The back stairs at Mount Music were
old and precipitous. To descend them at high
noon demanded circumspection at night, when the armies
of the cockroaches were abroad; and marauding rats
came flopping up and down them, upon their unlawful
occasions, only that man of iron, Robert Evans, was
proof to their terrors. Christian, even though
inured from childhood to the backstairs, held her habit
skirt high, and thanked, heaven for her riding-boots,
as she made her way down the worn stone steps, at
some half-past four of a September morning.
Mount Music was one of the many houses
of its period that, with, to quote Mrs. Dixon, “the
globe of Ireland to build over,” had elected
to bestow its menials in dark and complex basements.
Christian and her candle traversed the long maze of
underground passages. The smell of past cooking
was in the air, the black and evil glitter of cockroaches
twinkled on the walls on either hand. This was
the horrible part of subbing, thought Christian, and
told herself that nothing but the thought of seeing
the debut of Dido, the puppy that she had walked,
would compensate her for facing the cockroaches.
As she opened the kitchen door she
was surprised to find a lighted lamp on the table.
In the same glance she caught a glimpse of a figure,
retreating hastily, with slippered shuffle, followed
by the trailing tappings of braces off duty.
On one end of the long kitchen table was seated a
cat, in motionless meditation, like a profile in an
Egyptian hieroglyphic; at the other end was a steaming
cup of cocoa and plateful of bread and butter.
“Long life to Evans!”
thought Christian, seating herself, like the cat,
on the edge of the table, and entering upon the cocoa.
“Miss Christian!” a raven-croak
came through a slit of the pantry-door; “keep
off the Carmodys’ land! Mind now what I’m
tellin’ you!” The slit ceased.
“Thank you for the cocoa, Evans,
but why must I?” called Christian, in a breath.
A lower croak, that seemed to end
with the words “black papishes,” came
through the closed door.
“Old lunatic!” thought
Christian; she drank the cocoa, and putting out the
lamp, groped her way to the back-door. It opened
on a shrieking hinge, and she was out into a pale
grey dawn, pure and cold, with the shiver and freshness
of new life in it.
The Mount Music stable yard was an
immense square, with buildings round its four sides,
and a high, ivy-covered battlemented wall surrounding
and overlooking all. In the middle of the yard
was an island of grass, on which grew three wide-armed
and sombre Irish yews, dating, like the walls, from
the days of Queen Elizabeth. Weeds were growing
in the gravel of the wide expanse; more than one stable-door
dropped on broken hinges under its old cut-stone pédiments;
the dejection of a faded and remembered prosperity
lay heavy on all things in the thin, cold air of that
September dawn.
The clatter of a horse’s hoofs
came cheerfully from a stable, and, as Christian crossed
the yard, a dishevelled young man, with a large red
moustache, put his head over the half-door.
“I’m this half-hour striving
to girth her, Miss,” he complained, “she
got very big entirely on the grass; the surcingle’s
six inches too short for her, let alone the way she
have herself shwoll up agin me!”
Charles, once ruler and lawgiver,
was dead, and, with the departure of the hounds, Major
Dick’s interest in the stables had died too;
his tall, grey horse was ending his days in bondage
to the outside car; the meanest of the underlings
who had grovelled beneath Charles’ top-boots,
was now in sole charge, and had grown a moustache,
unchecked; and Christian’s only mount was a green
four-year-old filly, in whom she had invested the
economies of a life-time, with but a dubious chance
of their recovery.
“Can’t you get a bit of
string and tie up the surcingle Tommy?” suggested
Christian, who was now too well used to these crises
in the affairs of the stable to be much moved by them.
“Sure, I’m after doing
it, Miss. T’would make a cat laugh the ways
I have on it! She’s a holy fright altogether
with the mane and the tail she have on her! I
tried to pull them last night, and she went up as
straight as a ribbon in the stable!”
The flushed face and red moustache
were withdrawn, and with considerable clattering and
shouting, the holy fright was led forth. She
was a small and active chestnut mare, with a tawny
fleece, a mane like a prairie fire, and a tail like
a comet. Her impish eyes expressed an alarm that
was more than half simulated, and the task of manoeuvring
her into position beside the mounting block, was comparable
only to an endeavour to extract a kitten from under
a bed with the lure of a reel of cotton. An apple
took the place of the reel of cotton, and its consumption
afforded Christian just time enough to settle herself
in her saddle. Since the days of Harry the Residue
Christian had ridden many and various horses, and she
had a reputation for making the best of a bad job
that had often earned her mounts from those who, wishing
to sell a horse as a lady’s hunter, were anxious
to impart some slight basis of fact into the transaction.
