On one point, however, the grey pony proved better than had been antic.i.p.ated. Without the intervention of the forty married couples she took to jumping at once.

"It comes as aisy to her as lies to a tinker," said Jimmy to a criticising friend; "the first day ever I had her out on a string she wint up to the big bounds fence between us and Barrett's as indipindant as if she was going to her bed; and she jumped it as flippant and as crabbed--By dam, she's as crabbed as a monkey!"

In those days Mr. Standish O'Grady, popularly known as "Owld Sta'," had the hounds, and it need scarcely be said that Mr. Denny was one of his most faithful followers. This season he had not done as well as usual.

The colt was only turning out moderately, and though the pony was undoubtedly both crabbed and flippant, she could not be expected to do much with nearly twelve stone on her back. It happened, therefore, that Mr. Denny took his pleasure a little sadly, with his loins girded in momentary expectation of trouble, and of a sudden refusal from the colt to jump until the crowd of skirters and gap-hunters drew round, and escape was impossible until Mrs. Tom Graves's splinty old carriage horse had ploughed its way through the bank, and all those whom he most contemned had flaunted through the breach in front of him. He rode the pony now and then, but he more often lent her to little Mary O'Grady, "Owld Sta's" untidy, red-cheeked, blue-eyed, and quite uneducated little girl. It was probable that Mary could only just write her name, and it was obvious that she could not do her hair; but she was afraid of nothing that went on four legs--in Ireland, at least--and she had the divine gift of "hands". From the time when she was five, up till now, when she was fifteen, Mr. Denny had been her particular adherent, and now he found a chastened pleasure in having his eye wiped by Mary, on the grey pony; moreover, experience showed him that if anything would persuade the colt to jump freely, it was getting a lead from the little mare.

"Upon my soul, she wasn't such a bad bargain after all," he thought one pleasant December day as he jogged to the Meet, leading "Matchbox," who was fidgeting along beside him with an expression of such shrewishness as can only be a.s.sumed by a pony mare; "if it wasn't that Mary likes riding her I'd make her up a bit and she'd bring thirty-five anywhere."

There had been, that autumn, a good deal of what was euphemistically described as "trouble" in that district of the County Cork which Mr.

Denny and the Kilcronan hounds graced with their society, and when Mr.

O'Grady and his field a.s.sembled at the Curragh-coolaghy cross-roads, it was darkly hinted that if the hounds ran over a certain farm not far from the covert, there might be more trouble.

Dinny Johnny, occupied with pulling up Mary O'Grady's saddle girths, and evading the snaps with which "Matchbox" acknowledged the attention, thought little of these rumours.

"Nonsense!" he said; "whatever they do they'll let the hounds alone.

Come on, Mary, you and me'll sneak down to the north side of the wood.

He's bound to break there, and we've got to take every chance we can get."

Curragh-coolaghy covert was a large, ill-kept plantation that straggled over a long hillside fighting with furze-bushes and rocks for the right of possession; a place wherein the young hounds could catch and eat rabbits to their heart's content comfortably aware that the net of brambles that stretched from tree to tree would effectually screen them from punishment. From its north-east side a fairly smooth country trended down to a river, and if the fox did not fulfil Mr. Denny's expectations by breaking to the north, the purplish patch that showed where, on the further side of the river, Madore Wood lay, looked a point for which he would be likely to make. Conscious of an act which he would have loudly condemned in any one else, Mr. Denny, followed by Mary, like his shadow, rode quietly round the long flank of the covert to the north-east corner. They sat in perfect stillness for a few minutes, and then there came a rustling on the inside of the high, bracken-fringed fence which divided them from the covert. Then a countryman's voice said in a cautious whisper:--

"Did he put in the hounds yit?"

"He did," said another voice, "he put them in the soud-aisht side; they'll be apt to get it soon."

"Get what?" thought Dinny Johnny, all his bristles rising in wrath as the idea of a drag came to him.

"There! they're noising now!" said the first voice, while a whimper or two came from far back in the wood. "Maybe there'll not be so much chat out o' thim afther once they'll git to Madore!"

"'Twas a pity Scanlan wouldn't put the mate in here and have done with it," said the second voice. "Owld Sta'll niver let them run a dhrag."

