthy lane after another, until, somewhere on the outskirts of
Drumcurran, Flurry pushed open the gate of a yard and went in. It was
nearly five o'clock on that raw December morning; low down in the sky a
hazy moon shed a diffused light; all the surrounding houses were still
and dark. At our footsteps an angry bark or two came from inside the
stable.

"Whisht!" said Flurry, "I'll say a word to them before I open the door."

At his voice a chorus of hysterical welcome arose; without more delay
he flung open the stable door, and instantly we were all knee-deep in a
rush of hounds. There was not a moment lost. Flurry started at a
quick run out of the yard with the whole pack pattering at his heels.
Charley Knox vanished; Dr. Hickey and I followed the hounds, splashing
into puddles and hobbling over patches of broken stones, till we left
the town behind and hedges arose on either hand.

"Here's the house!" said Flurry, stopping short at a low entrance gate;
"many's the time I've been here when his father had it; it'll be a
queer thing if I can't find a window I can manage, and the old cook he
has is as deaf as the dead."

He and Doctor Hickey went in at the gate with the hounds; I hesitated
ignobly in the mud.

"This isn't an R.M.'s job," said Flurry in a whisper, closing the gate
in my face; "you'd best keep clear of house-breaking."

I accepted his advice, but I may admit that before I turned for home a
sash was gently raised, a light had sprung up in one of the lower
windows, and I heard Flurry's voice saying, "Over, over, over!" to his
hounds.

There seemed to me to be no interval at all between these events and
the moment when I woke in bright sunlight to find Dr. Hickey standing
by my bedside in a red coat with a tall glass in his hand.

"It's nine o'clock," he said. "I'm just after waking Flurry Knox.
There wasn't one stirring in the hotel till I went down and pulled the
'boots' from under the kitchen table! It's well for us the meet's in
the town; and, by-the-bye, your grey horse has four legs on him the
size of bolsters this morning; he won't be fit to go out, I'm afraid.
Drink this anyway, you're in the want of it."

Dr. Hickey's eyelids were rather pink, but his hand was as steady as a
rock. The whisky-and-soda was singularly untempting.

"What happened last night?" I asked eagerly as I gulped it.

"Oh, it all went off very nicely, thank you," said Hickey, twisting his
black beard to a point. "We benched as many of the hounds in Flood's
bed as'd fit, and we shut the lot into the room. We had them just
comfortable when we heard his latchkey below at the door." He broke
off and began to snigger.

"Well?" I said, sitting bolt upright.

"Well, he got in at last, and he lit a candle then. That took him five
minutes. He was pretty tight. We were looking at him over the
banisters until he started to come up, and according as he came up, we
went on up the top flight. He stood admiring his candle for a while on
the landing, and we wondered he didn't hear the hounds snuffing under
the door. He opened it then, and, on the minute, three of them bolted
out between his legs." Dr. Hickey again paused to indulge in
Mephistophelian laughter. "Well, you know," he went on, "when a man in
poor Tomsy's condition sees six dogs jumping out of his bed he's apt to
make a wrong diagnosis. He gave a roar, and pitched the candlestick at
them, and ran for his life downstairs, and all the hounds after him.
'Gone away!' screeches that devil Flurry, pelting downstairs on top of
them in the dark. I believe I screeched too."

"Good heavens!" I gasped, "I was well out of that!"

"Well, you were," admitted the Doctor. "However, Tomsy bested them in
the dark, and he got to ground in the pantry. I heard the cups and
saucers go as he slammed the door on the hounds' noses, and the minute
he was in Flurry turned the key on him. 'They're real dogs, Tomsy, my
buck!' says Flurry, just to quiet him; and there we left him."

"Was he hurt?" I asked, conscious of the triviality of the question.

"Well, he lost his brush," replied Dr. Hickey. "Old Merrylegs tore the
coat-tails off him; we got them on the floor when we struck a light;
Flurry has them to nail on his kennel door. Charley Knox had a
pleasant time too," he went on, "with the man that brought the
barrow-load of meat to the stable. We picked out the tastiest bits and
arranged them round Flood's breakfast table for him. They smelt very
nice. Well, I'm delaying you with my talking----"

Flurry's hounds had the run of the season that day. I saw it admirably
throughout--from Miss Bennett's pony cart. She drove extremely well,
in spite of her strained arm.

TRINKET'S COLT

It was Petty Sessions day in Skebawn, a cold, grey day of February. A
case of trespass had dragged its burden of cross summonses and cross
swearing far into the afternoon, and when I left the bench my head was
singing from the bellowings of the attorneys, and the smell of their
clients was heavy upon my palate.

The streets still testified to the fact that it was market day, and I
evaded with difficulty the sinuous course of carts full of soddenly
screwed people, and steered an equally devious one for myself among the
groups anchored round the doors of the public-houses. Skebawn
possesses, among its legion of public-houses, one establishment which
timorously, and almost imperceptibly, proffers tea to the thirsty. I
turned in there, as was my custom on court days, and found the little
dingy den, known as the Ladies' Coffee-Room, in the occupancy of my
friend Mr. Florence McCarthy Knox, who was drinking strong tea and
eating buns with serious simplicity. It was a first and quite
unexpected glimpse of that domesticity that has now become a marked
feature in his character.

"You're the very man I wanted to see," I said as I sat down beside him
at the oilcloth-covered table; "a man I know in England who is not much
of a judge of character has asked me to buy him a four-year-old down
here, and as I should rather be stuck by a friend than a dealer, I wish
you'd take over the job."

Flurry poured himself out another cup of tea, and dropped three lumps
of sugar into it in silence.

Finally he said, "There isn't a four-year-old in this country that I'd
be seen dead with at a pig fair."

This was discouraging, from the premier authority on horse-flesh in the
district.

"But it isn't six weeks since you told me you had the finest filly in
your stables that was ever foaled in the County Cork," I protested:
"what's wrong with her?"

"Oh, is it that filly?" said Mr. Knox with a lenient smile; "she's gone
these three weeks from me. I swapped her and £6 for a three-year-old
Ironmonger colt, and after that I swapped the colt and £19 for that
Bandon horse I rode last week at your place, and after that again I
sold the Bandon horse for £75 to old Welply, and I had to give him back
a couple of sovereigns luck-money. You see I did pretty well with the
filly after all."

"Yes, yes--oh rather," I assented, as one dizzily accepts the
propositions of a bimetallist; "and you don't know of anything
else----?"

The room in which we were seated was closely screened from the shop by
a door with a muslin-curtained window in it; several of the panes were
broken, and at this juncture two voices that had for some time carried
on a discussion forced themselves upon our attention.

"Begging your pardon for contradicting you, ma'am," said the voice of
Mrs. McDonald, proprietress of the tea-shop, and a leading light in
Skebawn Dissenting circles, shrilly tremulous with indignation, "if the
servants I recommend you won't stop with you, it's no fault of mine.
If respectable young girls are set picking grass out of your gravel, in
place of their proper work, certainly they will give warning!"