Tommy Sullivan watched her admiringly.
“Where’s the meet, Miss?”
he said, quickly, as she started, and as if he were
struck by a sudden thought.
“Nad Wood.”
“If they run the Valley, Miss,
mind out for wire!” called Tommy after her,
as she rode out of the yard. “Carmody’s
fences are strung with it!”
He ran to the gate to watch the mare
as she capered and lunged sideways along the drive,
and thanked God, not for the first time, for the heavy
hands that preserved him from the duty of riding Miss
Christian’s horses.
Christian rode past the long ivy-covered
lace of the house, that stared at her with the wall-eyed
glare of shuttered windows, and down the long avenue,
that curved submissive to the windings of the Onwashee,
now black and brimming after a week of rain. Young
cattle, that had slept, according to their custom,
on the roadway, scrambled up as she came near, and
crashed away through the evergreens, whose bared lower
branches bore witness to their depredations. They
were a sight hateful to Christian, who, in spite of
her resignation to the methods of her groom, cherished
a regard for tidiness that she had often found was
more trouble than it was worth.
She let Nancy, the chestnut mare,
have her head, a privilege that made short work of
the remaining half-mile of avenue, and soon the stones
and mud of the high road were flying behind her, as
the little mare, snatching at her bridle, and neglecting
no opportunity for a shy, fretted on towards the sunrise,
and the covert that lay, purple, on a long hill, three
miles away.
Bill Kirby’s foible was not
punctuality; when Christian arrived at the appointed
cross-roads in the middle of Nad Wood she found a
patient little group of three or four men, farmers,
all of them, she thought, waiting under the dewy branches
of the beeches for the arrival of the hounds.
One of them rode quickly from the group to meet her.
A young man, with a slight figure and square shoulders,
who was riding a long-legged bay horse, that, like
its rider, was unknown to Christian. The light
under the beech trees was dim and green, and such
faint illumination as the grey and quiet sky afforded,
was coming, like this rider, to meet Christian.
He was close to her before he spoke, then he caught
his cap off his head and waved it, and shouted:
“Hurrah, Christian! Here I am! Home
again! Don’t pretend you never saw me before,
because I won’t stand swagger from you!”
“Larry! Not you? Not really?”
He had her hand by this time, and
was shaking it wildly despite the resentment of the
chestnut mare, at the sudden proximity of the bay
horse.
“Yes! Me all right! Moi
qui vous parle as we say in French
Paris! I only got home last night. I bought
this chap at Sewell’s on my way through.
He’s a County Limerick horse. I bet he’s
a goer! How do you like him?”
It was like Larry to require, instantly,
praise and recognition for his new purchase, but Christian
wasn’t thinking of the horse. Her wide,
clear eyes were fixed on his rider, her mind was a
hustle of questions.
Had he changed? Would he stay?
Did he know that he was “in black books”
with her father? Would he care if he did know?
What ages it seemed ! Four years, wasn’t
it? Her brain was working too hard to remember,
but she certainly remembered that he had not had a
moustache when he was last at home; such a fanciful
little French scrap of a moustache as it was too,
made of pure gold!
“I rather like it, Larry!”
she said, beaming at him; “quite nice!”
“What? What’s quite
nice?” says Larry, beaming back; “oh,
this?” He gave the moustache an extra
upward twist. “Yes, rather so! Beats
the Kaiser’s to fits, I flatter myself!
I’m glad you like it, but I don’t see
how you could help it!”
Yes! This was the old Larry,
the right one; Christian felt very glad. It might
so easily have been some one else, some one not half
so nice as her own old Larry.
“Why on earth didn’t you
say you were coming? Cousin Freddy told us that
you were painting at Etaples.”
“So I was till one fine day
I ’took the notion for to cross the raging ocean,’
and I’m jolly glad I did too! Oh, by Jove!
Look at old Bill and the hounds! What a swell!
Christian, do you know I haven’t seen a hound
for four years! Do you mind if I call them ‘dogs,’
just till I get used to them a bit?”
There are few bonds more enduring
than those that are woven round the playmates of childhood.
In how many raids had Larry not been Christian’s
trusted leader! What stolen dainties had they
not shared, what punishments not endured together!
