In Mr. Knox's Country Part 30

says I to the water-bailiff. 'How do you know it was a salmon at all?'

'Is it how would I know?' says the bailiff, 'didn't I gaff the fish for him meself!'"

"What did your anglers say to that?" I enquired.

"Well, they didn't quite go so far as to tell me I was a liar," said Mr. M'Cabe tranquilly. "Ah, telling such as them the truth is wasting what isn't plenty! Then they'll meet some fellow that lies like a tooth-drawer, and they'll write to the English _Times_ on the head of him!" He stretched forth a long and bony hand for the tumbler of whisky and water. "And talking of tooth-drawers," he went on, "there's a dentist comes here once a fortnight, Jeffers his name is, and a great sportsman too. I was with him to-day"--he pa.s.sed his hand consciously over his mouth, and the difference that I had dimly felt in his appearance suddenly, and in all senses of the word, flashed upon me--"and he was telling me how one time, in the summer that's past, he'd been out all night, fis.h.i.+ng in the Owen. He was going home before the dawn, and he jumped down off a bank on to what he took to be a white stone--and he aimed for the stone, mind you, because he thought the ground was wet--and what was it but a man's face!" M'Cabe paused to receive my comment. "What did he do, is it? Ran off for his life, roaring out, 'There's a first-rate dentist in Owenford!' The fellow was lying asleep there, and he having bundles of spurge with him to poison the river! He had taken drink, I suppose."

"Was he a water-bailiff too?" said I. "I hope the conservators of the river stood him a set of teeth."

"If they did," said M'Cabe, with an unexpected burst of feeling, "I pity him!" He rose to his feet, and put his tumbler down on the chimney-piece. "Well, we should get away early in the morning, and it's no harm for me to go to bed."

He yawned--a large yawn that ended abruptly with a metallic click. His eyes met mine, full of unspoken things; we parted in a silence that seemed to have been artificially imposed upon Mr. M'Cabe.

The wind boomed intermittently in my chimney during the night, and a far and heavy growling told of the dissatisfaction of the sea. Yet the morning was not unfavourable. There was a broken mist, with s.h.i.+mmers of sun in it, and the carman said it would be a thing of nothing, and would go out with the tide. The Boots, a relic of the old _regime_, was pessimistic, and mentioned that there were two stars squez up agin the moon last night, and he would have no dependence on the day.

M'Cabe offered no opinion, being occupied in bestowing in a species of dog-box beneath the well of the car a young red setter, kindly lent by his friend the dentist. The setter, who had formed at sight an unfavourable opinion of the dog-box, had resolved himself into an invertebrate ma.s.s of jelly and lead, and was with difficulty straightened out and rammed home into it.

"Have we all now?" said M'Cabe, slamming the door in the dog's face.

"Take care we're not like me uncle, old Tom Duffy, that was going shooting, and was the whole morning slapping his pockets and saying, 'Me powder! me shot! me caps! me wads!' and when he got to the bog, 'O tare an' ouns!' says he, 'I forgot the gun!'"

There are still moments when I can find some special and not-otherwise-to-be-attained flavour in driving on an outside car; a sense of personal achievement in sitting, by some method of instinctive suction, the lurches and swoops peculiar to these vehicles. Reardon's had given us its roomiest car and its best horse, a yellow mare, with a long back and a slinging trot, and a mouth of iron.

"Where did Mr. Reardon get the mare, Jerry?" asked M'Cabe, as we zigzagged in successive hairbreadths through the streets of Owenford.

"D-Dublin, sir," replied the driver, who, with both fists extended in front of him and both heels planted against his narrow footboard, seemed to find utterance difficult.

"She's a goer!" said M'Cabe.

"She is--she killed two men," said Jerry, in two jerks.

"That's a great credit to her. What way did she do it?"

"P-pulled the lungs out o' them!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Jerry, turning the last corner and giving the mare a shade more of her head, as a tribute, perhaps, to her prowess.