The voice that replied struck me as being a notable one, well-bred and
imperious.

"When I take a barefooted slut out of a cabin, I don't expect her to
dictate to me what her duties are!"

Flurry jerked up his chin in a noiseless laugh. "It's my grandmother!"
he whispered. "I bet you Mrs. McDonald don't get much change out of
her!"

"If I set her to clean the pig-sty I expect her to obey me," continued
the voice in accents that would have made me clean forty pig-sties had
she desired me to do so.

"Very well, ma'am," retorted Mrs. McDonald, "if that's the way you
treat your servants, you needn't come here again looking for them. I
consider your conduct is neither that of a lady nor a Christian!"

"Don't you, indeed?" replied Flurry's grandmother. "Well, your opinion
doesn't greatly distress me, for, to tell you the truth, I don't think
you're much of a judge."

"Didn't I tell you she'd score?" murmured Flurry, who was by this time
applying his eye to a hole in the muslin curtain. "She's off," he went
on, returning to his tea. "She's a great character! She's
eighty-three if she's a day, and she's as sound on her legs as a
three-year-old! Did you see that old shandrydan of hers in the street
a while ago, and a fellow on the box with a red beard on him like
Robinson Crusoe? That old mare that was on the near side--Trinket her
name is--is mighty near clean bred. I can tell you her foals are worth
a bit of money."

I had heard of old Mrs. Knox of Aussolas; indeed, I had seldom dined
out in the neighbourhood without hearing some new story of her and her
remarkable ménage, but it had not yet been my privilege to meet her.

"Well, now," went on Flurry in his slow voice, "I'll tell you a thing
that's just come into my head. My grandmother promised me a foal of
Trinket's the day I was one-and-twenty, and that's five years ago, and
deuce a one I've got from her yet. You never were at Aussolas? No,
you were not. Well, I tell you the place there is like a circus with
horses. She has a couple of score of them running wild in the woods,
like deer."

"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. Most
people found it 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 dogcart, 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, fraught, 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," I said.

Flurry administered a composing kick to the ceaseless strivings of the
red setters under the seat.

"I used to be rather a pet with her," he said, after a pause; "but mind
you, I haven't got him yet, and if she gets any notion I want to sell
him I'll never get him, so say nothing about the business to her."

The tall gates of Aussolas shrieked on their hinges as they admitted
us, and shut with a clang behind us, in the faces of an old mare and a
couple of young horses, who, foiled in their break for the excitements
of the outer world, turned and galloped defiantly on either side of us.
Flurry's admirable cob hammered on, regardless of all things save his
duty.

"He's the only one I have that I'd trust myself here with," said his
master, flicking him approvingly with the whip; "there are plenty of
people afraid to come here at all, and when my grandmother goes out
driving she has a boy on the box with a basket full of stones to peg at
them. Talk of the dickens, here she is herself!"

A short, upright old woman was approaching, preceded by a white woolly
dog with sore eyes and a bark like a tin trumpet; we both got out of
the trap and advanced to meet the lady of the manor.

I may summarise her attire by saying that she looked as if she had
robbed a scarecrow; her face was small and incongruously refined, the
skinny hand that she extended to me had the grubby tan that bespoke the
professional gardener, and was decorated with a magnificent diamond
ring. On her head was a massive purple velvet bonnet.

"I am very glad to meet you, Major Yeates," she said with an
old-fashioned precision of utterance; "your grandfather was a dancing
partner of mine in old days at the Castle, when he was a handsome young
aide-de-camp there, and I was----you may judge for yourself what I was."

She ended with a startling little hoot of laughter, and I was aware
that she quite realised the world's opinion of her, and was indifferent
to it.

Our way to the bogs took us across Mrs. Knox's home farm, and through a
large field in which several young horses were grazing.

"There now, that's my fellow," said Flurry, pointing to a fine-looking
colt, "the chestnut with the white diamond on his forehead. He'll run
into three figures before he's done, but we'll not tell that to the old
lady!"

The famous Aussolas bogs were as full of snipe as usual, and a good
deal fuller of water than any bogs I had ever shot before. I was on my
day, and Flurry was not, and as he is ordinarily an infinitely better
snipe shot than I, I felt at peace with the world and all men as we
walked back, wet through, at five o'clock.

The sunset had waned, and a big white moon was making the eastern tower
of Aussolas look like a thing in a fairy tale or a play when we arrived
at the hall door. An individual, whom I recognised as the Robinson
Crusoe coachman, admitted us to a hall, the like of which one does not
often see. The walls were panelled with dark oak up to the gallery
that ran round three sides of it, the balusters of the wide staircase
were heavily carved, and blackened portraits of Flurry's ancestors on
the spindle side stared sourly down on their descendant as he tramped
upstairs with the bog mould on his hobnailed boots.

We had just changed into dry clothes when Robinson Crusoe shoved his
red beard round the corner of the door, with the information that the
mistress said we were to stay for dinner. My heart sank. It was then
barely half-past five. I said something about having no evening
clothes and having to get home early.

"Sure the dinner'll be in another half-hour," said Robinson Crusoe,
joining hospitably in the conversation; "and as for evening
clothes----God bless ye!"

The door closed behind him.

"Never mind," said Flurry, "I dare say you'll be glad enough to eat
another dinner by the time you get home." He laughed. "Poor Slipper!"
he added inconsequently, and only laughed again when I asked for an
explanation.

Old Mrs. Knox received us in the library, where she was seated by a
roaring turf fire, which lit the room a good deal more effectively than
the pair of candles that stood beside her in tall silver candlesticks.
Ceaseless and implacable growls from under her chair indicated the
presence of the woolly dog. She talked with confounding culture of the
books that rose all round her to the ceiling; her evening dress was
accomplished by means of an additional white shawl, rather dirtier than
its congeners; as I took her in to dinner she quoted Virgil to me, and
in the same breath screeched an objurgation at a being whose matted
head rose suddenly into view from behind an ancient Chinese screen, as
I have seen the head of a Zulu woman peer over a bush.

Dinner was as incongruous as everything else. Detestable soup in a
splendid old silver tureen that was nearly as dark in hue as Robinson
Crusoe's thumb; a perfect salmon, perfectly cooked, on a chipped
kitchen dish; such cut glass as is not easy to find nowadays; sherry
that, as Flurry subsequently remarked, would burn the shell off an egg;
and a bottle of port, draped in immemorial cobwebs, wan with age, and
probably priceless. Throughout the vicissitudes of the meal Mrs.
Knox's conversation flowed on undismayed, directed sometimes at me--she
had installed me in the position of friend of her youth, and talked to
me as if I were my own grandfather--sometimes at Crusoe, with whom she
had several heated arguments, and sometimes she would make a statement
of remarkable frankness on the subject of her horse-farming affairs to
Flurry, who, very much on his best behaviour, agreed with all she said,
and risked no original remark. As I listened to them both, I
remembered with infinite amusement how he had told me once that "a pet
name she had for him was 'Tony Lumpkin,' and no one but herself knew
what she meant by it." It seemed strange that she made no allusion to
Trinket's colt or to Flurry's birthday, but, mindful of my
instructions, I held my peace.