Larry’s three years of seniority had only deepened
the reverence and loyalty that he had inspired in
his youngest follower; he had never presumed upon them;
he had been a chieftain worthy of homage, and he had
Had all Christian’s. There are some people
who appear to change their natures when they grow
up. They may have been pleasing as little boys
or girls; they may be equally agreeable as men and
women, but there is no continuity and no development.
They have become new creatures. Christian, alone
of her family, was essentially as she had ever been,
and, being of those whose inward regard is as searching
as their outward observation, she knew it. Now,
Larry had come back again, and in half-a-dozen sentences
she knew that neither had he changed, and that with
him her ancient leader had returned.
The Wood of Nad (which, being interpreted,
means a nest) filled a pocket on the side of Lissoughter
Hill, and had thence spread over the crest of the
hill, and ended near the cross-roads at which the hounds
had met.
“Don’t holloa away an
old fox. I want to kill a cub if I can. I’ll
let you know if the hounds get away below. You
needn’t be afraid I won’t! Open the
gate!”
Thus, magisterially, the Master, standing
at the gate into the wood, with the hounds crushing
round his horse’s heels, “Leu in there!”
With a squeal or two of excitement
from Dido and her brethren-puppies, the hounds squeezed
through the narrow gateway, and were swallowed up
by the wood.
Larry returned to Christian’s side.
“I hate not seeing Cousin Dick
out,” he began; “what a pity he gave ’em
up! Why did he? You know, Christian, you
were pretty rotten about writing to me! Aunt
Freddy never tells me a thing about the Hunt!
I didn’t even know Cousin Dick had chucked till
I saw it in The Field.”
Larry was staring at Christian as
he spoke. He, like her was searching for his
former comrade; but, unlike her, was doing so unconsciously,
as Larry did most things: What he believed himself
to be doing was appraising her appearance from a painter’s
point of view. He found he had forgotten her
eyes. He tried to think of them in terms of paint;
Brun de Bruxelles, and a touch of cadmium, or
was it Verte Émeraude? Hang it! How
can paint do more than suggest the colours of a sunlit
moorland pool? Was it the white hunting-tie that
gave that special “value” to her face
He had forgotten how delicious in tone was the faint
colour that just tinted her cheek; so hopeless a word
as pink was not to be thought of; just a hint of Rose
Garance dore, might do it. And to get the
drawing of those subtle outlines the ineffable refinement
of all her features. Larry put his head on one
side, and screwed up his eyes (remembering faithfully
the injunctions of “dear old Chose,” en
clignant bien les yeux) and said to himself that
she would put dear old Chose himself to his trumps,
and then maybe he wouldn’t get her right!
Aloud he said, peremptorily and professionally:
“Christian, I’m going
to paint you! Eight o’clock at the studio
to-morrow morning, Ma’mselle, s’il vous
plait!”
Christian’s response was closured
by a wild outcry from the wood, hounds and horn lifting
up their voices together in sudden delirium.
Old horses pricked their ears, and young ones, and
notably, Nancy, began to fret and to fidget.
Some one said, unnecessarily: “That’s
him!” A man, farther down the road, turned his
horse, and standing in his stirrups, stared over the
wall into the thick covert, rigid as a dog setting
his game. Then he held up his hat, and, a moment
later, something brown glided, with the fluent swiftness
of a fish in a stream, across the road and over the
opposite wall. The scream that followed him was
not needed; was, indeed, hardly heard in the crashing,
clashing clamour of the back, as they came pitching
headlong over the wall of the wood, and hurling themselves
at the opposite wall. It was high, and had a
coped, top, and the yelling hounds broke against it,
and fell, like waves against a cliff. A couple
achieved it, and the anguish of their comrades, as
they heard them go away, full-cry, on the line, redoubled.
In the same instant, Larry was off his tall bay.
He flung his reins to Christian, and was into the
struggling pack. It is no easy matter to heave
a hound over a high wall, but Larry and a young farmer
had somehow shoved over four couple, before Bill Kirby
and his whipper-in came and swept the remainder to
a place of possible entrance a little further on.
Larry snatched his plunging horse
from Christian, and started to gallop before he was
fairly in the saddle, kicking his right foot into
the stirrup as he went, and shouting gratitude to Christian
for having held the horse. It had not been easy.