She swung us for some six miles along the ruts of the coast road at the same unflinching pace, after which, turning inland and uphill, we began the climb of four miles into the mountains. It was about eleven o'clock when we pulled up beside a long and reedy pool, high up in the heather; the road went on, illimitably it seemed, and was lost, with its attendant telegraph posts, in cloud.

"Away with ye now, Jerry," said M'Cabe; "we'll shoot our way home."

He opened the back of the dog-box, and summoned its occupant. The summons was disregarded. Far back in the box two sparks of light and a dead silence indicated the presence of the dog.

"How, snug you are in there!" said M'Cabe; "here, Jerry, pull him out for us. What the deuce is this his name is? Jeffers told me yesterday, and it's gone from me."

"I d'no would he bite me?" said Jerry, taking a cautious observation and giving voice to the feelings of the party. "Here, poor fellow!

Here, good lad!"

The good lad remained immovable. The lure of a sandwich produced no better result.

"We can't be losing our day with the brute this way," said M'Cabe.

"Tip up the car. He'll come out then, and no thanks to him."

As the shafts rose heavenwards, the law of gravitation proved too many for the setter, and he slowly slid to earth.

"If I only knew your dam name we'd be all right now," said M'Cabe.

The carman dropped the shafts on to the mare, and drove on up the pa.s.s, with one side of the car turned up and himself on the other. The yellow mare had, it seemed, only begun her day's work. A prophetic instinct, of the reliable kind that is strictly founded on fact, warned me that we might live to regret her departure.

The dentist's setter had, at sight of the guns, realised that things were better than he had expected, and now preceded us along the edge of the lake with every appearance of enthusiasm. He quartered the ground with professional zeal, he splashed through the sedge, and rattled through thickets of dry reeds, and set successively a heron, a water-hen, and something, unseen, that I believe to have been a water-rat. After each of these efforts he rushed in upon his quarry, and we called him by all the gun-dog names we had ever heard of, from Don to Grouse, from Carlo to Shot, coupled with objurgations on a rising scale. With none of them did we so much as vibrate a chord in his bosom. He was a large dog, with a blunt stupid face, and a faculty for excitement about nothing that impelled him to bound back to us as often as possible, to gaze in our eyes in brilliant enquiry, and to pant and prance before us with all the fatuity of youth. Had he been able to speak, he would have asked idiotic questions, of that special breed that exact from their victim a reply of equal imbecility.

The lake and its environs, for the first time in M'Cabe's experience, yielded nothing; we struck up on to the mountain side, following the course of an angry stream that came racing down from the heights. We worked up through ling and furze, and skirted flocks of pale stones that lay in the heather like petrified sheep, and the dog, ranging deliriously, set water-wagtails and anything else that could fly; I believe he would have set a blue-bottle, and I said so to M'Cabe.

"Ah, give him time; he'll settle down," said M'Cabe, who had a thankfulness for small mercies born of a vast experience of makes.h.i.+fts; "he might fill the bag for us yet."

We laboured along the flank of the mountain, climbing in and out of small ravines, jumping or wading streams, slos.h.i.+ng through yellow sedgery bog; always with the brown heather running up to the misty skyline, and always with the same atrocious luck. Once a small pack of grouse got up, very wild, and leagues out of range, thanks to the far-reaching activities of the dog, and once a hermit woodc.o.c.k exploded out of a clump of furze, and sailed away down the slope, followed by four charges of shot and the red setter, in equally innocuous pursuit.

And this, up to luncheon time, was the sum of the morning's sport.

We ate our sandwiches on a high ridge, under the lee of a tumbled pile of boulders, that looked as if they had been about to hurl themselves into the valley, and had thought better of it at the last moment.

Between the looming, elephant-grey mountains the mist yielded glimpses of the far greenness of the sea, the only green thing in sight in this world of grey and brown. The dog sat opposite to me, and willed me to share my food with him. His steady eyes were charged with the implication that I was a glutton; personally I abhorred him, yet I found it impossible to give him less than twenty-five per cent. of my sandwiches.

"I wonder did Jeffers take him for a bad debt," said M'Cabe reflectively, as he lit his pipe.

