Here Darby wanted patiently to know if Phil was digging trenches or only opening a box.
"I'd say it will not fit on aisy," said Phil dubiously, coming round. He held up a brightly new Klaxon and scratched his head with his free hand.
"I--Matilda!" yelled George Freyne hopelessly.
"I--told you--a hunting horn--weeks ago! Years ago! There was a delay in sending it."
"You said the very loudest one, Dearest George," said Matilda pleasantly. "All the stores were short owing to the war. I did wonder what you could fix it on to, but as you said a whistle too. