 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information, or to find out how you can volunteer, please go to LibriVox.org. Recording by Andy Minter Some Experiences of an Irish RM by Edith Inonis-Somerville and Martin Ross Chapter 7 A MISS DEAL The wagonette slewed and slackened mysteriously on top of the long hill above Drumcurran. So many remarkable things had happened since we had entrusted ourselves to the guidance of Mr. Bernard Chute that I rose in my place and possessed myself of the break, and in so doing saw the horses with their heads hard in against their chests and their quarters jammed crookedly against the splash-board, being apparently tied into knots by some inexplicable power. Someone's pulling the reins out of my hand! exclaimed Mr. Chute. The horses and pole were by this time making an acute angle with the wagonette, and the groom plunged from the box to their heads. Miss Sally Knox, who was sitting beside me, looked over the edge. Put on the break! The reins are twisted round the axle! she cried, and fell into a fit of laughter. We all, that is to say, Philip, Miss Chute, Miss Knox and I, got out as speedily as might be, but I think without panic. Mr. Chute alone stuck to the ship, with the horses struggling and rearing below him. The groom and I contrived to back them, and by so doing caused the reins to unwind themselves from the axle. It was my fault, said Mr. Chute, hauling them in as fast as we could give them to him. I broke the reins yesterday, and these are the fate-on ones, and about six fathoms long at that, and I forgot and let the slack go overboard. It's all right. I won't do it again. With this reassurance, we confided ourselves once more to the wagonette. As we neared the town of Drumcurran, the fact that we were on our way to a horse-fare became alarmingly apparent. It's as impossible to imagine how we pursued an uninjured course through the companies of horsemen, the crowded carts, the squealing colts, the irresponsible lead horses, and most immutable of all obstacles, the groups of countrywomen, with the hoods of their heavy blue cloaks over their heads. They looked like nuns of some obscure order. They were deaf and blind as ramparts of sandbags. Nothing less callous to human life than a Parisian cab driver could have burst away through them. Many times during that drive I had caused to be thankful for the sterling qualities of Mr. Shoot's break. With its aid he dragged his overfed bays into a crawl, and finally, and not without injury to the varnish, took the wagonette to the Royal Hotel. Every available stall in the yard was by that time filled, and it was only by virtue of the fact that the kitchen maid was nearly related to my cook that the indignant groom was permitted to stable the bays in a den known as the Carthouse. That I should have lent myself to such an expedition was wholly due to my wife. Since Philippa had taken up her residence in Ireland, she had discovered a taste for horses that was not to be extinguished, even by an occasional afternoon on the Quaker, whose paces had become harder than rock in his many journeys to petty sessions. She had also discovered the Shoot's, newcomers on the outer edge of our vast visiting district, and between them this party to drum-currant horse-fare had been devised. Philippa proposed to buy herself a hunter. Bernard Shoot wished to do the same, possibly two hunters, money being no difficulty with this fortunate young man. Miss Sally Knox was of the company, and I also had been kindly invited as to a missionary meeting to come and bring my check-book. The only saving clause in the affair was the fact that Mr. Flurry Knox was to meet us at the scene of action. The fair was held in a couple of large fields outside the town and on the farther bank of the Curran-Hilty River. Across a wide and glittering ford, horses of all sizes and sorts were splashing, and a long row of stepping-stones was hot and staggered and scrambled over by a ceaseless variety of foot-passengers. A man with a cart plied as a ferry-boat, doing a heavy trade among the apple-women and vendors of cro-beens, alias Pig's feet, a grisly delicacy peculiar to Irish open-air holiday-making, and a July sun blazed on a scene that even Miss Cecilia Shoot found to be almost repayment enough for the alarms of the drive. As a rule I am so bored by driving that I find it reviving to be frightened," she said to me, as we climbed to safety on a heathery ridge above the fields dedicated to galloping the horses. But when my brother scraped all those people off one side of that car and ran the pole into the cart of lemonade-bottles, I began to wish for courage to tell him I was going to get out and walk home. Well, if you only knew it," said Bernard, who was spreading rugs over the low firs-bushes in the touching belief that the prickles would not come through. The time you came nearest to walking home was when the lash of the whip got twisted round Nancy's tail. Miss Knox, you're an authority on these things. Don't you think it would be a good scheme to have a light anchor in the trap? And when the horses began to play the fool, you'd heave the anchor over the fence and bring them up all standing. They wouldn't stand for very long," remarked Miss Sally. Oh, that's all right. Return the inventor. I'd have a dodge to catch them loose with the pole and the splinter-bar. You'd never see them again," responded Miss Knox demurely. If you thought that mattered, it would be the brightest feature of the case," said Miss Shoot. She was surveying Miss Sally through her past nay as she spoke, and was, I have reason to believe, deciding that by the end of the day her brother would be well on in the first stages of his fifteenth love affair. It has possibly been suspected that Mr. Bernard Shoot was a sailor. Had been a sailor, rather, until within the last year, when he had tumbled into a fortune and a property and out of the navy in the shortest time on record. His enthusiasm for horses had been nourished by the highlings of Malta and other resorts of Her Majesty's ships, and his knowledge of them was, so far, bounded by the fact that it was more usual to come off over their heads than their tails. For the rest he was a clean-shaved and personable youth, with the laugh, which I may, without offence of intention, define as possessing a watcheriness, special to his profession, and a habit engendered, no doubt, sojourns in the antipodes, of getting his clothes in large hideous consignments from a naval outfitter. It was eleven o'clock, and the fare was in full swing. Its vortex was in the centre of the field below us, where a low bank of sods and earth had been erected as a trial jump, with a yelling crowd of men and boys at either end, acting instead of the usual wings to prevent a swerve. Strings of reluctant horses were scourged over the bank by dozens of willing hands, while exhortation, cheers, and criticism were freely showered upon each performance. Give the knees to the saddle-boy, and leave the heel a slack! That's a nice horse. He'd keep a jock on his back when another'd throw him. Well jumped me, God, she fled that fairly, as an ungainly three-year-old flounced over the bank without putting a foof on it, and her owner, unloosing his pride in similarly after the manner of his race. Aha! When she give a let-man, she's that free, she's like a hare for it. A giggling group of country-girls, elbowed their way past us out of the crowd of spectators, one of the number inciting her fellows to hurry on to the other field, until they'd seen the lads' garip in the houses, to which another responded that she'd be skinned alive for the houses. The party sped on their way. We, i.e. my wife, Miss Knox, Bernard Shute and myself, followed in their wake, a matter by no means as easy as it looked. Miss Shute had exhibited her wanted intelligence by remaining on the hilltop with the spectator. She had not reached the happy point of possessing a mind ten years older than her age and a face ten years younger without also developing the gift of sending boredom from afar. We squeezed past the noses and heels of fidgety horses and circumnavigated their attendant groups of critics, while half-trained brutes and snaffles bolted to nowhere and back again, and winneying foals ran to and fro in search of their mothers. A moderate bank divided the upper from the lower fields, and as every feasible spot in it was commanded by a refusing horse, the choice of a place and moment for crossing it required judgment. I got Philippa across it in safety. Miss Knox, though as capable as any young woman in Ireland of getting over a bank, either on horseback or on her own legs, had to submit to the assistance of Mr. Shute, and the laws of dynamics decreed that a force sufficient to raise a bow-ranker should hoist her seven-stone-odd to the top of the bank with such speed that she landed half on her knees and half in the arms of her pioneer. A group of portentously quiet men stood near, their eyes on the ground, their hands in their pockets. They were all dressed so much alike that I did not at first notice that Flurry Knox was among them. When I did, I perceived that his eyes, instead of being on the ground, were surveying Mr. Shute with that measure of disapproval that he habitually bestowed upon strange men. Here later than I thought should be, he said, I have a horse half-bought for Mrs. Yates. It's that old mare of Barbie Bennett's. She makes a little noise, and you couldn't throw her down if you tried. Barbie wants thirty pounds for her, but I think you might get her for less. She's in the hotel stables and you can see her when you go into lunch. We moved on towards the rushy bank of the river, and Philippa and Sally Knox seated themselves on a low rock, looking in their white frocks as incongruous in that dingy preoccupied assemblage as the dreamy meadow-sweet and purple spires of loose strife that throng the river banks. Bernard Shute had been lost in the shifting maze of men and horses who were, for the most part, galloping with the blind fury of charging bulls. But presently among a party who seemed to be riding the finish of a race, we described our friend, and a second or two later he hauled a brown mare to a standstill in front of us. The fellow was asking forty-five pounds for her. He said to Miss Sally, she's a nail at a gallop. Her answer was the mountain hare, said the owner of the mare, hurrying up to continue her family history. And he was the grandest horse in all the four baronies. He was forty-two years of age when he died. And they waked him. The same as she'd waked a Christian. They had whisky and parter and bread and a piper in it. The mountain hare colts his no great things. Interrupted, Mr. Shute's groom contemptuously. I'd seen a coat once that was one of his stock. And if there was forty men in their wives and they after him with sticks he wouldn't leap a sod of turf. Lep is it! Ejeculated the owner in a voice shrill without rage. You may lead that mare out through the country, but there isn't a fence in it that she wouldn't go up to it as independent as if she was going to her bed. And your honour's ladyship knows that damn well, Miss Knox. You want too much money for her, McGarthy. Return, Miss Sally, with her little air of pretty natural wisdom. God pardon you, Miss Knox! Sure, a lady like you knows well that forty-five pounds is no money for that mare. Forty-five pounds! He laughed. It has been as good for me to make her a present at the gentleman all out. I'll take three far things less for her. She's too grand entirely for a poor farmer like me. And if it wasn't for the long week family I have I wouldn't part with her under twice the money. Three fine lumps of daughters in America paying his rent for him, commented Flurry in the background. That's the long week family. Bernard dismounted and slapped the mare's ribs, approving me. I haven't had such a gallop since I was at Rio, he said. What do you think of her, Miss Knox? Then, without waiting for an answer, I like her. I think I may as well give him the forty-five and have done with it. At these ingenuous words I saw a spasm of anguish across the countenance of McCarthy, easily interpreted as the first pang of a lifelong regret that he had not asked twice the money. Flurry Knox put up an eyebrow and winked at me. Mr. Shoot's groom turned away for very shame. Sally Knox laughed with the deplorable levity of nineteen. Thus, with a brevity absolutely scandalous in the eyes of all beholders, the bargain was concluded. Flurry strolled up to Philippa, observing an elaborate remoteness from Miss Sally and from Mr. Shoot. I believe I am selling a horse here myself today, he said. Would you like to have a look at him, Mrs. Yates? Oh, are you selling Knox? Struck in Bernard to whose brain the glory of buying a horse had obviously mounted like new wine. I want another, and I know yours are the right sort. Well, as you seem so fond of galloping, said Flurry sardonically, this one might suit you. You don't mean the moonlighter, said Miss Knox, looking fixedly at him. Supposing I did, have you anything to say against him? replied Flurry. Decidedly, he was in a very bad temper. Miss Sally shrugged her shoulders and gave a little shred of a laugh, but said no more. In a comparatively secluded corner of the field, we came upon moonlighter, sidling and fussing with flickering ears, his tail tightly tucked in and long back humped in a manner that bowed it little good. Even to my untutored eye he appeared to be an uncommonly good-looking animal, a well-bred gray, with shoulders that raked back as far as the eye could wish, the true Irish jumping hind-quarters and a showy head and neck. It was obvious that nothing except Michael Hallehan's adroit chucks at his bridle kept him from displaying his jumping-powers free of charge. Not the pregnant and intimidating silence of the connoisseur, but the tongue-tied muteness of helpless ignorance. His eye for horses had most probably been formed on circus posters and the advertisements of a well-known embrication and moonlighter approximated in colour and conduct to these models. I can see he's a ripping, fine horse, he said, at length. I think I should like to try him. Miss Knox changed countenance perceptibly and gave a perturbed glance at Flurry. Flurry remained impenetrably unamable. I don't pretend to be a judge of horses. Went on, Mr. Shoot. I dare say I needn't tell you that with a very engaging smile at Miss Sally. But I like this one awfully. As even Philippe said afterwards, she would not have given herself away like that over buying a reel of cotton. Are you quite sure he's really the sort of horse you want? Said Miss Knox, with rather more colour in her face than usual, he said, he's only four years old and he's hardly a finished hunter. The object of her philanthropy looked rather puzzled. What? Can't he jump? he said. Is it jump? exclaimed Michael Hallehan, unable any longer to contain himself. Is it the horse that jumped five foot of a clothes-line in Heaven and Yard, enough one on his back but himself and didn't leave so much as a track of his hoof on the quilt that was hanging on it? That's about good enough, said Mr. Shoot, with his large friendly laugh. Watch your price, Knox. I must have the horse that jumped the quilt. I'd like to try him if you don't mind. There are some jolly-looking banks over there. My price is a hundred sovereigns, said Flurry. You can try him if you like. Oh, don't! cried Sally impulsively, but Bernard's foot was already in the stirrup. I call it disgraceful. I heard her say in a low voice to her kinsman. You know he can't ride. The kinsman permitted himself a malign smile. That's his look out, he said. Perhaps the unexpected docility with which moonlighter allowed himself to be maneuvered through the crowd was due to Bernard's thirteen stone. At all events his progress through a gate into the next field was unacceptable. Bernard, however, had no idea of encouraging this tranquility he had come out to gallop. And without further ceremony he drove his heels into moonlighter's sides and took the consequences in the shape of a very fine and able buck. How he remained within even visiting distance of the saddle it is impossible to explain. Perhaps his early experience in the rigging stood him in good stead in the matter of hanging on by his hands. But, however preserved, he did remain and went away down the field at what he himself subsequently described as the rate of knots. Fleury flung away his cigarette and ran to a point of better observation. We all ran, including Michael Hallihane and various onlookers, and were in time to see Mr. Shoot charging the least advantageous spot in a hollow-faced, fuzzy bank. Nothing but the grey horse's extreme activity got the pair safely over. He jumped it on a slant, changed feet in the heart of a fursbush and was lost to views. In what relative positions Bernard and his steed lighted was to us a matter of conjecture. When we caught sight of them again moonlighter was running away with his rider still on his back while the slope of the ground lent wings to his flight. That young gentleman will be apt to be killed, said Michael Hallihane with composure, not to say enjoyment. He'll be into the long bog with him pretty soon, said Fleury, his keen eye tracking the fugitive Oh! I thought he was off that time! exclaimed Miss Sally with a gasp in which consternation and amusement were blended. There! He is into the bog! It did not take us long to arrive at the scene of disaster to which, as to a dogfight, other foot-runners were already hurrying and on our arrival we found things looking remarkably unpleasant for Mr. Shoot and moonlighter. The latter was sunk to his withers in the water, the former submerged to the waist three yards farther away in the bog was trying to drag himself towards firm ground by the aid of tussocks of wiry grass. Hit him! shouted Fleury. Hit him! He'll sink if he stops there! Mr. Shoot turned on his advisor a face streaming with black mud out of which his brown eyes and white teeth gleamed with undaunted cheerfulness. All John's men, and all of them, all wanted cheerfulness. All jolly fine! he called back. If I let go this grass I'll sink too! A shout of laughter from the male portion of the spectators sympathetically greeted this announcement and a dozen equally futile methods of escape were suggested. Among those who had joined us was fortunately one of the many boys who pervaded the fair selling halters and by means of several of these knotted together a line of communication was established. Moonlighter, who had fallen into the state of inane stupor in which horses in his plight so often indulge was aroused to activity by showers of stones and imprecations but faintly chastened by the presence of ladies. Bernard, hanging onto his tail belaboured him with a cane and finally the reins proving good at the task of towing the victims ashore was achieved. He's my nox, you know! Mr. Shute's first words as he scrambled to his feet. He's the best horse I ever got across! Worth twice the money! Faith, he's faith, he plays. Remarked by stander. Oh, do go and borrow some dry clothes! Interposed Philippa practically. Surely there must be some one! There's a shop in the town where he can strip a peg for thirteen and nine pence, said Flurry grimly. I wouldn't care myself about the clothes here. The morning sun shone jovially upon moonlight and his rider caking momentally the black bog stuff with which both were coated and as the group disintegrated and returned to go back every man present was pleasurably aware that the buttons of Mr. Shute's riding-bridges had burst at the knee causing a large triangular hiatus above his gator. Well! said Flurry conclusively to me as we retraced our steps. I always thought the fellow was a fool, but I never thought he was such a damn fool. It seemed an interminable time since breakfast when our party somewhat shattered by the stirring events of the morning found itself gathered in an upstairs room at the Royal Hotel, waiting for a meal that had been ordained some two hours before. The air was charged with the mingled odours of boiling cabbage and frying mutton. We wanted to speak of them with disgust, but our souls yearned to them. Female ministrants with rustling skirts and pounding feet raced along the passages with trays that were never for us and opening doors released roaring gusts of conversation, blended with the clatter of knives and forks and still we starved. Even the ginger-coloured check-suit lately labelled the Sandringham Wonderful Value Sixteen and Ninepence in the window of Drum Curran's leading mart and now displayed on Mr. Shoots all two lengthy limbs had lost its power to charm. Oh, don't tear that bell quite out by the roots burnered," said his sister from the heart of a lamentable yawn. I dare say it only amuses them when we ring, but it may remind them that we are still alive. Major Yates, do you or do you not regret the pig's feet? More than I can express," I said, turning from the window where I had been looking down at the endless succession of horses' backs and men's hats moving in two opposing currents in the street below. I dare say, if we talk about them for a while, we shall feel ill, and that will be better than nothing. At this juncture, however, a heavy laden tray thumped against the door and our repast was born into the room by a hot young woman in creaking boots who hoarsely explained that what kept her was waiting on the potatoes and that the old pan that was in it was playing puck with the beef steaks. Well," said Miss Shoot, as she began to try conclusions between a blunt knife and a bullet-proof mutton chop, I have never lived in the country before, but I've always been given to understand that the village in was one of its chief attractions. She delicately moved the potato dish so as to cover the traces of a bygone egg, and her glance lingered on the flies that dragged their way across a melting mound of salt butter. I like local colour, but I don't care about it on the tablecloth. Well, I'm feeling quite anxious about Irish country hotels now," said Bernard. They're getting so civilised and respectable. After all, when you go back to England no one cares a pin to hear that you've been done up to the knocker. That don't amuse them a bit, but all my friends are as pleased as I tell them of the pot-house where I slept in my clothes rather than face the sheets. Or how, when I complained to the landlady the next day, she said, cocky-up, wasn't it his reverence the dean of Kilcoe had them last? We smiled onely. What I chiefly felt was respect for any hungry man who could jest in the presence of such a meal. All this time my hunter hasn't been bought," said Philippa presently, leaning back in her chair in a contest with her beefsteak. Who is Bobby Bennett? Will his horse carry a lady? Sally Knox looked at me and began to laugh. You should ask Major Yates about Bobby Bennett," she said. Confound, Miss Sally, it had never seemed worthwhile to tell Philippa all that story about my doing up Miss Bobby Bennett's hair, and I sank my face in my tumbler of stagnant whiskey and soda to conceal the colour that suddenly adorned it. Any intelligent man will understand that it was a situation calculated to amuse the ungodly but without any real fun in it. I explained Miss Bennett as briefly as possible, and at all the more critical points Miss Sally's hazel-green eyes roamed slowly and mercilessly towards me. You haven't told Miss Yates that she's one of the greatest horse copers in the country," she said when I had got through somehow. She can sell you a very good horse sometimes, and a very bad one too as she gets the chance. No one will ever explain to me, said Miss Shoot, scanning us all with her dark, half-amused and wholly sophisticated eyes. Why, horse-coping is more respectable than cheating at cards. I rather respect people who are able to cheat at cards. If everyone did, it would make Wist so much more cheerful. But there's no forgiveness for dealing yourself the right card, no condemnation for dealing your neighbour a very wrong horse. Your neighbour is supposed to be able to take care of himself," said Bernard. Well, why doesn't that apply to card-players?" returned his sister. Are they all in a state of helpless innocence? I'm helplessly innocent," announced Philippa. So I hope Miss Bennett won't deal me a wrong horse. Oh, her mare is one of the right ones," said Miss Sally. She's a lovely jumper, and manners are the very best. The door opened and flurry knocks put in his head. Bobby Bennett's downstairs. He said to me, mysteriously, I got up, not without consciousness of Miss Sally's eye, and prepared to follow him. You'd better come to Mrs. Yates to keep an eye on him. Don't let him give her more than thirty. And if he gives that, she should return him to sovereigns. This last injunction showed in a whisper as we descended the stairs. Miss Bennett was in the crowded yard of the hotel, looking handsome and overdressed, and she greeted me with just that touch of old lang-zine in her manner that I could best have dispensed with. I turned to the business in hand without delay. The brown mare was led forth from the stable and paraded for our benefit. She was one of those inconspicuous meritorious animals about whom there seems nothing particular to say, and I felt her legs and looked hard at her hocks, and was not much so wiser. It's no use by saying she doesn't make a noise, said Miss Bobby, because everyone in the country will tell you she does. You can have a vet, if you like, and that's the only fault he can find with her. But if Mrs. Yates hasn't hunted before now, I'll guarantee Cross Keen is just the thing for her. She's really safe and confidential. My little brother Georgie has hunted her. You'll remember Georgie made she Yates the night of the ball, you know, and he's only eleven. Mr. Knox can tell you what sort she is. Oh, she's a grand mare, said Mr. Knox, thus appealed to. He had heard her coming three fields are like a German band. And well for you, if you could keep within three fields of her, retorted Miss Bennet. At all events, she's not like the hunter you sold uncle, that used to kick the stars as soon as I put my foot in the stirrup. Twas the size of the foot frightened him, said Flurry. Do you know how Uncle cured him? said Miss Bennet, turning her back on her adversary. He had him tied, head and tail across the yard gate, and every man that came in had to get over his back. That's no bad one, said Flurry. Philippa looked from one to the other in bewilderment, while the badinage continued, swift it went on at intervals for the next ten minutes, and at the end of that time I had bought the mare for thirty pounds, as Miss Bennet said nothing about giving me back two of them, I had not the nerve to suggest it. After this, Flurry and Miss Bennet went away, and were swallowed up in the fair. We returned to our friends upstairs, and began to arrange about getting home. This, among other difficulties, involved the tracking and capture of the mare, and took so long that it necessitated tea. Bernard and I had settled to ride our new purchases home, and the groom was to drive the wagonet, an alteration ardently furthered by Miss Chute. The afternoon was well advanced when Bernard and I struggled through the turmoil of the hotel yard in search of our horses, and the hotel osloor being nowhere to be found, the chutesman saddled our animals for us, and then withdrew with the bays in the calf-house. Good business for me that Knox is sending the grey-horse home for me, remarked Bernard as his new mare followed him tractably out of the stall. He'd have been rather a handful in this whole of a place. He shoved his way out of the yard in front of me, seemingly quite comfortable, and at home upon the descendant of the mountain here, and I followed as closely as drunken carmen and shafts of erratic carts would permit. Crosquine decided tendency to turn to the right on leaving the yard, but she took my leftward tug in good part, and we moved on through the streets of Drumcaron, with a dignity that was only impaired by the irrepressible determination of Mr. Chute's new trousers to run up his leg. It was a trifle disappointing that Crosquine should carry her nose in the air like a camel, but I set it down to my own bad hands, and to that cause I also imputed her frequent desire to stop, a fire that appeared to coincide with every fourth or fifth public house on the line of March. Indeed, at the last corner before we left the town, Miss Bennet's mayor and I had a serious difference of opinion in the course of which she mounted the pavement and remained planted in front of a very disreputable public house, whose owner had been before me several times for various infringements of the licensing acts. Bernard and the Corder Boys were of course much pleased. I inwardly resolved to let Miss Bennet know how her groom occupied his time in drum current. We got out into the calm of the country road without further incident, and I there discovered that Crosquine was possessed of a dromedary swiftness in trotting, that the action was about as comfortable as the dromedary's, and that it was extremely difficult to moderate the pace. I say, this is something like going," said Bernard, cantering hard beside me with pain and every appearance of happiness. Do you mean to keep it up all the way? You better ask this devil," I replied, hauling on the futile ring snaffle. Miss Bennet must have an arm like a prize fighter. If this is what she calls confidential, I don't want her confidences. After another half-mile, during which I cursed Flurrinox and registered a vow that Philippa should ride Crosquine in a cavalry bit, we reached the crossroads at which Bernard's way parted from mine. Another difference of opinion between my wife's hunter and me here took place, this time on the subject of parting from our companion, and I experienced that peculiar inward sinking that accompanies the birth of the conviction one has been stuck. There were still some eight miles between me and home, but I had at least the consolation of knowing that the brown mare could easily cover it in forty minutes. But in this also disappointment awaited me, dropping her head to about the level of her knees, the mare subsided into a walk as slow as that of the slowest cow, and very similar in general style. In this manner I progressed her for a further mile, breathing forth like St. Paul, threatening and slaughters against Bobby Bennet and all her confederates, and then the idea occurred to me that many really first-class hunters were very poor hacks. I consoled myself with this for a further period and presently an opportunity for testing it presented itself. The road made a long loop round the flank of a hill, and it was possible to save half a mile or so by getting into the fields. It was a shortcut I had often taken on the Quaker and it involved nothing more serious than a couple of low stone gaps and an infantile bank. I turned Croskine at the first of these. She was evidently surprised. Being in an excessively bad temper I beat her in a way that surprised her even more, and she jumped the stones precipitately and with the knees that showed she knew quite well what she was about. I vented some further emotion upon her by the convenient medium of my cane and galloped her across the field and over the bank, which as they say in these parts she fled, without putting an iron on it. It was not the right way to jump it, but it was inspiriting. And when she had disposed of the next gap without hesitation my waning confidence in Miss Bennet began to revive. I cantered over the ridge of the hill and down it towards the cottage near which I was accustomed to get out onto the road again. As I neared my wanted opening in the fence, I saw that it had been filled by a stout pole, well fixed into the bank at each end, but not more than three feet high. Croskine pricked her ears at it with intelligence. I trotted her at it and gave her a whack. Ages afterwards there was someone speaking on the blared edge of a dream that I was dreaming about nothing in particular. I went on dreaming and was impressed by the shape of a fat jug, mottled white and blue that intruded itself painfully, and I again heard voices very urgent and full of effort but quite outside any concern of mine. I also made an effort of some kind. I was doing my very best to be good and polite, but I was dreaming in a place that worden was engrossing and daylight was cold and let in some unknown unpleasantness. For that time the dream got the better of daylight, and then apropos of nothing I was standing up in a house with someone's arm round me. The mottled jug was there, so was the unpleasantness and I was talking with most careful old world politeness. Sit down now, you're all right! Bobby Bennet, who was mopping my face with a handkerchief dipped in the jug, I perceived that I was asking what had happened. She fell over the stick with you, said Miss Bennet, the dirty brute. With another great effort I hooked myself on to the march of events as a truck is dragged out of a siding and hooked on to a train. Oh, the Lord save us! said a grey-haired woman who held the jug. You destroyed entirely, oh, glory be to the mouse for a willow gourd me hardly leapt across my shift when I see'd him under the horse. Go out and see if the trap's coming, said Miss Bennet. He should have found the doctor by this. She stared very closely at my face and seemed to find it easier to talk in short sentences. We must get those cuts looking better before Mrs. Yates comes. After an interval, during which unexpected places in my head ate from the cold water, the desire to be polite and coherent again came on me. I'm sure it was not your mayor's fault, I said. Miss Bennet laughed to very little. I was glad to see her laugh. It had struck me her face was strangely haggard and frightened. Well, of course it wasn't poor Croskine's fault, she said. She's nearly home with Mr. Shute by now. That's why I came after you. Mr. Shute, I said, wasn't he at the fair that day? He was, answered Miss Bobby, looking at me with very compassionate eyes. You and he got on each other's horses by mistake at the hotel, and you got the worst of the exchange. Oh, I said, without even trying to understand. He's here within your honour's ladyship, Mrs. Yates' mum, shouted the grey-haired woman at the door. Don't be uneasy, of course. He's doing grand. Sure, I'm telling Miss Bennet that she couldn't give him bit of care. The grey-haired woman laughed. End of chapter 7 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to find out how you can volunteer, please go to LibriVox.org Recording by Andy Minter Some experiences of an Irish R.M. by Edith in only Somerville and Martin Ross Chapter 8 The Holy Island For three days of November a white fog stood motionless over the country. All day and all night smothered booms and bangs away to the south-west told that the fast-net gun was hard at work, and the sirens of the American liners uplifted their monstrous female voices as they felt their way along the coast of Cork. On the third afternoon the wind began to whine about the windows of Shrelaine and the barometer fell like a stone. At eleven p.m. the storm rushed upon us with the roar and the suddenness of a train. The chimneys bellowed, the tall old house quivered and the yelling wind drove against it as a man puts his shoulder toward the door to burst it in. We none of us got much sleep and if Mrs. Gaduggan is to be believed which experience assures me she is not she spent the night in devotional exercises and administering to the panic-stricken kitchen-made by the light of a blessed candle. All that day the storm screamed on dry-eyed at nightfall the rain began and next morning every servant in the house was a messenger of Job laden with tales of leakages floods and fallen trees and inflated with the ill-concealed glory of their kind in evil tidings. To Peter Gaduggan who had been to early mass was reserved the crowning satisfaction of reporting that a big vessel had gone on the rocks at Yocan Point the evening before and was breaking up fast. It was rumoured that the crew had got ashore but this feature, being favourable and uninteresting as possible in the background. Mrs. Gaduggan who had been to America in an ocean liner became at once the latest authority on shipwrecks and was of the opinion that whoever would be drowned in it wouldn't be them lads assailants. Sharr wasn't there the greatest storm ever was in it the time myself was on the se and what did them fellows do but to put us below entirely in the ship and close down the doors on us the way themselves had leg it when we'd be drowned in. This view of the position was so startlingly novel that Philippa withdrew suddenly from the task of ordering dinner and fell up the kitchen stairs in unsuitable laughter. Philippa has not the most rudimentary capacity for keeping her countenance. That afternoon I was wrapped in the slumber, barmyest and most profound that follows on a wet Sunday luncheon when Murray, our D.I. of police drove up in uniform on the top of a gust that set every door banging and every picture dancing on the walls. He looked as if his eyes had been blown out of his head and he wanted something to eat very badly. I had been down at the wreck since ten o'clock this morning he said, waiting for her to break up and once she does there'll be trouble she's an American ship and she's full up with rum and bacon and butter and all sorts Bozenkett is there with his coast guards and there are five hundred country people on the strand at this moment waiting for the fun to begin. I've got ten of my fellows there now and I wish I had as many more. You'd better come back with me, Yeats. We may want the riot act before all's done. The heavy rain had ceased but it seemed as if it had fed the wind instead of calming it and when Murray and I drove out of Shrelyn the whole dirty sky was moving full sail in from the south west and the telegraph wires were hanging in a loop coast outside the gate nothing except a skiborn cart-horse would have faced the hooping charges of the wind that came at us across Corrin Lake. Stimulated mysteriously by whistles from the driver Murray's yellow harling pounded woodenly along against the blast till the smell of the torn seaweed was born upon it and we saw the Atlantic waves come towering into the bay of Trelegocque. The ship was or had been a remastered bark. Two of her masks were gone and her bow stood high out of water on the reef that forms one of the shark-like jaws of the bay. The long strand was crowded with black groups of people from the bank of heavy shingle that had been hurled over onto the road down to the slope where the waves pitched themselves and climbed and fought and tore the gravel back with them as though they had dug their fingers in. The people were nearly all men dressed solemnly and hideously in their Sunday clothes. Most of them had come straight from Mass without any dinner, true to that Irish instinct that places its fun before its food. That the wreck was regarded as a spree of the largest kind was sufficiently obvious. Our car pulled up at a public house that stood a skew between the road and the shingle. It was humming with those whom Irish publicans are pleased to call a bonner feeds with the same class were clustered round the door. Under the wall on the lee side was seated a bagpiper droning out the Irish washerwoman with nodding head and tapping heel, and a young man was cutting a few steps of a jig for the delectation of a group of girls. So far Murray's constabulary had done nothing but exhibit their imposing chest measurements and spotless uniforms to the Atlantic, and Bozanquette's coast guards had only salvaged some spars the debris of a boat and a dead sheep, but their time was coming. As we stumbled down over the shingle, battered by the wind and pelted by clots of foam, someone beside me shouted, she's gone! A hill of water had smothered the wreck, and when it fell from her again nothing was left but the bows, with the bowsprit hanging from them in a tangle of rigging. The clouds bronzed by an unseen sunset hung low over her. In that greedy pack of waves with the remorseless rocks above and below her, she seemed the most lonely and tormented of creatures. About half an hour afterwards the cargo began to come ashore on the top of the rising tide. Barrels were plunging and diving in the trough of the waves, like a school of porpoises. They were pitched up the beach in waist-deep rushes of foam. They rolled down again and were swung up and shouldered by the next wave, on Tiddler's ground with the coast-guards. Some of the barrels were big and dangerous, some were small and nimble like young pigs, and the blue-jackets were up to their middles as their prey dodged and ducked, and the police lined out along the beach to keep back the people. Ten men of the RIC can do a great deal, but they cannot be in more than twenty or thirty places at the same instant. Therefore they could hardly cope with a scattered and extremely active mob of four hundred, many of whom had taken advantage of their privileges as bona fide travellers, and all of whom were determined on getting at the rum. As the dusk fell, the thing got more and more out of hand. The people had found out that the big punch-uns held the rum and had succeeded in capturing one. In the twinkling of an eye it was broached and fifty backs were shoving round it like a football-scrummage. I have heard many rows in my time. I have seen two Irish regiments, one of the militia, at each other's throats in Firmoy barracks. I have heard Philip as water-spaniel and two fox-terriers hunting a strange cat round the dairy, but never have I known such untrammeled bedlam as that which yelled round the rum casks on Tralagoch Strand. For it was soon not a question of one broach cask, or even of two. The barrels were coming in fast, so fast that it was impossible for the representatives of law and order to keep on any sort of terms with them. The people shouting with laughter stove in the cask and drank the rum at 34 degrees above proof, out of their hands, out of their hats, out of their boots. Women came fluttering over the hillside through the twilight, carrying jugs, milk-pales, anything that would hold the liquor. I saw one of them roaring with laughter tilt a filthy zinc bucket to an old man's lips. With the darkness came anarchy. The rising tide brought more and yet more booty. Great spas came lunging in on the lap of the waves, mixed up with cabin furniture, seamen's chests, and the black and slippery barrels. And the country people continued to flock in, and the drinking became more and more unbridled. Murray sent for more men than the doctor, and we slaved on hopelessly in the dark, collaring half-drunken men, showing pig-headed casks and hills of shingle hustling in among groups of roaring drinkers. We rescued perhaps one barrel in half a dozen. I began to know that there were men there who were not drunk and were not idle. I was also aware, as this strenuous hours of darkness passed, of an occasional rumble of cartwheels on the road. It was evident that the casks which were broached were the least part of the looting, but even they were beyond our control. The most that wasn't yet Murray and I could do was to concentrate our forces on the casks that had been secured, and to organize charges upon the swilling crowds in order to upset the casks that they had broached. Already men and boys were lying about, limp as leeches, motionless as the dead. They'll kill them to tell us before morning at this rate, shouted Murray to me. They're drinking it by the quart. Here's another barrel. Come on! We rallied our small forces, and after a brief but furious struggle succeeded in capsizing it. It poured away in a flood over the stones, over the prostrate figures that sprawled on them, and a howl of reproach followed. If you pour away any more of that major, said an unctuous voice in my ear, you'll intoxicate the stones and they'll be getting up and knocking us down. I had been aware of a fat shoulder next to mine in the throng as we heaved the punch and over, and I now recognized the ponderous wit and falstaffian figure of Mr. James Canty, a noted member of the Skiborn Board of Guardians, and the owner of a large farm near at hand. I never saw a worse work on this strand. He went on. I consider these debaucheries a disgrace to the country. Mr. Canty was famous as an orator, and I presume it was from long practice among his fellow PLGs that he was able, without apparent exertion, to out-shout the storm. At this juncture the long-awaited reinforcements arrived, and along with them came Dr. Jerome Hickey, armed with a black bag. Having mentioned that the bag contained a pump, not one of the common or garden variety, and that no pump on board a foundering ship had more arduous labours to perform, I prefer to pass to other themes. The wreck, which had at first appeared to be as inexhaustible and as variously stopped as that in the Swiss family Robinson, was beginning to fail in its supply. The crowd were by this time for the most incapable from drink, and the fresh contingent of police tackled their work with some prospect of success by the light of a tar-barrel contributed by the owner of the public house. At about the same time I began to be aware that I was aching with fatigue, that my clothes hung heavy and soaked upon me, that my face was stiff with the salt spray and the bitter wind, and that it was two hours past dinner-time. The possibility of fried salt herrings and hot whiskey and water at the public house rose dazzlingly before my mind, when Mr. Canty again crossed my path. In my opinion you have the whole cargo under control now, major," he said, and the police and the sailors should be able to account for it all now by the help of the light. Wasn't I the finished fool that I didn't think to send up to my house for a tar-barrel before now? Ah, well, we're all foolish sometimes. But indeed it's time for us to give over, and that's what I'm after saying to the captain and Mr. Murray, you're exhausted now, the three of you, and if I might make so bold, I'd suggest that you come up to my little place and have what had warmed you up before you'd go home. It's only a few perches up the road. The tide had turned, the rain had begun again, and the tar-barrel illumined the fact that Dr. Hickey's dreadful duties alone were pressing. We held a council and finally followed Mr. Canty picking our way through wreckage of all kinds, including the human variety. Near the public house I stumbled over something that was soft and had a squeak in it. It was the piper with his head and shoulders in an overturned rum-barrel and the bagpipe still under his arm. I knew the outward appearance of Mr. Canty's house very well. It was a typical southern farmhouse with dirty whitewashed walls, a slated roof, and small hermetically sealed windows staring at the morass of manure which constituted the yard. We followed Mr. Canty up the filthy lane that led to it, picked our way round vague and squelching spurs of the manure heap, and were finally led through the kitchen into a stifling best parlour. Mrs. Canty, a vast and slatenly matron, had evidently made preparations for us. There was a newly lighted fire pouring flame up the chimney from layers of bogwood. There was whiskey and brandy on the table, and a plateful of biscuits, sugared in white and pink. Upon our hostess was a black silk dress, which indifferently concealed the fact that she was short of bootlaces and that the boots themselves had made many excursions to the yard and none to the blacking-bottle. Her manners, however, were admirable, and whilst I live I shall not forget her potato cakes. They came in hot and hot from a pot oven, they were speckled with caraway seeds, they swam in salt butter and we ate them shamelessly and greasily, and washed them down with hot whiskey and water. I knew to a nicety how ill I should be the next day, and he did not. Well, gentlemen, remarked Mr. Canty later on in his best Board of Guardians manner, I've seen many wrecks between this and the Misenhead, but I never witnessed a scene of modest graceful excess than what was in it to-night. Here, here, murmured Bosun Kett with unseemly levity. I should say, went on Mr. Canty, there was at one time to-night upwards of one hundred men dead drunk on the strand, or anyway so drunk that if they'd attempted to spake they'd foam at the mouth. The creatures interjected Mrs. Canty sympathetically, but if they're drunk today, mentioned our host, it's nothing at all to what they'll be to-morrow and after to-morrow, and it won't be on the strand they'll be drinking it. Why, where will it be, said Bosun Kett, with his disconcerting English way of asking a point-blank question? Mr. Canty passed his hand over his red cheeks. There would be plenty asking that before all said and done, Captain," he said with a compassionate smile, and there would be plenty that could give the answer if they'd like. But, by dam, I don't think you'll be apt to get much out of the ochan, boys. That Lord Savest would be better to keep out from the likes of them, put in Mrs. Canty, sliding a fresh avalanche of potato cakes on the dish. Didn't they pull the clothes off the gager and pour patine down his throat till he ran screeching through the streets of Skiborn? James Canty chuckled. I remember there was a wreck here one time and the underwriters put me in charge of the cargo. Brandy it was, cases of the best French brandy. The people had a song about it. What's this, the first verse was, One night on the rocks of your barn, came the bark as a bell of so dandy, pieces she went before dawn, herself and her cargo of brandy, and all met of watery grave, accepting the vessel's carpenter, poor fellow too far from his home. Mr. Canty chanted these touching lines in a tuneful, if weasy tenor. Well, gentlemen, we're all friends here, he continued, and it's no harm to mention that this man below at the public house was asking me would I let him have some of it for a consideration. The salivant says I to him, if you run down gold in a cup in place of the brandy I wouldn't give it to you. Of course, says I, I'm not saying, but that if a bottle was to get to crack of a stick and to be broken and a man to drink a glass out of it that would be no more than an accident. That's no good to me, says he, but brandy at cork, says he, by the holy German, says he, saying an awful curse. I'd sell twenty-five out of it. Well, indeed, it was true for him, it was grand stuff. As the saying is, it would make a horse out of a cow. It appears to be a handy sort of place for keeping a pub, said Bowsen Kett. Shut the door, Margaret, said Mr. Canty with elaborate caution. It would be a queer place that wouldn't be handy for Sullivan. A further tale of great length was in progress when Dr. Hickey's Mephistophelian nose was poked into the best parlour. Hello, Hickey. Pumped out, eh? said Murray. If I am, there's plenty more like me, replied the doctor enigmatically, and some of them three times over. James, did these gentlemen leave you a drop of anything that you'd offer me? Maybe you'd like a glass of rum, doctor, said Mr. Canty with a wink at his other guests. Dr. Hickey shuddered. I had, next morning, precisely the kind of mouth that I had anticipated, and it being my duty to spend the better part of the day administering justice in Skiborn, I received from Mr. Flurry Knox and other of my brother magistrates precisely the class of condolences on my amundi head that I found least amusing. It was unavailing to point out the resemblance between hot potato cakes and molten lead, or to dilate on their equal power of solidifying. The collective wisdom of the bench decided that I was suffering from contraband rum and rejoiced over me accordingly. During the next three weeks, Murray and Bosenket put in a time only to be equaled by that of the heroes in detective romances. They began by acting on the hint offered by Mr. Canty, and were rewarded by finding eight barrels of bacon and three casks of rum in the heart of Mr. Sullivan's turf rick. Placed there, so Mr. Sullivan explained with much detail, by enemies, with the object of getting his license taken away. They stabbed potato gardens with crowbars to find the buried barrels. They explored the chimneys, they raided the cowhouses, and in every possible and possible place they found some of the cargo of the late Bart John D. Williams. And as the sympathetic Mr. Canty said, for as much as they found they left five times as much after them. It was a wet, lingering autumn, but towards the end of November the rain dried up, the weather stiffened, and a week of light frosts and blue skies was offered as a tardy apology. Philippa possesses, in common with many of her sex, an in-appeasable passion for picnics, and her ingenuity in devising occasions for them is only equaled by her gift for enduring their rigours. I have seen her tackle a moist chicken pie with a splinter of slate and my stylograph pen. I have known her to take the tea-basket to an auction, and make tea in a four-wheeled inside car, regardless of the fact that it was coming under the hammer in ten minutes, and that the kettle took twenty minutes to boil. It will therefore be readily understood that the rare occasions when I was free to go out with a gun were not allowed to pass uncelebrated by the tea-basket. You'd much better shoot Corrin Lake to-morrow, my wife said to me one brilliant afternoon, we could send the punt over, and I could meet you on Holy Island with. The rest of the sentence was concerned with ways, means and the tea-basket, and need not be recorded. I had taken the shooting of a long snipe-bog that trailed from Corrin Lake almost to the sea at Tralagoth, and it was my custom to begin to shoot it from the seaward end of it and finally to work round the lake after dark. Tomorrow proved a heavenly morning, touched with frost, guilt with sun. I started early, and the mists were still smoking up from the calm or reflecting lake as the quaker stepped out along the level road, smashing the thin ice in its puddles with his big feet. Behind the calves of my legs sat Maria, Phillipa's brown Irish water-spaniel, assiduously licking the barrels of my gun, as was her custom when the ecstasy of going out shooting was hers. Maria had been given to Phillipa as a wedding present, and since then it had been my wife's ambition that she should conform to the Beth Gillert standard of being a lamb at home, a lion in the chase. Maria did pretty well as a lion. She hunted all dogs unmistakably smaller than herself and whenever it was reasonably possible to do so she devoured the spoils of the chase, notably Jack Snipe. It was as a lamb that she failed. Objectionable as I have no doubt a lamb would be as a domestic pet, it at least would not snatch the cold beef from the luncheon table. Nor yet, if banished for its crimes, would it spend the night in washing the paint off the whole door. Maria bit beggars, who valued their disgusting limbs at five shillings the square inch. She bullied the servants, she concealed duck's claws and fish's backbones behind the sofa cushions, and yet when she laid her brown snout upon my knee and rolled her black-eyed amber eyes upon me and smote me with her feathered paw, it was impossible to remember her iniquities against her. On shooting mornings Maria ceased to be a buccaneer, a glutton and a hypocrite. From the moment when I put my gun together her breakfast stood untouched until it suffered the final degradation of being eaten by the cats, and now in the trap she was shivering with excitement and agonising in her soul lest she should even yet be left behind. Slipper met me at the crossroads, from which I had sent back the trap. Slipper read her in the nose that anything I have ever seen off the stage, very husky as to the voice and going rather tender on both feet. He informed me that I should have a grand day's shooting, the haired poacher of the locality, having in a most gentleman-like manner refrained from exercising his sporting rights the day before on hearing that I was coming. I understood that this was to be considered as a mark of high personal esteem and I set to work at the bog with suitable gratitude. In spite of Mr. O'Driscoll's magnanimity, I had not a very good morning. The snipe were there, but in the perfect stillness of the weather it was impossible to get near them, and five times out of six they were out flickering and dodging before I was within shot. Maria became possessed of seven devils and broke away from heel the first time I let off my gun, ranging far and wide in search of the bird I had missed, and putting up every live thing I had learned as she went splashing and steeple-chasing through the bog. Slipper expressed his opinion of her behaviour in language more appallingly picturesque and resourceful than any I have heard, even in the skibborn courthouse. I admit that at the time I thought he spoke very suitably. Before she was recaptured every remaining snipe within earshot was lifted out of it by Slipper's steam-engine whistles and my own infuriated bellows. It was fortunate that the bog was spacious and that there was still a long track to it ahead, where beyond these voices there was peace. I worked my way on, jumping treacle-dark drains, floundering through the rustling yellow rushes, circumnavigating the bog-holes, and taking every possible and impossible chance of a shot. By the time I reached Corrin Lake I had got two-and-a-half brace, retrieved by Maria with a perfection that showed what her powers were when the sinuous adroitness of Slipper's wood-bind stick was fresh in her mind. But with Maria it was always the unexpected that happened. By last snipe a jack fell in the lake, and Maria, bursting through the reeds with kangaroo-bounds and cleaving the water like a torpedo-boat, was a model of all the virtues of her kind. She picked up the bird with the snake-like dart of her head, clambered with it onto a tussock, and there, well out of reach of the arm of the law, before our indignant eyes crunched it twice and bolted it. "'Well,' said Slipper complacently, some ten minutes afterwards, divvled such a baiting avarice give a dog since the day Prince killed old Mrs. Knox's pay-cock. Prince was a lump of brown tarrier I had one time, and faith I kicked the toes out of my old boots on him before I had the old lady composed. However composing Slipper's methods may have been to Mrs. Knox, they had quite the contrary effect upon a family-party of duck that had been lying in the reeds. With horrified outcries they broke into flight, and now were far away on the ethereal mirror of the lake, among strings of their fellows that were floating and quacking in preoccupied indifference to my presence. The promenade along the lake-shore demonstrated the fact that without a boat there was no more shooting for me. I looked across to the island and some time ago I had seen Philippa and her punt arrive. The boat was tied to an overhanging tree but my wife was nowhere to be seen. I was opening my mouth to give a hail when I saw her emerge precipitately from among the trees and jump into the boat. Philippa had not in vain spent many summers on the Thames. She was under way in a twinkling, sculled a score of strokes at the rate of a finish, and then stopped and stared at the peaceful island. I called to her, and in a minute or two the punt had crackled through the reeds and shoved its blunt nose ashore at the spot where I was standing. "'Sinclair,' said Philippa, in awestruck tones, there's something on the island. "'I hope there's something to eat there,' said I. "'I tell you there is something there alive,' said my wife, with her eyes as large as saucers. It's making an awful sound like snoring.' "'That's the fairest, ma'am,' said Slipper, with complete certainty, for I've known them there that seen fairies in that island as thick as the grass, and every one of them with little caps on them.' Philippa's wide gaze wandered to Slipper's hideous pug-face and back to me. It was not a human being, Sinclair. She said combatively, though I had not uttered a word. Maria had already, after the manner of dogs, let dripping into the boat. I prepared to follow her example. "'Major,' said Slipper, in a tragic whisper. There was a man that was a night on that island, one time watching duck, and dim people caught him and dragged him through hell and through death and threw him in the tide. "'Sharve off the boat,' I said, too hungry for argument. Slipper obeyed, throwing his knee over the gun all as he did so, and tumbling into the bow. We could have done without him very comfortably, but his devotion was touching. Holy Island was perhaps a hundred yards long and about half as many broad. It was covered with trees and a dense growth of rhododendrons. Somewhere in the jungle was a ruined fragment of a chapel, smothered in ivy and briars, and in a little glade in the heart of the island there was a holy well. We landed, and it was obviously a sore humiliation to Philippa that not a sound was to be heard in the spellbound silence of the island, save the cough of a heron on a treetop. "'It was there,' she said, with an unconvinced glance at the surrounding thickets. "'Sure, I'll give a trial through the island, ma'am,' volunteered Slipper with unexpected gallantry, and if it's that divil himself in it I'll rattle him into the lake. He went swaggering on his search, shouting, high cock, and whacking the rhododendrons with his stick, and after an interval returned and assured us that the island was uninhabited. Being provided with refreshments, he again withdrew, and Philippa and Berea and I fared variously and at great length, and washed the plates with water from the holy well. I was smoking a cigarette when we heard Slipper addressing the solitudes at the farther end of the island, and ending with one of his whiskey-throated crows of laughter. He presently