"Yirrah, what dhrag man! 'Twas the fox himself they had, and he cut open to make a good thrail, and the way Scanlan laid it the devil himself wouldn't know 'twas a dhrag, and they have little Danny Casey below to screech he seen the fox--"

At the same instant the whimpers swelled into a far-away chorus, that grew each moment fainter and more faint. Much as Mr. Denny desired to undertake the capture of the imparters of these interesting facts, he knew that he had now no time to attempt it, and, with a shout to Mary, he started the colt at full gallop up the rough hillside, round the covert, while the grey pony scuttled after him as nimbly as a rabbit.

The colt seemed to realise the stress of the occasion, and jumped steadily enough; but the last fence on to the road was too much for his nerves, and, having swerved from it with discomposing abruptness, he fell to his wonted tactics of rearing and backing.

Mr. Denny permitted himself one minute in which to establish the fruitlessness of spurs, whip and blasphemy in this emergency, and then, descending to his own legs, he climbed over the fence into the road and ran as fast as boots and tops would let him towards the point whence the cry of the hounds was coming, ever more and more faintly. In a moment or two he returned, out of breath, to where the faithful Mary awaited him.

"It's no good, Mary," he said, wiping the perspiration from his forehead; "they're running like blazes to the south along through the furze. I suppose the devils took it that way to humbug your father, and then they'll turn for the bridge and run into Madore; and there's the end of the hounds."

Mary, who regarded the hounds as the chief, if not the only, object of existence, looked at him with scared eyes, while the colour died out of her round cheeks.

"Will they be poisoned, Mr. Denny?" she gasped.

"Every man jack of them, if your father doesn't twig it's a drag, and whip 'em off," replied Mr. Denny, with grim brevity.

"Couldn't we catch them up?" cried Mary, almost incoherent from excitement and horror.

"They've gone half-a-mile by this, and that brute," this with an eye of concentrated hatred at the colt, "won't jump a broom-stick."

"But let me try," urged Mary, maddened by the a.s.sumption of masculine calm which Mr. Denny's despair had taken on; "or--oh, Mr. Denny, if you rode 'Matchbox' yourself straight to Madore across the river, you'd be in time to whip them off!"

"By Jove!" said Dinny Johnny, and was silent. I believe that was the moment at which the ident.i.ty of the future Mrs. Denny was made clear to him.

"And you'll have to ride her in my saddle!" went on Mary at lightning speed, taking control of the situation in a manner prophetic of her future successful career as a matron. "There isn't time to change--"

"The devil I shall!" said Dinny Johnny, and an unworthy thought of what his friends would say flitted across his mind.

"And you'll have to sit sideways, because the lowest crutch is so far back there's not room for your leg if you sit saddleways," continued his preceptor breathlessly. "I know it--Jimmy said so when he rode her to the meet for me last week. Oh hurry--hurry! How slow you are!"

Mr. Denny never quite knew how he got into the horrors of the saddle, still less how he and "Matchbox" got into the road. At one acute moment, indeed, he had believed he was going to precede her thither, but they alighted more or less together, and turning her, by a handy gap, into the field on the other side of the road, he set off at a precarious gallop, followed by the encouraging shrieks of Mary.

"Thank the Lord there's no one looking, and it's a decent old saddle with a pommel on the offside," he said to himself piously, while he grasped the curving snout of the pommel in question, "I'd be a dead man this minute only for that."

He felt as though he were wedged in among the claws of a giant crab, but without the sense of retention that might be hoped for under such circ.u.mstances. The lowest crutch held one leg in aching durance; there was but just room for the other between the two upper horns, and the saddle was so short and hollow in the seat that its high-ridged cantle was the only portion from which he derived any support--a support that was suddenly and painfully experienced after each jump. He could see, very far off, the pink coat of "Owld Sta'" following a line which seemed each moment to be turning more directly for Madore, and in his agony he gave the pony an imprudent dig of the spur that sent her on and off a boggy fence in two goat-like bounds, and gave the sunlight opportunity to play intermittently upon the hollow seat of the saddle. She had never carried him so well, and as she put her little head down and raced at the fences, the unfortunate Dinny Johnny felt that though he was probably going to break his neck, no one would ever be able to mention his early demise without a grin.

Field after field fled by him in painful succession till he found himself safe on the farther side of a big stone-faced "double," the last fence before the river.

"Please G.o.d I'll never be a woman again!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Mr. Denny as he wedged his left leg more tightly in behind the torturing leaping horn, "that was a hairy old place! I wish Mary saw the pair of us coming up on to it like new-born stags!"