I said I should rather take my chance with the bad debt.

"He might have treated me better," M'Cabe grumbled on, "seeing that I paid him seven pound ten the day before yesterday, let alone that it was me that was the first to put him up to this--this bit of s.h.i.+nroe Mountain that never was what you might call strictly preserved. When he came here first he didn't as much as know what cartridges he'd want for it. 'Six and eight,' says I, 'that's a lawyer's fee, so if you think of me you'll not forget it!' And now, if ye please," went on Mr.

Jeffers' preceptor in sport, "he's shooting the whole country and selling all he gets! And he wouldn't as much as ask me to go with him; and the excuse he gives, he wouldn't like to have an old hand like me connyshooring his shots! How modest he is!"

I taunted M'Cabe with having been weak enough thus to cede his rights, and M'Cabe, who was not at all amused, said that after all it wasn't so much Jeffers that did the harm, but an infernal English Syndicate that had taken the s.h.i.+nroe shooting this season, and paid old Purcell that owned it ten times what it was worth.

"It might be as good for us to get off their ground now," continued M'Cabe, rising slowly to his feet, "and try the Lackagreina Valley.

The stream below is their bounds."

This, I hasten to say, was the first I had heard of the Syndicate, and I thought it tactless of M'Cabe to have mentioned it, even though the wrong that we had done them was purely technical. I said to him that I thought the sooner we got off their ground the better, and we descended the hill and crossed the stream, and M'Cabe said that he could always shoot this next stretch of country when he liked. With this a.s.surance, we turned our backs on the sea and struck inland, tramping for an hour or more through country whose entire barrenness could only be explained on the hypothesis that it has been turned inside out to dry. So far it had failed to achieve even this result.

The weather got thicker, and the sport, if possible, thinner; I had long since lost what bearings I possessed, but M'Cabe said he knew of a nice patch of scrub in the next valley that always held a c.o.c.k. The next valley came at last, not without considerable effort, but no patch of scrub was apparent. Some small black and grey cattle stood and looked at us, and a young bull showed an inclination to stalk the dog; it seemed the only sport the valley was likely to afford. M'Cabe looked round him, and looked at his watch, and looked at the sky, which did not seem to be more than a yard above our heads, and said without emotion:

"Did ye think of telling the lad in the gla.s.s box in the hall that we might want some dinner kept hot for us? I d'no from Adam where we've got to!"

There was a cattle track along the side of the valley which might, though not necessarily, lead somewhere. We pursued it, and found that it led, in the first instance, to some blackfaced mountain sheep. A cheerful interlude followed, in which the red setter hunted the sheep, and we hunted the setter, and what M'Cabe said about the dentist in the intervals of the chase was more appropriate to the occasion than to these pages.

When justice had been satiated, and the last echo of the last yell of the dog had trembled into silence among the hills, we resumed the cattle-track, which had become a shade more reliable, and, as we proceeded, began to give an impression that it might lead somewhere.

The day was dying in threatening stillness. Lethargic layers of mist bulged low, like the roof of a marquee, and cloaked every outline that could yield us information. The dog, unchastened by recent events, and full of an idiot optimism, continued to range the hillside.

"I suppose I'll never get the chance to tell Jeffers my opinion of that tom-fool," said M'Cabe, following with an eye of steel the perambulations of the dog; "the best barrister that ever wore a wig couldn't argue with a dentist! He has his fist half way down your throat before you can open your mouth; and in any case he'll tell me we couldn't expect any dog would work for us when we forgot his name.

What's the brute at now?"

The brute was high above us on the hillside, setting a solitary furze bush with convincing determination, and casting backward looks to see if he were being supported.

"It might be a hare," said M'Cabe, c.o.c.king his gun, with a revival of hope that was almost pathetic, and ascending towards the furze bush.

I neither quickened my pace nor deviated from the cattle track, but I may admit that I did so far yield to the theory of the hare as to slip a cartridge into my gun.

M'Cabe put his gun to his shoulder, lowered it abruptly, and walked up to the furze bush. He stooped and picked up something.