As, at about half-past eight, we drove away in the moonlight, Flurry
congratulated me solemnly on my success with his grandmother. He was
good enough to tell me that she would marry me to-morrow if I asked
her, and he wished I would, even if it was only to see what a nice
grandson he'd be for me. A sympathetic giggle behind me told me that
Michael, on the back seat, had heard and relished the jest.

We had left the gates of Aussolas about half a mile behind when, at the
corner of a by-road, Flurry pulled up. A short squat figure arose from
the black shadow of a furze bush and came out into the moonlight,
swinging its arms like a cabman and cursing audibly.

"Oh murdher, oh murdher, Misther Flurry! What kept ye at all? 'Twould
perish the crows to be waiting here the way I am these two hours----"

"Ah, shut your mouth, Slipper!" said Flurry, who, to my surprise, had
turned back the rug and was taking off his driving coat, "I couldn't
help it. Come on, Yeates, we've got to get out here."

"What for?" I asked, in not unnatural bewilderment.

"It's all right. I'll tell you as we go along," replied my companion,
who was already turning to follow Slipper up the by-road. "Take the
trap on, Michael, and wait at the River's Cross." He waited for me to
come up with him, and then put his hand on my arm. "You see, Major,
this is the way it is. My grandmother's given me that colt right
enough, but if I waited for her to send him over to me I'd never see a
hair of his tail. So I just thought that as we were over here we might
as well take him back with us, and maybe you'll give us a help with
him; he'll not be altogether too handy for a first go off."

I was staggered. An infant in arms could scarcely have failed to
discern the fishiness of the transaction, and I begged Mr. Knox not to
put himself to this trouble on my account, as I had no doubt I could
find a horse for my friend elsewhere. Mr. Knox assured me that it was
no trouble at all, quite the contrary, and that, since his grandmother
had given him the colt, he saw no reason why he should not take him
when he wanted him; also, that if I didn't want him he'd be glad enough
to keep him himself; and finally, that I wasn't the chap to go back on
a friend, but I was welcome to drive back to Shreelane with Michael
this minute if I liked.

Of course I yielded in the end. I told Flurry I should lose my job
over the business, and he said I could then marry his grandmother, and
the discussion was abruptly closed by the necessity of following
Slipper over a locked five-barred gate.

Our pioneer took us over about half a mile of country, knocking down
stone gaps where practicable and scrambling over tall banks in the
deceptive moonlight. We found ourselves at length in a field with a
shed in one corner of it; in a dim group of farm buildings a little way
off a light was shining.

"Wait here," said Flurry to me in a whisper; "the less noise the
better. It's an open shed, and we'll just slip in and coax him out."

Slipper unwound from his waist a halter, and my colleagues glided like
spectres into the shadow of the shed, leaving me to meditate on my
duties as Resident Magistrate, and on the questions that would be asked
in the House by our local member when Slipper had given away the
adventure in his cups.

In less than a minute three shadows emerged from the shed, where two
had gone in. They had got the colt.

"He came out as quiet as a calf when he winded the sugar," said Flurry;
"it was well for me I filled my pockets from grandmamma's sugar basin."

He and Slipper had a rope from each side of the colt's head; they took
him quickly across a field towards a gate. The colt stepped daintily
between them over the moonlit grass; he snorted occasionally, but
appeared on the whole amenable.

The trouble began later, and was due, as trouble often is, to the
beguilements of a short cut. Against the maturer judgment of Slipper,
Flurry insisted on following a route that he assured us he knew as well
as his own pocket, and the consequence was that in about five minutes I
found myself standing on top of a bank hanging on to a rope, on the
other end of which the colt dangled and danced, while Flurry, with the
other rope, lay prone in the ditch, and Slipper administered to the
bewildered colt's hindquarters such chastisement as could be ventured
on.

I have no space to narrate in detail the atrocious difficulties and
disasters of the short cut. How the colt set to work to buck, and went
away across a field, dragging the faithful Slipper, literally
_ventre-à-terre_, after him, while I picked myself in ignominy out of a
briar patch, and Flurry cursed himself black in the face. How we were
attacked by ferocious cur dogs, and I lost my eyeglass; and how, as we
neared the River's Cross, Flurry espied the police patrol on the road,
and we all hid behind a rick of turf, while I realised in fulness what
an exceptional ass I was, to have been beguiled into an enterprise that
involved hiding with Slipper from the Royal Irish Constabulary.

Let it suffice to say that Trinket's infernal offspring was finally
handed over on the high-road to Michael and Slipper, and Flurry drove
me home in a state of mental and physical overthrow.

I saw nothing of my friend Mr. Knox for the next couple of days, by the
end of which time I had worked up a high polish on my misgivings, and
had determined to tell him that under no circumstances would I have
anything to say to his grandmother's birthday present. It was like my
usual luck that, instead of writing a note to this effect, I thought it
would be good for my liver to walk across the hills to Tory Cottage and
tell Flurry so in person.

It was a bright, blustery morning, after a muggy day. The feeling of
spring was in the air, the daffodils were already in bud, and crocuses
showed purple in the grass on either side of the avenue. It was only a
couple of miles to Tory Cottage by the way across the hills; I walked
fast, and it was barely twelve o'clock when I saw its pink walls and
clumps of evergreens below me. As I looked down at it the chiming of
Flurry's hounds in the kennels came to me on the wind; I stood still to
listen, and could almost have sworn that I was hearing again the clash
of Magdalen bells, hard at work on May morning.

The path that I was following led downwards through a larch plantation
to Flurry's back gate. Hot wafts from some hideous caldron at the
other side of a wall apprised me of the vicinity of the kennels and
their cuisine, and the fir-trees round were hung with gruesome and
unknown joints. I thanked Heaven that I was not a master of hounds,
and passed on as quickly as might be to the hall door.

I rang two or three times without response; then the door opened a
couple of inches and was instantly slammed in my face. I heard the
hurried paddling of bare feet on oilcloth, and a voice, "Hurry,
Bridgie, hurry! There's quality at the door!"

Bridgie, holding a dirty cap on with one hand, presently arrived and
informed me that she believed Mr. Knox was out about the place. She
seemed perturbed, and she cast scared glances down the drive while
speaking to me.

I knew enough of Flurry's habits to shape a tolerably direct course for
his whereabouts. He was, as I had expected, in the training paddock, a
field behind the stable-yard, in which he had put up practice jumps for
his horses. It was a good-sized field with clumps of furze in it, and
Flurry was standing near one of these with his hands in his pockets,
singularly unoccupied. I supposed that he was prospecting for a place
to put up another jump. He did not see me coming, and turned with a
start as I spoke to him. There was a queer expression of mingled guilt
and what I can only describe as divilment in his grey eyes as he
greeted me. In my dealings with Flurry Knox, I have since formed the
habit of sitting tight, in a general way, when I see that expression.