came lurching towards us through the bushes, and a glance sufficed to show even Philippa, who was as incompetent a judge of such matters of many of her sex, that he was undeniably screwed. "'Major Yates,' he began, and Mrs. Major Yates with respects to her, and bastely drunk, me'er head is light hence the fluency, and the doctor told me I should carry a little bottle-een of spirits. "'Look here,' I said to Philippa, "'I'll take him across and bring the boat back for you.' "'Sinclair,' responded my wife with concentrated emotion, I would rather die than stay on this island alone.' Slipper was getting drunker every moment, but I managed to stow him on his back in the boughs of the punt, in which position he at once began to uplift husky and wandering strains of melody. To this accompaniment we, as Tennyson says, moved from the brink like some full-breasted swan, that fluting a wild carol air her death, ruffles her pure cold plume and takes the flood with swarthy web. Slipper would certainly have been none the worst for taking the flood, and as the burden of Clanigan's ball strengthened and spread along the tranquil lake, and the dark once more fled in justifiable consternation I felt much inclined to make him do so. We made for the end of the lake that was nearest Trilane, and as we rounded the point of the island, another boat presented itself to our view. It contained my late entertainer, Mrs. Canty, seated bulkily in the stern, while a small boy bowed himself between the two heavy oars. It's a lovely evening, Major Yates, she called out. I am just going to the island to get some water from the holy well, for me data has an impression on her chest. Indeed, I thought as yourself was singing a song for Mrs. Yates when I heard you coming, but sure Slipper is a great warrant himself for singing. May the devil crack two legs under you! balled Slipper in acknowledgement of the compliment. Mrs. Canty laughed genially, and her boat lumbered away. I shoved Slipper ashore at the nearest point. Filipper and I paddled to the end of the lake, and ending the duck as a bad business walked home. A few days afterwards, it happened that it was incumbent upon me to attend the funeral of the Roman Catholic bishop of the diocese. It was what is called in France un bel enterrement, with inky flocks of tall-hatted priests and countless yards of white scarves, and a repast of monumental solidity at the bishop's residence. The actual interment was to take a walk, and we moved in long an imposing procession to the railway station, where a special train awaited the courtiers. My friend Mr. James Canty was among the mourners, an important and active personage, exchanging condolence with the priests, giving directions to porters, and blowing his nose with a trumpeting mournfulness that penetrated all the other noises of the platform. He was condescending enough to notice my presence, and found time to tell that he had given Mr. Murray a sure word, with regard to some of the wreckage, this with deep significance, and a wink of an inflamed and tearful eye. I saw him depart in the first-class carriage, and the odour of sanctity, seeing that he was accompanied by seven priests and that both windows were shut, the latter must have been considerable. Afterwards, in the town I met Murray, looking more pleased with himself than I had seen since he took up the unprofitable task of smuggler hunting. Come along and have some lunch," he said. I got a real good thing on this time. That chap Canty came to me late last night, and told me that he knew for a fact that the island on Corrin Lake was just stiff with barrels of bacon and rum, and that I had better send every man I could spare today to get them into the town. I sent the men out at eight o'clock this morning. I think I've gone one early. He began to realise that Philippa was going to score heavily on the subject of the fairies that she had heard snoring on the island, and I imparted to Murray the leading features of our picnic there. Her slippers been up to his chin and later on from the first," said Murray. I'd like to know who his sleeping partner was. It was beginning to get dark before the loaded carts of the salvage party came lumbering past Murray's window and into the wreck. We followed them, and in so doing picked up Flurry Knox who was sauntering in the same direction. It was a good hall, five big casks of rum, and at least a dozen smaller barrels of bacon and butter, and Murray and his chief constable smiled seraphically on one another as the spoil was unloaded and stowed in a shed. Wouldn't it be as well to see how the butter is keeping, remarked Flurry, who had been looking on silently with, as I had noticed, a still and amused eye. The rim of that small keg there looks as if it had been shifted lately. The sergeant looked hard at Flurry. He knew, as well as most people, that a hint from Mr. Knox was usually worth taking. He turned to Murray. Will I open it, sir? Oh, open it if Mr. Knox wishes," said Murray, who was not famous for appreciating people's suggestions. The keg was opened. Funny butter," said Flurry. The sergeant said nothing. The keg was full of black bog mould. Another was opened, and another, all with the same result. Dan Nation, said Murray, suddenly losing his temper. What's the use of going on with those? Try one of the rum casks. A few moments passed after a little silence while a tap and a spigot were sent for and applied to the barrel. The sergeant drew off a mug full and put his nose to it with the deliberation of a connoisseur. Water, sir," he pronounced, dirty water with a small indication of spirits. A junior constable titted explosively, met the light blue glare of Murray's eye and withered away. Perhaps it's holy water," said I, with a wavering voice. Murray's glance pinned me like an assaguy, and I also faded into the background. Well," said Flurry, in dulcet tones, if you want to know where the stuff is that was in those barrels I can tell you, for I was told it myself half an hour ago. He's gone to Cork with the bishop by special train. Mr. Canty was undoubtedly a man of resource. Mrs. Canty had mistakenly credited me with an intelligence equal to her own. And on receiving from Slipper a highly-coloured account of how audibly Mr. Canty had slept off his potations, had regarded the secret of Holy Island as having been given away. That night, and the two succeeding ones, were spent in the transfer of the run to bottles and the bottles and the butter to fish-boxes. These were, by means of a slight lubrication of the railway underlings, loaded into a truck as fresh fish, urgent, and attached to the bishop's funeral train, while the police, decoyed far from the scene of the action, were breaking their backs over barrels of bog-water. I suppose, continued Flurry, pleasantly, you don't know the pub that Canty's brother has in Cork. Well, I do. I'm going to buy some rum there next week, cheap. I shall proceed against Canty, said Murray, with fateful calm. You won't proceed far, said Flurry. You'll not get as much evidence out of the whole country as a hang of cat. Who was your informant? demanded Murray. Flurry laughed. Well, by the time the train was in Cork yourself and the major were the only two men in the town who weren't talking about it. End of Chapter 8 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to find out how you can volunteer please go to LibriVox.org Recording by Andy Minter Some Experiences of an Irish RM by Edith in Only Somerville and Martin Ross Chapter 9 The Policy of the Closed Door The Disasters The disasters and humiliations that befell me at Drumcurran Fair may yet be remembered. They certainly have not been forgotten in the regions about Skiborn where the tale of how Bernard's shoot and I stole each other's horses has passed into history. The granddaughter of the mountain here bought my Mr. Shoot with such light-hearted enthusiasm was restored to that position between the shafts of a cart that she was so well fitted to graze. Moonlighter, his other purchase, spent the two months following on the fair in favouring a leg with a strained sinew and in receiving visits from the local vet, who, however uncertain in his diagnosis of Moonlighter's leg, had accurately estimated the length of Bernard's foot. Miss Bennet's mare, Crosskeen, alone of the trio was immediately and thoroughly successful. She went in harness like a hero, she carried Philip her like an elder sister. She was never sick or sorry. As Peter Cadogan summed her up, that one had lived when another had died. In her safekeeping Philip made her debut with hounds at an uneventful morning's cubbing with no particular result except that Philip returned home so stiff that she had to go to bed for a day and arose more determined than ever to be a fox-hunter. The opening meet of Mr. Knox's Foxhounds was on November the 1st and on that morning Philip, on Crosskeen accompanied by me on the Quaker set out for Ardmine Cross the time-honoured fixture for all Saints' Day. The weather was grey and quiet and full of all the moist sweetness of an Irish autumn. There had been a great deal of rain during the past month. It had turned the bracken to a purple-brown and had filled the hollows with shining splashes of water. They were very slippery underfoot and the branches above were thinly decked with yellow where the pallid survivors of summer still clung to their posts. As Philip and I sedately approached the meet the red coats of flurry Knox and his whip Dr. Jerome Hickey were to be seen on the road at the top of the hill. Crosskeen put her head in the air and stared at them with eyes that understood all they putended. Sinclair, said my wife hurriedly, as a straggling hound by Dr. Hickey uttered a grievous and melodious howl. Remember, if they find it's no use to talk to me for I shan't be able to speak. I was sufficiently acquainted with Philip in moments of enthusiasm to exhibit silently the corner of a clean-bocket handkerchief. I have seen her cry when a police constable won a bicycle race in Skiborn. She has wept at hearing Sir Valentine's Knox's health drunk with musical honours for dinner. It is an amiable custom, but as she herself admits it is unbecoming. An imposing throng in point of numbers was gathered at the crossroads. The riders being almost swamped in the crowd of traps, outside cars, bicyclists and people on foot. The field was an eminently representative one. The Clan Knox was, as usual, there in force. It's more aristocratic members, dingily respectable in black coats and tall hats that went impartially to weddings, funerals and hunts. And like a horse that his past mark of mouth were no longer to be identified with any special epoch. There was a humbler, squireen element in tweeds and black brim pot hats and a good muster of farmers, men of the spare, black muzzled west of Ireland type, on horses that ranged from the cart mare, clipped trace high, to shaggy and leggy three-year-olds, and none of them hunters, but all of them able to hunt. Philippa and I worked our way to the heart of things, where was Flurry seated on his brown mare in what appeared to be a somewhat moody silence. As we exchanged greetings I was aware that his eye was resting with extreme disfavour upon two approaching figures. I put up my eyeglass and perceived that one of them was Miss Sally Knox on a tall grey horse. The other was Mr. Bernard Shute in all the flawless beauty of his first pink coat, mounted on stockbroker, a well-known hardmouth big jumping bay recently purchased from Dr. Hickey. During the langurs of a damp autumn the neighbourhood had been much nourished and sustained by the privilege of observing and diagnosing the progress of Mr. Shute's flirtation with Miss Sally Knox. What made it all the more enjoyable for the looker's arm, or most of them, was that although Mr. Bernard's courtship was of the nature of a proclamation from the house-stops Miss Knox's attitude left everything to the imagination. To Flurry Knox the romantic but despicable position of slighted rival was comfortably allotted. His sole sympathisers were Philippa and old Mrs. Knox of Orseless. But no one knew if he needed sympathisers. Flurry was a man of mystery. Mr. Shute and Miss Knox approached us rapidly. The latter's mount pulling hard. Flurry, I said, isn't that grey the horse that Shute bought from you last you lie at the fair? Flurry did not answer me. His face was as black as thunder. He turned