Had Mary seen him and "Matchbox" a moment later, emerging separately from a hole in mid stream, her respect might not have prevented her from laughing, but the fact remains that the pair got across somehow.

At the top of the hill beyond the river Dinny Johnny saw the hounds for the first time. They had checked on the road by the bridge, but now he heard them throwing their tongues as they hit the line again, the fatal line that was leading them to the covert. Even at this moment, Mr. Denny could not restrain an admiration that would appear to most people ill-timed.

"Aren't they going the h.e.l.l of a docket!" he exclaimed fondly, "and good old Chantress leading the lot of them, the darling! It'll be a queer thing now, if I don't get there in time!"

Blown though the pony was, he knew instinctively that he had not yet come to the end of her, and he drove her along at a canter until he reached a lane that encircled the covert, along which he would have to go to intercept the hounds. As he jumped into it he was suddenly aware of a yelling crowd of men and boys, who seemed, with nightmare unexpectedness, to fill all the lane behind him. He knew what they were there for, and oblivious of the lamentable absurdity of his appearance, he turned and roared out a defiance as he clattered at full speed down the stony lane. It seemed like another and almost expected episode in the nightmare when he became aware of a barricade of stones, built across the road to a height of about four feet, with along the top of it--raising it to what, on a fourteen hand pony, looked like impossibility--the branch of a fir-tree, with all its bristling twigs left on it.

He heard the cry of the hounds clearly now; they were within a couple of fields of the covert. Dinny Johnny drove his left spur into the little mare's panting side, let go the crutch, took hold of her head in the way that is unmistakable, and faced her at the barricade. As he did so a countryman sprang up at his right hand and struck furiously at him with a heavy potato spade. The blow was aimed at Dinny Johnny, but the moment was miscalculated, and it fell on "Matchbox" instead. The sharp blade gashed her hind quarter, but with a spring like a frightened deer she rose to the jump. For one supreme moment Dinny Johnny thought she had cleared it, but at the next her hind legs had caught in the branch, and with a jerk that sent her rider flying over her head, she fell in a heap on the road. Fortunately for Mr. Denny, he was a proficient in the art of falling, and though his hands were cut, and blood was streaming down his face, he was able to struggle up, and run on towards the cry of the hounds. There was still time; panting and dizzy, and half-blinded with his own blood, he knew that there was still time, and he laboured on, heedless of everything but the hounds. A high wall divided the covert from the lane, and he could see the gate that was the sole entrance to the wood on this side standing open. It was an iron gate, very high, with close upright iron bars and Chantress was racing him to get there first, Chantress, with all the pack at her heels.

Dinny Johnny won. It was a very close thing between him and Chantress, and that good hound's valuable nose came near being caught as the gates clanged together, but Dinny Johnny was in first. Then he flung himself at the pack, whipping, slashing, and swearing like a madman, as indeed he was for the moment. He had often whipped for Mr. O'Grady, and the hounds knew him, but without the solid abetting of the wall and the gate, he would have had but a poor chance. As it was, he whipped them back into the field up which they had run, and as he did so, "Owld Sta'"

came puffing up the hill, with about a dozen of the field hard at his heels.

"Poison!" gasped Dinny Johnny, falling down at full length on the gra.s.s, "the wood's poisoned!"

When they went back to look for "Matchbox" she was still lying in the bohireen. Her bridle had vanished, and so had the pursuing countrymen.

Mary O'Grady's saddle was broken, and could never be used again, and no more could "Matchbox," because she had broken her neck.

And so the hounds, whom she had saved, subsequently ate her; but one of her little hoofs commemorates her name, and as Mr. Denny, with its a.s.sistance, lights his after-dinner pipe, he often heaves an appropriate sigh, and remarks: "Well, Mary, we'll never get the like of that pony again".

"AS I WAS GOING TO BANDON FAIR"

The first glimpse was worthy the best traditions of an Irish horse-fair.

The train moved slowly across a bridge; beneath it lay the princ.i.p.al street of Bandon, seething with horses, loud with voices, and as the engine-driver, with the stern humour of his kind, let loose the usual a.s.sortment of sounds, it seemed as though the roadway below boiled over.

Horses reared, plunged and stampeded, while high above the head of a long-tailed chestnut a countryman floated forth into s.p.a.ce, a vision, in its brief perfectness, delightfully photographed on the retina.