"Well, who's coming next, I wonder!" he said, as he shook hands with
me; "it's not ten minutes since I had two of your d--d peelers here
searching the whole place for my grandmother's colt!"

"What!" I exclaimed, feeling cold all down my back; "do you mean the
police have got hold of it?"

"They haven't got hold of the colt anyway," said Flurry, looking
sideways at me from under the peak of his cap, with the glint of the
sun in his eye. "I got word in time before they came."

"What do you mean?" I demanded; "where is he? For Heaven's sake don't
tell me you've sent the brute over to my place!"

"It's a good job for you I didn't," replied Flurry, "as the police are
on their way to Shreelane this minute to consult you about it. _You_!"
He gave utterance to one of his short diabolical fits of laughter.
"He's where they'll not find him, anyhow. Ho! ho! It's the funniest
hand I ever played!"

"Oh yes, it's devilish funny, I've no doubt," I retorted, beginning to
lose my temper, as is the manner of many people when they are
frightened; "but I give you fair warning that if Mrs. Knox asks me any
questions about it, I shall tell her the whole story."

"All right," responded Flurry; "and when you do, don't forget to tell
her how you flogged the colt out on to the road over her own bounds
ditch."

"Very well," I said hotly, "I may as well go home and send in my
papers. They'll break me over this----"

"Ah, hold on, Major," said Flurry soothingly, "it'll be all right. No
one knows anything. It's only on spec the old lady sent the bobbies
here. If you'll keep quiet it'll all blow over."

"I don't care," I said, struggling hopelessly in the toils; "if I meet
your grandmother, and she asks me about it, I shall tell her all I
know."

"Please God you'll not meet her! After all, it's not once in a blue
moon that she--" began Flurry. Even as he said the words his face
changed. "Holy fly!" he ejaculated, "isn't that her dog coming into
the field? Look at her bonnet over the wall! Hide, hide for your
life!" He caught me by the shoulder and shoved me down among the furze
bushes before I realised what had happened.

"Get in there! I'll talk to her."

I may as well confess that at the mere sight of Mrs. Knox's purple
bonnet my heart had turned to water. In that moment I knew what it
would be like to tell her how I, having eaten her salmon, and capped
her quotations, and drunk her best port, had gone forth and helped to
steal her horse. I abandoned my dignity, my sense of honour; I took
the furze prickles to my breast and wallowed in them.

Mrs. Knox had advanced with vengeful speed; already she was in high
altercation with Flurry at no great distance from where I lay; varying
sounds of battle reached me, and I gathered that Flurry was not--to put
it mildly--shrinking from that economy of truth that the situation
required.

"Is it that curby, long-backed brute? You promised him to me long ago,
but I wouldn't be bothered with him!"

The old lady uttered a laugh of shrill derision. "Is it likely I'd
promise you my best colt? And still more, is it likely that you'd
refuse him if I did?"

"Very well, ma'am." Flurry's voice was admirably indignant. "Then I
suppose I'm a liar and a thief."

"I'd be more obliged to you for the information if I hadn't known it
before," responded his grandmother with lightning speed; "if you swore
to me on a stack of Bibles you knew nothing about my colt I wouldn't
believe you! I shall go straight to Major Yeates and ask his advice.
I believe _him_ to be a gentleman, in spite of the company he keeps!"

I writhed deeper into the furze bushes, and thereby discovered a sandy
rabbit run, along which I crawled, with my cap well over my eyes, and
the furze needles stabbing me through my stockings. The ground shelved
a little, promising profounder concealment, but the bushes were very
thick, and I laid hold of the bare stem of one to help my progress. It
lifted out of the ground in my hand, revealing a freshly-cut stump.
Something snorted, not a yard away; I glared through the opening, and
was confronted by the long, horrified face of Mrs. Knox's colt,
mysteriously on a level with my own.

Even without the white diamond on his forehead I should have divined
the truth; but how in the name of wonder had Flurry persuaded him to
couch like a woodcock in the heart of a furze brake? For a full minute
I lay as still as death for fear of frightening him, while the voices
of Flurry and his grandmother raged on alarmingly close to me. The
colt snorted, and blew long breaths through his wide nostrils, but he
did not move. I crawled an inch or two nearer, and after a few seconds
of cautious peering I grasped the position. They had buried him.

A small sandpit among the furze had been utilised as a grave; they had
filled him in up to his withers with sand, and a few furze bushes,
artistically disposed round the pit, had done the rest. As the depth
of Flurry's guile was revealed, laughter came upon me like a flood; I
gurgled and shook apoplectically, and the colt gazed at me with serious
surprise, until a sudden outburst of barking close to my elbow
administered a fresh shock to my tottering nerves.

Mrs. Knox's woolly dog had tracked me into the furze, and was now
baying the colt and me with mingled terror and indignation. I
addressed him in a whisper, with perfidious endearments, advancing a
crafty hand towards him the while, made a snatch for the back of his
neck, missed it badly, and got him by the ragged fleece of his
hind-quarters as he tried to flee. If I had flayed him alive he could
hardly have uttered a more deafening series of yells, but, like a fool,
instead of letting him go, I dragged him towards me, and tried to
stifle the noise by holding his muzzle. The tussle lasted engrossingly
for a few seconds, and then the climax of the nightmare arrived.

Mrs. Knox's voice, close behind me, said, "Let go my dog this instant,
sir! Who are you----"

Her voice faded away, and I knew that she also had seen the colt's head.

I positively felt sorry for her. At her age there was no knowing what
effect the shock might have on her. I scrambled to my feet and
confronted her.

"Major Yeates!" she said. There was a deathly pause. "Will you kindly
tell me," said Mrs. Knox slowly, "am I in Bedlam, or are you? And
_what is that_?"

She pointed to the colt, and that unfortunate animal, recognising the
voice of his mistress, uttered a hoarse and lamentable whinny. Mrs.
Knox felt around her for support, found only furze prickles, gazed
speechlessly at me, and then, to her eternal honour, fell into wild
cackles of laughter.

So, I may say, did Flurry and I. I embarked on my explanation and
broke down; Flurry followed suit and broke down too. Overwhelming
laughter held us all three, disintegrating our very souls. Mrs. Knox
pulled herself together first.

"I acquit you, Major Yeates, I acquit you, though appearances are
against you. It's clear enough to me you've fallen among thieves."
She stopped and glowered at Flurry. Her purple bonnet was over one
eye. "I'll thank you, sir," she said, "to dig out that horse before I
leave this place. And when you've dug him out you may keep him. I'll
be no receiver of stolen goods!"

She broke off and shook her fist at him. "Upon my conscience, Tony,
I'd give a guinea to have thought of it myself!"