Nancy had proved the accuracy of her groom’s
statement by again “going up as straight as a
ribbon” when the hounds crossed the road, and
the bay had not been backward in emulating her efforts.
Bill Kirby had had luck; the fox had run left-handed
under the wall, and the leading hounds met the Master,
with the body of the pack, at the verge of the wood
on its farther side. A bank, pitted with rabbit-holes,
a space of stony lane with a pole at its farther end,
and Nad Wood was a thing of the past.
Outside, a fair stretch of grass presented
itself, falling in mild gradients to the banks of
the Broadwater, sprinkled with cattle, dotted with
groups of trees clustering round white farm houses,
from whose chimneys the thin, blue lines of the smoke
of morning fires were just beginning to ascend.
But few are able to spare much thought
for others during a first burst out of covert, their
strictly personal affairs being as sufficient for
them as is the day’s share of good and evil for
the day; but Larry, looking often over his shoulder
as he galloped, did not fail to note, despite his
engrossment in his new purchase, the ease and competence
that marked Christian’s dealings with the chestnut
mare, to whom the twin gifts of imagination and invention
had been lavishly granted. It has been ingeniously
said that the enemy of the aboriginal horse was a
creature of about the size of a dinner-plate, that
lay hidden in grass; nothing less than a concealed
dinner-service would have sufficed to account for
the mysterious alarms that repeatedly swept Nancy
from her course; wafting her, like a leaf, sideways
from a stream, impelling her to swing, from the summit
of a bank, back to the field from which she had wildly
sprung; suggesting to her that safety from the besetting
dangers could alone be secured by following the bay
horse (whom, after the manner of young horses, she
had adopted as a father) so closely, and at such a
rate of speed, that a live torpedo attached to his
tail could hardly have been a less desirable companion.
At a momentary check, an elderly farmer,
many of whose horses had owed to Christian their first
introduction to a side saddle, spoke to her.
“For God’s sake, Miss
Christian,” he said, fervently, “go home
with that mare! She’s very peevish!
I wouldn’t like to be looking at her! She
has that way of jumping stones her nose’d nearly
reach the ground before her feet!”
“Never fear that young lady’s
able for her!” struck in another farmer, the
former owner of Nancy. “How well yourself’d
be asking her to be riding nags that couldn’t
see the way that little mare’d go! Didn’t
I see her go mountains over the stone gap awhile ago?
And yourself seen the same, John Kearney!”
“If it was mountains and pressy-pices
that was in it itself,” returned John Kearney,
severely, “I’d say the same, Michael Donovan.
Miss Christian knows me, and I’m telling her
At this point, however, Christian’s
attention was absorbed by Dido, who was comporting
herself with precocious zeal, and, an instant after,
the dispute was ended by the shriek with which she
proclaimed her success. For some fifteen minutes
the hounds ran hard and fast; Nancy began to settle
down, and to realise that her adopted parent invariably
changed feet on a bank, and never jumped stones as
if he were a cork bursting perpendicularly from a
bottle of champagne. The fox was taking them
through the best of the Broadwater Vale country; pasture-field
followed pasture-field, in suave succession, the banks
were broad and benevolent, the going clean and firm.
The sun had just risen, and was throwing the long
blue shadows of the hedge-row trees on the dew-grey
grass. The river valley was full of silver mists,
changing and thinning, like the visions of a clairvoyant,
yielding slowly the beauty of the river, and of its
garlanding trees, to those who had eyes to see.
The sky became bluer each instant as the sun rushed
up, and Bill Kirby said to himself that the hunt was
too good to last, and the scent would soon be scorched
out.
Not long afterwards came the check.
The fox had run through a strip of plantation, and
in the succeeding field the scent failed. It was
a wide pasture-field, in which a number of young cattle
were running, snorting, bellowing, and gathering themselves
into defensive groups at the unwonted sight of hounds.
“That’s a nice little
plan of a mare!” said the young farmer who had
helped Larry with the hounds, drawing up beside Christian,
“and you have her in grand condition, Miss;
she’s as round as a bottle! She has a great
jump in her!” he went on. “She fled
the last fence entirely; she didn’t leave an
iron on it! She was hopping off the ground like
a ball!”
“That was no credit to her!”
said John Kearney, eyeing the mare and her rider gloomily.
“’Twas a sweet gallop
altogether,” said Nancy’s former owner,
addressing Christian, and ignoring Mr. Kearney’s
challenge, “and the mare carried you to fortune!