his horse around cursing two country-boys who got in his way with low and concentrated venom and began to move forward followed by the hounds. If his wish was to avoid speaking to Miss Sally it was not to be gratified. Good morning, Flurry. She began sitting close down to Moonlighter's ramping jog as she rode up beside her cousin. What a hurry you're in! We pass no end of people on the road who won't be here for another ten minutes. No more will I was Mr. Knox's cryptic reply as he spurred the brown mare into a trot. Moonlighter made a vigorous but frustrated effort to buck and indemnified himself for kick at a hound. Bother you, Flurry. Can't you walk for a minute?" exclaimed Miss Sally who looked about as large in relation to her horse as the conventional tom-tit on a round of beef. You might have more sense than to crack your whip under this horse's nose. I don't believe you know what horse it is even. I was not near enough to catch Flurry's reply. Well, if you didn't want him to be lent to me you shouldn't have sold him to Mr. Shute, retorted Miss Knox in her clear, provoking little voice. I suppose he's afraid to ride him himself, said Flurry, turning his horse in at a gate. Get ahead there, Jerome, can't you? It's better to put them in at this end than to have everyone riding on top of them. Miss Sally's cheeks were still very pink when I came up and began to talk to her and her grey-green eyes had a look in them like those of an angry kitten. The riders moved slowly down a rough pasture field and took up their position along the brow of Ardmin Covert into which the hounds had already hurled themselves with their customary contempt for the convenances. Flurry's hounds, true to their nationality, were in the habit of doing the right thing in the wrong way. Untouched by autumn the furs' bushes of Ardmin Covert were darkly green, save for a golden fleck of blossom here and there, and the glistening grey cobwebs from spike to spike. The look of the ordinary gorse covert is familiar to most people as a tidy enclosure of an acre or so filled with low plants of well-educated gorse. Not so many will be found who have experienced of it as a rocky, sedgy, wilderness half a mile square, garrisoned with brigades of furs' bushes, some of them higher than a horse's head, lean, strong and cunning like the foxes that breed in them, impenetrable with their bristling spikes as a hedge of bayonets. By dint of infinite leisure and obstinate greed the cattle had made paths for themselves through the bushes to the patches of grass that they hemmed in. Their hoof-prints were guides to the explorer, down muddy staircases of rock and across black intervals of unplumbed bog. The whole covert slanted gradually down to a small river that raced round three sides of it and beyond the stream in agreeable contrast lay a clean and wholesome country of grass fields and banks. The hounds drew slowly along and down the hill towards the river and the riders hung about outside the covert and tried I can answer for at least one of them to decide which was the least odious of the ways through it in the event of the fox breaking at the far side. Miss Sally took up a position not very far from me and it was easy to see how the manor borrowed mount on whose temper the delay and suspense were visibly telling. His iron-grey neck was white from the chafing of the reins. Had the ground under his feet been red hot he could hardly have sidled and hot more uncontrollably. Nothing but the most impassioned conjugation of the verb to condemn could have supplied any human equivalent for the manner in which he tore holes in the sedgy grass with a furious forefoot. Those who were even superficial judges of character gave his heels a liberal allowance of sea-room and Mr. Shoot, who could not be numbered among such and had as usual taken up a position as near to Miss Sally as possible, was rewarded by a double knock on his horse's ribs that was a cause of heartless mirth to the lady of his affections. Not a hound had as yet spoken but they were forcing their way through the gorse forest and shoving each other jealously aside with growing excitement and flurry could be seen at intervals moving forward in the direction they were indicating. It was at this juncture that the ubiquitous slipper presented himself at my horse's shoulder. "'Tis Father River, he's meek and major,' he said, with an upward roll of his squinting eyes that nearly made me seasick. He's a cattle-knocks fox that came in in this morning and you should get a head down to the fort.' A tip from slipper was not to be neglected and Philipra and I began a cautious progress through the gorse followed by miss Knox as quietly as moonlight as nerves would permit. "'Wishful has it,' she exclaimed as a hound came into view as at a sharp yelp and drove forward. "'Ark, harp!' roared flurry but at least three hours reverberating in each arc. At the same instant came a hello from the farther side of the river and Dr Hickey's renowned and blood-curdling screech at the bottom of the covet. Then Babel broke forth as the hounds converging from every quarter flung themselves shrieking on the line. Moonlighter went straight up on his hind legs and dropped again with a bound that sent him crushing past Philipra and Croskeen. He did it a second time and was almost on to the tale of the Quaker whose bulky person was not to be hurried in any emergency. "'Get on if you can, Magie Eight!' called out Sally, steadying the grey as well as she could in the narrow pathway between the great gorse bushes. Other horses were thundering behind us. Men were shouting to each other in similar passages right and left of us. The cry of the hounds filled the air with a kind of delirium. A low wall with a stick laid along it barred the passage in front of me and the Quaker firmly and immediately decided not to have it until someone else had dislodged the pole. "'Go ahead!' I shouted, squeezing to one side with heroic disregard of the furs bushes and my new tops. The words were hardly out of my mouth when moonlighter, mad with thwarted excitement, shot by me, hurtled over the obstacle with extravagant fury, landed twelve feet beyond it on clattering slippery rock, saved himself from falling with an eel-like forward buck onto sedgy ground and bolted at full speed down the muddy cattle-trag. The corners, rocky, most of them, in that cattle-trag, that Sally has told me she will remember to her dying day, boggy holes of any depth ranging between two feet and halfway to Australia, that she says she does not fail to mention in the General Thanksgiving. But at the time they occupied mere fractions of the strenuous seconds in which it was hopeless for her to do anything but try to steer, trust to luck, sit down hard for my part I would as soon try to adhere to the horns of a charging bull as to the crutches of a sidesaddle, but happily the necessity is not likely to arise. I saw Flurry Knox a little ahead of her on the same track, jamming his mare into the first bushes to get out of her way. He shouted something after her about the ford and started to gallop for it himself by a breakneck short cut. The hounds were already across the river, and it was obvious that ford or no ford, moonlighter's intentions might be simply expressed in the formula be with them I will. It was all down hill to the river, and among the first bushes and rocks there was neither time nor place to turn him. He rushed at it with a shattering slip upon a streak of rock, with a heavy plunge in the deep ground by the brink. It was as bad a take-off for twenty feet of water as could well be found. The grey horse rose out of the boggy stuff with all the impetus that pace and temper could give, but it was not enough. For one instant the twisting, sliding current was under Sally, the next a veil of water sprang up all around her, and moonlighter was rolling and lurching in the desperate effort to find foothold in the rocky bed of the stream. I was following at the best pace I could kick out of the Quaker, and saw the water swirl into her lap as her horse rolled to the near side. She caught the mane to save herself, but he struggled on to his legs again, and came floundering broadside on to the farther bank. In three seconds she had got out of the saddle and flung herself at the bank, grasping the rushes and trying, in spite of the sodden weight of her habit, to drag herself out of the water. At the same instant I saw Flurry and the brown mare dashing through the ford twenty yards higher up. He was off his horse and beside her with that uncanny quickness he served for moments of emergency, and catching her by the arms swung her onto the bank as easily as if she had been the kennel terrier. Catch the horse! she called out, scrambling to her feet. Damn the horse! returned Flurry in the rage that is so often the reaction from a bad scare. I turned along the bank and made for the ford. By this time it was full of hustling, splashing riders through whom Bernard's chute, furiously picking a bad start drove a devastating way. He tried to turn his horse down the bank towards Miss Knox, but the hounds were running hard and to my intense amusement Stockbroker refused to abandon the chase and swept his rider away in the wake of his stable companion Dr Hickey's young chestnut. By this time two country boys had as usual in such cases risen from the earth and fished moonlight are out of the stream. There was an acrimonious argument with her cousin by observing that she didn't care what he said and placing her waterlog boot in his obviously unwilling hand in a second was again in the saddle gathering up the wet rains with the trembling clumsy fingers of a person who is thoroughly chilled and in a violent hurry. She set moonlight agoing and was away in a moment galloping him at the first fence at a pace that suited his steeple-chasing ideas. Mr Knox panted Philippa who had by this time joined us, make her go home. She can go where she likes as far as I am concerned. Responded Mr Knox, pitching himself on his mare's back and digging in the spurs. Moonlighter had already glided over the bank in front of us with a perfunctory flick at it with his heels. Flurry's mare and Croskine jumped it side by side with equal precision. It was a bank of some five feet high. The Quaker charged it enthusiastically, refused it abruptly, and according to his infuriating custom at such moments proceeded to tear hurried mouthfuls of grass. Willow, you give him a couple of bell-charana!" shouted one of the running accompaniment of country-boys. You will, said I, with some further remarks to the Quaker that I need not commit to paper. Swish! Whack! The sound was music in my ears as the good remorseless ash sapling bend round the Quaker's dappled hind-quarters. At the third stripe he launched both his heels in the operator's face. At the fourth he reared undecidedly. At the fifth he bundled over the bank in a manner purged of hesitation. Ha! yelled my assistant. That'll put a hero-guard in him as the Quaker fled, headlong after the hunt. He'll be the better of that while he lives. Without going quite as far as this I must admit for the next half-hour he was astonishingly the better of it. The Castle Knox Fox was making a very pretty line of it over the seven miles that separated him from his home. He headed through a grassy country of Ireland's mild and brilliant green fenced with sound and bucks and banks enlivened by stone walls uncompromised by the presence of gates and yet comfortably laced with lanes for the furtherance of those who had laid to heart Woolsey's valuable advice. Fling away ambition by that sin fell the angels. The flotsam and jetsam of the hunt pervaded the landscape. Standing on one long bank three dismounted farmers flogged away at the refusing steeds below them, like anglers trying to rise a sulky fish. Half a dozen hats bobbing in a string showed where the road-riders followed the delusive windings of the bocorine. It was obvious that in the matter of ambition they would not have caused Cardinal Woolsey a moment's uneasiness, whether angels or otherwise they were not going to run any risk of falling. Flurry's red coat was like a beacon two fields ahead of me, with Phillipa following in his tracks. It was the first run worthy of the name that Phillipa had ridden, and I blessed Miss Bobby Bennett as I saw Croskine's undefeated fencing. An encouraging twang of the doctor's horn notified that