IV
THE WATERS OF STRIFE

I knew Bat Callaghan's face long before I was able to put a name to it.
There was seldom a court day in Skebawn that I was not aware of his
level brows and superfluously intense expression somewhere among the
knot of corner-boys who patronised the weekly sittings of the bench of
magistrates. His social position appeared to fluctuate: I have seen
him driving a car; he sometimes held my horse for me--that is to say,
he sat on the counter of a public-house while the Quaker slumbered in
the gutter; and, on one occasion, he retired, at my bidding, to Cork
gaol, there to meditate upon the inadvisability of defending a friend
from the attentions of the police with the tailboard of a cart.

He next obtained prominence in my regard at a regatta held under the
auspices of "The Sons of Liberty," a local football club that justified
its title by the patriot green of its jerseys and its free
interpretation of the rules of the game. The announcement of my name
on the posters as a patron--a privilege acquired at the cost of a
reluctant half-sovereign--made it incumbent on me to put in an
appearance, even though the festival coincided with my Petty Sessions
day at Skebawn; and at some five of the clock on a brilliant September
afternoon I found myself driving down the stony road that dropped in
zigzags to the borders of the lake on which the races were to come off.

I believe that the selection of Lough Lonen as the scene of the regatta
was not unconnected with the fact that the secretary of the club owned
a public-house at the cross roads at one end of it; none the less, the
president of the Royal Academy could scarcely have chosen more
picturesque surroundings. A mountain towered steeply up from the
lake's edge, dark with the sad green of beech-trees in September; fir
woods followed the curve of the shore, and leaned far over the
answering darkness of the water; and above the trees rose the toppling
steepnesses of the hill, painted with a purple glow of heather. The
lake was about a mile long, and, tumbling from its farther end, a
fierce and narrow river fled away west to the sea, some four or five
miles off.

I had not seen a boat race since I was at Oxford, and the words still
called up before my eyes a vision of smart parasols, of gorgeous
barges, of snowy-clad youths, and of low slim outriggers, winged with
the level flight of oars, slitting the water to the sway of the line of
flat backs. Certainly undreamed-of possibilities in aquatics were
revealed to me as I reined in the Quaker on the outskirts of the crowd,
and saw below me the festival of the Sons of Liberty in full swing.
Boats of all shapes and sizes, outrageously overladen, moved about the
lake, with oars flourishing to the strains of concertinas. Black
swarms of people seethed along the water's edge, congesting here and
there round the dingy tents and stalls of green apples; and the club's
celebrated brass band, enthroned in a wagonette, and stimulated by the
presence of a barrel of porter on the box-seat, was belching forth "The
Boys of Wexford," under the guidance of a disreputable ex-militia
drummer, in a series of crashing discords.

Almost as I arrived a pistol-shot set the echoes clattering round the
lake, and three boats burst out abreast from the throng into the open
water. Two of the crews were in shirt-sleeves, the third wore the
green jerseys of the football club; the boats were of the heavy
sea-going build, and pulled six oars apiece, oars of which the looms
were scarcely narrower than the blades, and were, of the two, but a
shade heavier. None the less the rowers started dauntlessly at
thirty-five strokes a minute, quickening up, incredible as it may seem,
as they rounded the mark boat in the first lap of the two-mile course.
The rowing was, in general style, more akin to the action of beating up
eggs with a fork than to any other form of athletic exercise; but in
its unorthodox way it kicked the heavy boats along at a surprising
pace. The oars squeaked and grunted against the thole-pins, the
coxswains kept up an unceasing flow of oratory, and superfluous little
boys in punts contrived to intervene at all the more critical
turning-points of the race, only evading the flail of the oncoming oars
by performing prodigies of "waggling" with a single oar at the stern.
I took out my watch and counted the strokes when they were passing the
mark boat for the second time; they were pulling a fraction over forty;
one of the shirt-sleeved crews was obviously in trouble, the other,
with humped backs and jerking oars, was holding its own against the
green jerseys amid the blended yells of friends and foes. When for the
last time they rounded the green flag there were but two boats in the
race, and the foul that had been imminent throughout was at length
achieved with a rattle of oars and a storm of curses. They were clear
again in a moment, the shirt-sleeved crew getting away with a distinct
lead, and it was at about this juncture that I became aware that the
coxswains had abandoned their long-handled tillers, and were standing
over their respective "strokes," shoving frantically at their oars, and
maintaining the while a ceaseless bawl of encouragement and defiance.
It looked like a foregone conclusion for the leaders, and the war of
cheers rose to frenzy. The word "cheering," indeed, is but an
euphuism, and in no way expresses the serrated yell, composed of
epithets, advice, and imprecations, that was flung like a live thing at
the oncoming boats. The green jerseys answered to this stimulant with
a wild spurt that drove the bow of their boat within a measurable
distance of their opponents' stroke oar. In another second a
thoroughly successful foul would have been effected, but the cox of the
leading boat proved himself equal to the emergency by unshipping his
tiller, and with it dealing "bow" of the green jerseys such a blow over
the head as effectually dismissed him from the sphere of practical
politics.

A great roar of laughter greeted this feat of arms, and a voice at my
dogcart's wheel pierced the clamour--

"More power to ye, Larry, me owld darlin'!"

I looked down and saw Bat Callaghan, with shining eyes, and a face
white with excitement, poising himself on one foot on the box of my
wheel in order to get a better view of the race. Almost before I had
time to recognise him, a man in a green jersey caught him round the
legs and jerked him down. Callaghan fell into the throng, recovered
himself in an instant, and rushed, white and dangerous, at his
assailant. The Son of Liberty was no less ready for the fray, and what
is known in Ireland as "the father and mother of a row" was imminent.
Already, however, one of those unequalled judges of the moral
temperature of a crowd, a sergeant of the R.I.C., had quietly
interposed his bulky person between the combatants, and the coming
trouble was averted.

Elsewhere battle was raging. The race was over, and the committee boat
was hemmed in by the rival crews, supplemented by craft of all kinds.
The "objection" was being lodged, and in its turn objected to, and I
can only liken the process to the screaming warfare of seagulls round a
piece of carrion. The tumult was still at its height when out of its
very heart two four-oared boats broke forth, and a pistol shot
proclaimed that another race had begun, the public interest in which
was specially keen, owing to the fact that the rowers were stalwart
country girls, who made up in energy what they lacked in skill. It was
a short race, once round the mark boat only, and, like a successful
farce, it "went with a roar" from start to finish. Foul after foul,
each followed by a healing interval of calm, during which the crews,
who had all caught crabs, were recovering themselves and their oars,
marked its progress; and when the two boats, locked in an inextricable
embrace, at length passed the winning flag, and the crews, oblivious of
judges and public, fell to untrammelled personal abuse and to doing up
their hair, I decided that I had seen the best of the fun, and prepared
to go home.