But sure it’d be as good for you to take her
home now, Miss Christian, she has enough done.
The fences from this out aren’t too good at
all.” He cast a glance at Kearney.
“Faith, and that’s true
for you,” said Kearney quickly, “Be said
by us now, Miss Christian, and go home. The road
isn’t but two fields back. The hounds’ll
do no more good, sure the sun’s too strong.”
“Where are we?” broke
in Larry, joining the group; “I’ve lost
my bearings.”
“Them’s the Carmodys’
bounds, sir,” said Michael Donovan in a colourless
voice, indicating the next fence.
“Carmody’s?” said
Larry. “Then isn’t the Derrylugga
gorse somewhere hereabouts? I see he’s
casting them ahead.”
“It’s burnt down,”
said Christian, hurriedly. Something in her face
checked Larry’s exclamation. In Ireland
people learn to be silent on a very imperceptible
hint.
The farmers moved away. Said
Michael Donovan in a low voice to John Kearney:
“Will she go back, d’ye think?”
“I d’no. Har’ly, I think!”
“It’d be a pity anything’d happen
her. She’s a lovely girl to ride!”
“You may say that, Michael!
The father gave her the sate, but it was the Lord
Almighty gave her the hands!” said old Kearney,
devoutly.
“Maybe He’ll mind her,
so!” responded Michael Donovan, without irreverence.
The shifting of responsibility brought
some ease of mind.
“God grant it!” said John Kearney.
Christian was ordinarily possessed
of an innate reasonableness that responded to reason,
but fear was not in her, and an appeal to reason was
least potent with her when she was in the saddle.
The veiled hints of danger, by which from, Evans onwards,
she had been beset, only woke the spirit of revolt
that slept in her but little less lightly than it
had slept in her childhood, and were as fuel on the
flame the run had kindled.
“Larry,” she said, with
a light in her eyes, and a flush in her cheeks, “do
you think I ought to go back?”
“Go back? Why should you?”
Larry, having received a hasty sketch
of the position, gave his advice with all the assurance
of complete ignorance. “Your father has
the sporting rights anyhow, I don’t
believe they’ll stop you. Irishmen are
Dissertation as to what Irishmen were
or were not, attractive though it was to a young man
who knew nothing of the subject, was checked by the
success of Bill Kirby’s cast ahead. Half
way across the big field, the hounds, who had been
industriously spreading themselves, and examining
blades of grass and fronds of bracken with the intentness
of botanists, came, with a sudden rush, to a deep
note from old Bellman, and, as suddenly, broke into
full-cry, with the unanimity of an orchestra when
the baton comes down. They headed for “Carmody’s
bounds,” and were over that solid barrier, and
running hard across the succeeding field, before most
of the riders had realised what had happened.
The bounds fence was an honest jump big,
but safe. Nancy, at the heels of the bay horse,
came up on to it with a perfection that banished all
other thoughts from Christian’s mind. On
the landing side, under the bank, was a strong-running
stream, and two or three of the horses, at sight of
it, checked on the wide top of the bank, and tried
to turn. Not so Nancy. It was enough for
her that her father by adoption had not hesitated.
She slid her forefeet a little way down the grassy
side and went out over the water as if the bank had
been a springboard. It was only then, at the
gorgeous moment of successful landing, that Christian
was aware of a young man running towards the riders,
bawling, and demonstrating with something that might
be a gun.
“That’s one of the Carmodys,
Miss,” said old Kearney, galloping near her.
“Don’t mind him! It’s as good
for you to go on now. That’s the house
below
“Come on, Christian!” shouted Larry; “he’ll
do no harm!”
The thought crossed Christian’s
mind that it might be better to disregard these counsels,
and to stop and speak to the assailant, but Nancy
had views of her own, and such arguments as a snaffle
could offer were quite unavailing. “I might
as well go on,” thought Christian, “we
shall be off his land in a minute.”
A very high bank, crowned with furze
and thorn bushes, divided them from the next field;
there was but one gap in it, near the farm-house,
and this was filled with a complicated erection of
stones and sods, built high, with light boughs of
trees laid upon them; not a nice place, but the only
practicable one. Bill Kirby and his whipper-in
jumped it; some of the farmers drew back, but Larry’s
bay horse charged it unhesitatingly, and soared over
it with the whole-souled gallantry of a well-bred
horse. Nancy, pulling hard, followed him.