the hounds were giving us a chance. Even the Quaker pricked his blunt ears and swerved in his stride to the sound. A stone wall, a rough patch of heather, a boggy field dinted deep and black with hoof marks and the stern chase was at an end. The hounds had checked on the outskirts of a small wood and the field thinned down to a panting dozen or so viewed us with the disfavour by the first flight towards those who unexpectedly add to their select number. In the depths of the wood Dr Hickey might be heard uttering those singular little yelps of encouragement that to the irreverent suggest a milkman in his dotage. Bernard Chute, who neither knew nor cared what the hounds were doing, was expiating at great length to an uninterested squireen upon the virtues and perfections of his new mount. "'I'll help you at the river,' he said, riding up to the splash, but still dripping Sally, but stockbroker wouldn't hear of it. I pulled his ugly head round till his nose was in my boot, but he caliped away just the same. "'He was quite right,' said Miss Sally, "'I didn't want you in the least.' As Miss Sally's red gold coil of hair was turned towards me during this speech, I could only in further glance with which it was delivered, from the fact into it with one of those firm gazes of adoration in which the neighbourhood took such an interest and crumbled away into incoherency. A shout from the top of a hill interrupted the amenities of the check. Flurry was out of the wood in half a dozen seconds, blowing shattering blasts upon his horn, and the hounds rushed to him, knowing the gone-away note that was never blown in vain. The brown mare came out through the trees and the undergrowth cocked down the wind, and jumped across a stream onto a more than questionable bank. The hounds splashed and struggled after him, and as they landed the first ecstatic whimpers broke forth. In the moment it was full cry, discordant, beautiful and soul-stirring as the pack spread and spared and settled to the line. I saw the absurd dazzle of tears in Philip's eyes and found time for the insulting proffer of the clean pocket handkerchief as we all galloped hard to get away on good terms with the hounds. It was one of those elect moments in fox-hunting when the fittest alone have survived. Even the quaker sluggish blood was stirred by good company and possibly by the remembrance of the singing ash-brand, and he lumbered up tall stone-faced banks and down heavy drops and across wide ditches in astounding adherence to the line cut out by Flurry. It went like a book, a story for girls, very pleasant and safe, but rather slow. Moonlighter was pulling Miss Sally onto the sterns of the hounds, flying his banks, rocketing like a pheasant over three-foot walls, committing, in fact, all the crimes induced by youth and over-feeding. He would have done very comfortably with another six or seven stone on his back. Why Bernard Choup did not come off at every fence and generally die a thousand deaths I cannot explain. Occasionally I rather wished he would, as from my secure position in the rear I saw him charging his fences at whatever pace and place, seemed good to the thoroughly demoralised stockbroker, and in so doing can unheavily against Dr. Hickey on landing over a rotten ditch, jump a wall with his spur rowling Charlie Knox's boot and cut in at top speed in front of Flurry, who was scientifically cramming his mare up a very awkward scramble. In so far as I could think of anything beyond Philippa and myself and the next fence I thought there would be trouble for Mr. Shute in consequence of this last feat. It was a half hour long to be remembered in spite of the quaker's ponderous and unalterable gallop, in spite of the thump with which he came down off his banks, in spite of the confiding manner in which he hung upon my hand. We were nearing Castle Knox, and the riders began to edge away from the hounds towards a gate that broke the long barrier of the demeaned wall. Steaming horses and purple-faced riders clattered and crushed in at the gate. There was a moment of pulling up and listening in which quivering tails and pumping sides told their own story. Croskeen's breathing suggested a cross between a grampus and a gramophone. Philippa's hair had come down and she had a stitch in her side. Moonlighter, fresher than ever stamped and dragged at his bit, I thought little Miss Sally looked very white. The bewildering clamour of the hounds was all through the wide laurel plantations. At a word from Flurry Dr. Hickey shoved his horse ahead and turned down a ride followed by most of the field. Philippa, I said severely, you've had enough and you know it. Do go up to the house and make them give you something to eat. Struck in Miss Sally, twisting Moonlighter round to keep his mind occupied. And as for you, Miss Sally, I went on, in the manner of Mr. Fairchild, the sooner you get off that horse and out of those wet things, the better. Flurry, who was just in front of us, said nothing but gave a short and most disagreeable laugh. Philippa accepted my suggestion with the meekness of exhaustion, but under the circumstances she did not surprise me that Miss Sally did not follow her example. Then ensued an hour of woodland hunting at its worst and most bewildering. I galloped off to Flurry and Miss Sally up and down long glittering lanes of laurel, at every other moment burying my face in the Quaker's coarse white mane to avoid the slash of the branches and receiving down the back of my neck showers of drops, stored up from the rain of the day before, this game of hide and seek with the hounds and never getting any nearer to them as they turned and doubled through the thickets of evergreens. Even to my limited understanding of the situation, it became clear at length that two foxes were on foot. Most of the hounds were hard at work a quarter of a mile away, but Flurry, with a grim face and a faithful three-couple, stuck to the failing line of the hunted fox. There came a moment when Miss Sally and I, through many vicissitudes had clung to each other, found ourselves at a spot where two rides crossed. Flurry was waiting there and a little way up one of the rides a couple of hounds were hustling to and fro with the thwarted whimpers half-breaking from them. He held up his hand to stop us and at that identical moment Bernard shoot like a bolt from the blue burst upon our vision. He'd need scarcely be mentioned that he was going at a full gallop at any other pace, and as he bore down upon Flurry and the hounds ducking and dodging to avoid the branches he shouted something about a fox having gone away at the other side of the covert. Hold hard! roared Flurry. Don't you see the hounds are full? Mr. Shoot, to do him justice, held hard with all the strength of his body, but it was of no avail. The bay horse had got his head down and his tail up. There was a piercing yell from a hound as it was ridden over and Flurry's brown mare will not soon forget the moment when Stockbroker's shoulder took her on the point of the hip and sent her staggering into the laurel bushes. As she swung round Flurry's whip went up and with a swift back-hander the cane and the looped thong caught Bernard across his broad shoulders. Oh, Mr. Shoot! shrieked Miss Sally as I stared dumbfounded. Did that branch hurt you? All right, nothing to signify. He called out as he bucketed past tugging at his horse's head thought someone had hit me at first. Come on, we'll catch him up this way. He swung perilously into the main ride and was gone, totally unaware of the position that Miss Sally's quickness had saved. Flurry rode straight up to his cousin with a pale, dangerous face. I suppose you think I'm to stand being ridden over and having my hounds killed to please you. He said, but you're mistaken. You were very smart and you may think you've saved him his licking, but you needn't think he won't get it. He'll have it in spite of you before he goes to bed this night. A man who loses his temper badly because he is badly in love is inevitably ridiculous, far though he may be from thinking himself so. He is also a highly unpleasant person to argue with and Miss Sally and I held our peace respectfully. He turned his horse and rode away. Almost instantly the three couple of hounds opened in the underwood nearest with a deafening crash and not twenty yards ahead the hunted fox, dark with wet and mud slunk across the ride. The hounds were almost on his brush. Moonlight arreared and chafed the din was redoubled, passed away to a little distance and suddenly became stationary in the middle of the laurels. Could he have got into the old ice house? exclaimed Miss Sally with a thriving excitement. She pushed ahead and turned down the narrowest of all the rides that had that day been my portion. At the end of the green tunnel there was a comparatively open space. Flurry's mare was standing in it riderless and Flurry himself was hammering with a stone at the padlock of a door that seemed to lead into the heart of a laurel clump. The hounds were baying furiously somewhere back of the entrance among the laurel stems. The ice-drain, said Flurry, addressing himself sulkily to me and ignoring Miss Sally, he had not the least idea of how absurd was his scowling face draped by the luxuriant heart's tongues that overhung the doorway. The padlock yielded and the opening door revealed a low dark passage into which Flurry disappeared, lugging a couple of hounds with him by the scruff of the neck. The remaining two-couple bayed implacably at the mouth of the drain. The croak of a rusty bolt told of a second door at the inner end of the passage. Look out for the steps, Flurry. They're all broken, called out Miss Sally in tones of honey. There was no answer. Miss Sally looked at me. Her face was serious, but her mischievous eyes made a confederate of me. He's in an awful rage, she said. I'm afraid there will certainly be a row. A row there certainly was, but it was in the cavern of the ice-house where the fox had evidently been discovered. Miss Sally suddenly flung moonlight as rains to me and slipped off his back. Hold him, she said, and dived into the doorway under the overhanging branches. Things happened after that with astonishing simultaneousness. There was a shrill exclamation from Miss Sally. The inner door was slammed and bolted, and at one and the same moment the fox darted from the entry and was away into the wood before one could wink. What's happened, I called out, playing the refractory moonlighter like a salmon. Miss Sally appeared at the doorway looking half-scared and half-delighted. I've bolted him in, and I won't let him out until he promises to be good. I was only just in time to slam the door after the fox bolted out. Great Scott, I said, helplessly. Miss Sally vanished again into the passage, and the imprisoned hounds continued to express their emotions in the echoing vault of the ice-house. Their master remained mute as they did, and I trembled. Flurry, I heard Miss Sally say, Flurry, I've locked you in. This self-evident piece of information met with no response. Shall I tell you why? A keener note seemed to indicate that a hound had been kicked. I don't care whether you answer me or not. I'm going to tell you. There was a pause. Apparently telling him was not as simple as had been expected. I won't let you out until you promise me something. Ah, Flurry, don't be so cross. What do you say? Oh, that's a ridiculous thing to say. You know quite well it's not on his account. There was another considerable pause. Flurry said Miss Sally again in tones that would have whined a badger from his earth. Dear Flurry! At this point I hurriedly flung moonlight as bridle over a branch and withdrew. My own subsequent adventures are quite immaterial, until the moment when I encountered Miss Sally on the steps of the hall door at Castle Knox. I'm just going in to take off these wet things, she said airily. This was no way to treat a Confederate. Well, I said, barring her progress. Oh, he promised. It's all right," she replied rather breathlessly. There was no one about. I waited resolutely for further information. It did not come. Did he try to make his own terms? Said I, looking hard at her. Yes, he did. She tried to pass me. And what did you do? I refused them. I refused them, she said, with a sudden stagger of a sob in her voice as she escaped into the house. Now, what on earth was Sally Knox crying about? End of Chapter 9