It was, as it happened, the last race of the day, and nothing remained
in the way of excitement save the greased pole with the pig slung in a
bag at the end of it. My final impression of the Lough Lonen Regatta
was of Callaghan's lithe figure, sleek and dripping, against the yellow
sky, as he poised on the swaying pole with the broken gold of the water
beneath him.

Limited as was my experience of the Southwest of Ireland, I was in no
way surprised to hear on the following afternoon from Peter Cadogan
that there had been "sthrokes" the night before, when the boys were
going home from the regatta, and that the police were searching for one
Jimmy Foley.

"What do they want him for?" I asked.

"Sure it's according as a man that was bringing a car of bogwood was
tellin' me, sir," answered Peter, pursuing his occupation of washing
the dogcart with unabated industry; "they say Jimmy's wife went roaring
to the police, saying she could get no account of her husband."

"I suppose he's beaten some fellow and is hiding," I suggested.

"Well, that might be, sir," asserted Peter respectfully. He plied his
mop vigorously in intricate places about the springs, which would, I
knew, have never been explored save for my presence.

"It's what John Hennessy was saying, that he was hard set to get his
horse past Cluin Cross, the way the blood was sthrewn about the road,"
resumed Peter; "sure they were fighting like wasps in it half the
night."

"Who were fighting?"

"I couldn't say, indeed, sir. Some o' thim low rakish lads from the
town, I suppose," replied Peter with virtuous respectability.

When Peter Cadogan was quietly and intelligently candid, to pursue an
inquiry was seldom of much avail.

Next day in Skebawn I met little Murray, the district inspector, very
alert and smart in his rifle-green uniform, going forth to collect
evidence about the fight. He told me that the police were pretty
certain that one of the Sons of Liberty, named Foley, had been
murdered, but, as usual, the difficulty was to get any one to give
information; all that was known was that he was gone, and that his wife
had identified his cap, which had been found, drenched with blood, by
the roadside. Murray gave it as his opinion that the whole business
had arisen out of the row over the disputed race, and that there must
have been a dozen people looking on when the murder was done; but so
far no evidence was forthcoming, and after a day and a night of search
the police had not been able to find the body.

"No," said Flurry Knox, who had joined us, "and if it was any of those
mountainy men did away with him you might scrape Ireland with a
small-tooth comb and you'll not get him!"

That evening I smoked an after-dinner cigarette out of doors in the
mild starlight, strolling about the rudimentary paths of what would, I
hoped, some day be Philippa's garden. The bats came stooping at the
red end of my cigarette, and from the covert behind the house I heard
once or twice the delicate bark of a fox. Civilisation seemed a
thousand miles off, as far away as the falling star that had just drawn
a line of pale fire half-way down the northern sky. I had been nearly
a year at Shreelane House by myself now, and the time seemed very long
to me. It was slow work putting by money, even under the austerities
of Mrs. Cadogan's _régime_, and though I had warned Philippa I meant to
marry her after Christmas, there were moments, and this was one of
them, when it seemed an idle threat.

"Pether!" the strident voice of Mrs. Cadogan intruded upon my
meditations. "Go tell the Major his coffee is waitin' on him!"

I went gloomily into the house, and, with a resignation born of
adversity, swallowed the mixture of chicory and liquorice which my
housekeeper possessed the secret of distilling from the best and most
expensive coffee. My theory about it was that it added to the illusion
that I had dined, and moreover, that it kept me awake, and I generally
had a good deal of writing to do after dinner.

Having swallowed it I went downstairs and out past the kitchen regions
to my office, a hideous whitewashed room, in which I interviewed
policemen, and took affidavits, and did most of my official writing.
It had a door that opened into the yard, and a window that looked out
in the other direction, among lanky laurels and scrubby hollies, where
lay the cats' main thoroughfare from the scullery window to the rabbit
holes in the wood. I had a good deal of work to do, and the time
passed quickly. It was Friday night, and from the kitchen at the end
of the passage came the gabbling murmur, in two alternate keys, that I
had learned to recognise as the recital of a litany by my housekeeper
and her nephew Peter. This performance was followed by some of those
dreary and heart-rending yawns that are, I think, peculiar to Irish
kitchens, then such of the cats as had returned from the chase were
loudly shepherded into the back scullery, the kitchen door shut with a
slam, and my retainers retired to repose.

It was nearly half-an-hour afterwards when I finished the notes I had
been making on an adjourned case of "stroke-hauling" salmon in the
Lonen River. I leaned back in my chair and lighted a cigarette
preparatory to turning in; my thoughts had again wandered on a
sentimental journey across the Irish Channel, when I heard a slight
stir of some kind outside the open window. In the wilds of Ireland no
one troubles themselves about burglars; "more cats," I thought, "I must
shut the window before I go to bed."

Almost immediately there followed a faint tap on the window, and then a
voice said in a hoarse and hurried whisper, "Them that wants Jim Foley,
let them look in the river!"

If I had kept my head I should have sat still and encouraged a further
confidence, but unfortunately I acted on the impulse of the natural
man, and was at the window in a jump, knocking down my chair, and
making noise enough to scare a far less shy bird than an Irish
informer. Of course there was no one there. I listened, with every
nerve as taut as a violin string. It was quite dark; there was just
breeze enough to make a rustling in the evergreens, so that a man might
brush through them without being heard; and while I debated on a plan
of action there came from beyond the shrubbery the jar and twang of a
loose strand of wire in the paling by the wood. My informant, whoever
he might be, had vanished into the darkness from which he had come as
irrecoverably as had the falling star that had written its brief
message across the sky, and gone out again into infinity.

I got up very early next morning and drove to Skebawn to see Murray,
and offer him my mysterious information for what it was worth.
Personally I did not think it worth much, and was disposed to regard it
as a red herring drawn across the trail. Murray, however, was not in a
mood to despise anything that had a suggestion to make, having been out
till nine o'clock the night before without being able to find any clue
to the hiding-place of James Foley.

"The river's a good mile from the place where the fight was," he said,
straddling his compasses over the Ordnance Survey map, "and there's no
sort of a road they could have taken him along, but a tip like this is
always worth trying. I remember in the Land League time how a man came
one Saturday night to my window and told me there were holes drilled in
the chapel door to shoot a boycotted man through while he was at mass.
The holes were there right enough, and you may be quite sure that chap
found excellent reasons for having family prayers at home next day!"

I had sessions to attend on the extreme outskirts of my district, and
could not wait, as Murray suggested, to see the thing out. I did not
get home till the following day, and when I arrived I found a letter
from Murray awaiting me.

"Your pal was right. We found Foley's body in the river, knocking
about against the posts of the weir. The head was wrapped in his own
green jersey, and had been smashed in by a stone. We suspect a fellow
named Bat Callaghan, who has bolted, but there were a lot of them in
it. Possibly it was Callaghan himself who gave you the tip; you never
can tell how superstition is going to take them next. The inquest will
be held to-morrow."