Christian heard Larry shout, and, looking round, saw
him turn in his saddle and strike with his crop at
something unseen. At the last instant, as the
mare was making her spring, a second man appeared on
the farther side of the jump, yelling, and brandishing
a wide-bladed hay-knife. To stop was impossible;
Christian could only utter a sharp cry of warning,
as Nancy, baulked by the suddenness of the attack,
but unable to stop herself, went up almost straight
into the air, and came down on the boughs, with her
hindlegs on one side of them and her forelegs on the
other. Then she fell forward on to her knees,
and rolled on to her off shoulder, her hind legs still
entangled in the boughs. Christian fell with
her, and as the mare’s shoulder came to the
ground, her rider was thrown a little beyond her on
the off side. The man, having saved himself by
a leap to one side, had instantly taken to his heels.
Christian was on her feet before even
Larry, quick as he was in stopping his horse and flinging
himself from his back, could reach her.
“Are you hurt?” The question,
so fraught with fear, and breathless with remembered
disasters, was answered almost before it was uttered.
“Not a scrap! Absolutely
all right; but I don’t know about Nancy
One of the mare’s hind feet
was wedged in the fork of a bough; she struggled fiercely,
and in a second or two she had freed both her hind
legs from the tangle of twigs, and lay prone at the
foot of the barricade.
“She’s all right!
He didn’t touch her,” said Larry, catching
her by the bridle. “Come, mare!”
Nancy made an effort, attempting to
get on to her feet, and rolled over again on to her
side.
“Oh, get the mare up, one of
you!” shouted Larry, wild with the rage that
had gathered force from the terror by which it had
first been strangled. “I want to go after
that damned coward
He caught his horse’s bridle
from a man who had climbed over the bank, leaving
his own horse on the farther side.
“Why the devil did none of you
stop the brute?” he stormed at the little group,
now standing on the bank, looking down upon the prostrate
mare, while he tried to steady his plunging horse in
order to mount.
“It’s no good for you,
sir!” called John Kearney to him; “he’s
away back of the house, ye’ll never get him!”
“Don’t go, Larry,”
said Christian, who was kneeling by Nancy, caressing
her and murmuring endearments. “I’m
afraid she’s badly hurt.”
The mare was lying still. Michael
Donovan, who had bred her, slipped his hand under
her, and drew it out, red with blood.
“Go after him, if ye like, the
bloody ruffian!” he said, furiously, “but
the mare will never rise from this! Oh, my lovely
little mare!”
“What do you mean?” Larry
let his horse go, and flung himself on his knees beside
Donovan. Christian, colourless continued to try
and soothe Nancy, who lay without moving, though her
frightened eye turned from one to another, and her
ears twitched.
“Staked she is!” roared
Donovan; “that’s what I mean! Look
at what’s coming from her!”
He broke into a torrent of crude statements,
made, if possible, more horrible by curses.
Larry struck him on the mouth with his open hand.
“Shut your mouth! Remember the lady!”
Michael Donovan took the blow as a
dog might take it, and without more resentment.
Christian quickly put her hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t mind, Michael. Let me see
what has happened to her
Nancy’s eye rolled back at Christian,
as she stooped over her, leaning on Donovan.
Already, a dark pool was forming beside her.
“You couldn’t see where
the branch bet her, Miss,” said Donovan, quieted
by Christian’s touch, “but there’s
what done it!” He pointed to the sharp, jagged
end of one of the branches, red with blood.
“The Vet ”
said Christian, trying to think, speaking steadily.
“Couldn’t someone fetch Mr. Cassidy?”
“No good, my dear,” said
old Kearney, wagging his head; “No good at all!
There’s no medicine for her now but what’ll
come out of a gun!”
Christian looked up into the faces
of the little knot of men round her.
“Is that true?” she said, watching them.
And all the time a voice in her mind said to her that
it was true.
“God knows I wouldn’t
wish it for the best money ever I handled,” said
one man, and looked aside from her eyes.
Another shook his head, and muttered
something about the Will o’ God. A third
said it was the sharp end of the branch that played
hammock with her; he lost a cow once himself the same
way. Old Kearney summed up for the group.
“There is no doubt in it, Miss
Christian, my dear child
Christian leaned hard on Larry’s
shoulder as she rose to her feet.
“I’m going to get Carmody’s
gun,” she said, beginning to walk away.
“He had one. I saw it. I don’t
suppose he’ll mind lending it to me.”