The coroner's jury took a cautious view of the cause of the
catastrophe, and brought in a verdict of "death by misadventure," and I
presently found it to be my duty to call a magisterial inquiry to
further investigate the matter. A few days before this was to take
place, I was engaged in the delicate task of displaying to my landlord,
Mr. Flurry Knox, the defects of the pantry sink, when Mrs. Cadogan
advanced upon us with the information that the Widow Callaghan from
Cluin would be thankful to speak to me, and had brought me a present of
"a fine young goose."

"Is she come over here looking for Bat?" said Flurry, withdrawing his
arm and the longest kitchen-ladle from the pipe that he had been
probing; "she knows you're handy at hiding your friends, Mary; maybe
it's he that's stopping the drain!"

Mrs. Cadogan turned her large red face upon her late employer.

"God knows I wish yerself was stuck in it, Master Flurry, the way ye'd
hear Pether cursin' the full o' the house when he's striving to wash
the things in that unnatural little trough."

"Are you sure it's Peter does all the cursing?" retorted Flurry. "I
hear Father Scanlan has it in for you this long time for not going to
confession."

"And how can I walk two miles to the chapel with God's burden on me
feet?" demanded Mrs. Cadogan in purple indignation; "the Blessed Virgin
and Docthor Hickey knows well the hardship I gets from them. If it
wasn't for a pair of the Major's boots he gave me, I'd be hard set to
thravel the house itself!"

The contest might have been continued indefinitely, had I not struck up
the swords with a request that Mrs. Callaghan might be sent round to
the hall door. There we found a tall, grey-haired countrywoman waiting
for us at the foot of the steps, in the hooded blue cloak that is
peculiar to the south of Ireland; from the fact that she clutched a
pocket-handkerchief in her right hand I augured a stormy interview, but
nothing could have been more self-restrained and even imposing than the
reverence with which she greeted Flurry and me.

"Good-morning to your honours," she began, with a dignified and
extremely imminent snuffle. "I ask your pardon for troubling you,
Major Yeates, but I haven't a one in the counthry to give me an adwice,
and I have no confidence only in your honour's experiments."

"Experience, she means," prompted Flurry. "Didn't you get advice
enough out of Mr. Murray yesterday?" he went on aloud. "I heard he was
at Cluin to see you."

"And if he was itself, it's little adwantage any one'd get out of that
little whipper-shnapper of a shnap-dhragon!" responded Mrs. Callaghan
tartly; "he was with me for a half-hour giving me every big rock of
English till I had a reel in me head. I declare to ye, Mr. Flurry,
after he had gone out o' the house, ye wouldn't throw three farthings
for me!"

The pocket-handkerchief was here utilised, after which, with a heavy
groan, Mrs. Callaghan again took up her parable.

"I towld him first and last I'd lose me life if I had to go into the
coort, and if I did itself sure th' attorneys could rip no more out o'
me than what he did himself."

"Did you tell him where was Bat?" inquired Flurry casually.

At this Mrs. Callaghan immediately dissolved into tears.

"Is it Bat?" she howled. "If the twelve Apostles came down from heaven
asking me where was Bat, I could give them no satisfaction. The divil
a know I know what's happened him. He came home with me sober and
good-natured from the rogatta, and the next morning he axed a fresh egg
for his breakfast, and God forgive me, I wouldn't break the score I was
taking to the hotel, and with that he slapped the cup o' tay into the
fire and went out the door, and I never got a word of him since, good
nor bad. God knows 'tis I got throuble with that poor boy, and he the
only one I have to look to in the world!"

I cut the matter short by asking her what she wanted me to do for her,
and sifted out from amongst much extraneous detail the fact that she
relied upon my renowned wisdom and clemency to preserve her from being
called as a witness at the coming inquiry. The gift of the goose
served its intended purpose of embarrassing my position, but in spite
of it I broke to the Widow Callaghan my inability to help her. She did
not, of course, believe me, but she was too well-bred to say so. In
Ireland one becomes accustomed to this attitude.

As it turned out, however, Bat Callaghan's mother had nothing to fear
from the inquiry. She was by turns deaf, imbecile, garrulously candid,
and furiously abusive of Murray's principal witness, a frightened lad
of seventeen, who had sworn to having seen Bat Callaghan and Jimmy
Foley "shaping at one another to fight," at an hour when, according to
Mrs. Callaghan, Bat was "lying sthretched on the beddeen with a sick
shtomach" in consequence of the malignant character of the porter
supplied by the last witness's father. It all ended, as such cases so
often do in Ireland, in complete moral certainty in the minds of all
concerned as to the guilt of the accused, and entire impotence on the
part of the law to prove it. A warrant was issued for the arrest of
Bartholomew Callaghan; and the clans of Callaghan and Foley fought
rather more bloodily than usual, as occasion served; and at intervals
during the next few months Murray used to ask me if my friend the
murderer had dropped in lately, to which I was wont to reply with
condolences on the failure of the R.I.C. to find the Widow Callaghan's
only son for her; and that was about all that came of it.

Events with which the present story has no concern took me to England
towards the end of the following March. It so happened that my old
regiment, the ----th Fusiliers, was quartered at Whincastle, within a
couple of hours by rail of Philippa's home, where I was staying, and,
since my wedding was now within measurable distance, my former
brothers-in-arms invited me over to dine and sleep, and to receive a
valedictory silver claret jug that they were magnanimous enough to
bestow upon a backslider. I enjoyed the dinner as much as any man can
enjoy his dinner when he knows he has to make a speech at the end of
it; through much and varied conversation I strove, like a nervous
mother who cannot trust her offspring out of her sight, to keep before
my mind's eye the opening sentences that I had composed in the train; I
felt that if I could only "get away" satisfactorily I might trust the
Ayala ('89) to do the rest, and of that fount of inspiration there was
no lack. As it turned out, I got away all right, though the sight of
the double line of expectant faces and red mess jackets nearly
scattered those precious opening sentences, and I am afraid that so far
as the various subsequent points went that I had intended to make, I
stayed away; however, neither Demosthenes, nor a Nationalist member at
a Cork election, could have been listened to with more gratifying
attention, and I sat down, hot and happy, to be confronted with my own
flushed visage, hideously reflected in the glittering paunch of the
claret jug.

Once safely over the presentation, the evening mellowed into frivolity,
and it was pretty late before I found myself settled down to whist, at
sixpenny points, in the ancient familiar way, while most of the others
fell to playing pool in the billiard-room next door. I have played
whist from my youth up; with the preternatural seriousness of a
subaltern, with the self-assurance of a senior captain, with the
privileged irascibility of a major; and my eighteen months of
abstinence at Shreelane had only whetted my appetite for what I
consider the best of games. After the long lonely evenings there, with
rats for company, and, for relaxation, a "deck" of that specially
demoniacal American variety of patience known as "Fooly Ann," it was
wondrous agreeable to sit again among my fellows, and "lay the longs"
on a severely scientific rubber of whist, as though Mrs. Cadogan and
the Skebawn Bench of Magistrates had never existed.

We were in the first game of the second rubber, and I was holding a
very nice playing hand; I had early in the game moved forth my trumps
to battle, and I was now in the ineffable position of scoring with the
small cards of my long suit. The cards fell and fell in silence, and
Ballantyne, my partner, raked in the tricks like a machine. The
concentrated quiet of the game was suddenly arrested by a sharp,
unmistakable sound from the barrack yard outside, the snap of a
Lee-Metford rifle.

"What was that?" exclaimed Moffat, the senior major.

Before he had finished speaking there was a second shot.

"By Jove, those were rifle-shots! Perhaps I'd better go and see what's
up," said Ballantyne, who was captain of the week, throwing down his
cards and making a bolt for the door.

He had hardly got out of the room when the first long high note of the
"assembly" sang out, sudden and clear. We all sprang to our feet, and
as the bugle-call went shrilly on, the other men came pouring in from
the billiard-room, and stampeded to their quarters to get their swords.
At the same moment the mess sergeant appeared at the outer door with a
face as white as his shirt-front.

"The sentry on the magazine guard has been shot, sir!" he said
excitedly to Moffat. "They say he's dead!"

We were all out in the barrack square in an instant; it was clear
moonlight, and the square was already alive with hurrying figures
cramming on clothes and caps as they ran to fall in. I was a free
agent these times, and I followed the mess sergeant across the square
towards the distant corner where the magazine stands. As we doubled
round the end of the men's quarters, we nearly ran into a small party
of men who were advancing slowly and heavily in our direction.

"'Ere he is, sir!" said the mess sergeant, stopping himself abruptly.

They were carrying the sentry to the hospital. His busby had fallen
off; the moon shone mildly on his pale, convulsed face, and foam and
strange inhuman sounds came from his lips. His head was rolling from
side to side on the arm of one of the men who was carrying him; as it
turned towards me I was struck by something disturbingly familiar in
the face, and I wondered if he had been in my old company.

"What's his name, sergeant?" I said to the mess sergeant.

"Private Harris, sir," replied the sergeant; "he's only lately come up
from the depôt, and this was his first time on sentry by himself."

I went back to the mess, and in process of time the others straggled
in, thirsting for whiskies-and-sodas, and full of such information as
there was to give. Private Harris was not wounded; both the shots had
been fired by him, as was testified by the state of his rifle and the
fact that two of the cartridges were missing from the packet in his
pouch.

"I hear he was a queer, sulky sort of chap always," said Tomkinson, the
subaltern of the day, "but if he was having a try at suicide he made a
bally bad fist of it."

"He made as good a fist of it as you did of putting on your sword,
Tommy," remarked Ballantyne, indicating a dangling white strap of
webbing, that hung down like a tail below Mr. Tomkinson's mess jacket.
"Nerves, obviously, in both cases!"

The exquisite satisfaction afforded by this discovery to Mr.
Tomkinson's brother officers found its natural outlet in a bear fight
that threatened to become more or less general, and in the course of
which I slid away unostentatiously to bed in Ballantyne's quarters, and
took the precaution of barricading my door.

Next morning, when I got down to breakfast, I found Ballantyne and two
or three others in the mess room, and my first inquiry was for Private
Harris.

"Oh, the poor chap's dead," said Ballantyne; "it's a very queer
business altogether. I think he must have been wrong in the top
storey. The doctor was with him when he came to out of the fit, or
whatever it was, and O'Reilly--that's the doctor y' know, Irish of
course, and, by the way, poor Harris was an Irishman too--says that he
could only jibber at first, but then he got better, and he got out of
him that when he had been on sentry-go for about half-an-hour, he
happened to look up at the angle of the barrack wall near where it
joins the magazine tower, and saw a face looking at him over it. He
challenged and got no answer, but the face just stuck there staring at
him; he challenged again, and then, as O'Reilly said, he 'just oop with
his royfle and blazed at it.'" Ballantyne was not above the common
English delusion that he could imitate an Irish brogue.

"Well, what happened then?"

"Well, according to the poor devil's own story, the face just kept on
looking at him and he had another shot at it, and 'My God Almighty,' he
said to O'Reilly, 'it was there always!' While he was saying that to
O'Reilly he began to chuck another fit, and apparently went on chucking
them till he died a couple of hours ago."

"One result of it is," said another man, "that they couldn't get a man
to go on sentry there alone last night. I expect we shall have to
double the sentries there every night as long as we're here."

"Silly asses!" remarked Tomkinson, but he said it without conviction.

After breakfast we went out to look at the wall by the magazine. It
was about eleven feet high, with a coped top, and they told me there
was a deep and wide dry ditch on the outside. A ladder was brought,
and we examined the angle of the wall at which Harris said the face had
appeared. He had made a beautiful shot, one of his bullets having
flicked a piece off the ridge of the coping exactly at the corner.

"It's not the kind of shot a man would make if he had been drinking,"
said Moffat, regretfully abandoning his first simple hypothesis; "he
must have been mad."

"I wish I could find out who his people are," said Brownlow, the
adjutant, who had joined us; "they found in his box a letter to him
from his mother, but we can't make out the name of the place. By Jove,
Yeates, you're an Irishman, perhaps you can help us."

He handed me a letter in a dirty envelope. There was no address given,
the contents were very short, and I may be forgiven if I transcribe
them:--

"My dear Son, I hope you are well as this leaves me at present, thanks
be to God for it. I am very much unaisy about the cow. She swelled up
this morning, she ran in and was frauding and I did not do but to run
up for torn sweeney in the minute. We are thinking it is too much
lairels or an eirub she took. I do not know what I will do with her.
God help one that's alone with himself I had not a days luck since ye
went away. I am thinkin' them that wants ye is tired lookin' for ye.
And so I remain,

"YOUR FOND MOTHER."

"Well, you don't get much of a lead from the cow, do you? And what the
deuce is an eirub?" said Brownlow.

"It's another way of spelling herb," I said, turning over the envelope
abstractedly. The postmark was almost obliterated, but it struck me it
might be construed into the word Skebawn.

"Look here," I said suddenly, "let me see Harris. It's just possible I
may know something about him."

The sentry's body had been laid in the dead-house near the hospital,
and Brownlow fetched the key. It was a grim little whitewashed
building, without windows, save a small one of lancet shape, high up in
one gable, through which a streak of April sunlight fell sharp and
slender on the whitewashed wall. The long figure of the sentry lay
sheeted on a stone slab, and Brownlow, with his cap in his hand, gently
uncovered the face.

I leaned over and looked at it--at the heavy brows, the short nose, the
small moustache lying black above the pale mouth, the deep-set eyes
sealed in appalling peacefulness. There rose before me the wild dark
face of the young man who had hung on my wheel and yelled encouragement
to the winning coxswain at the Lough Lonen Regatta.

"I know him," I said, "his name is Callaghan."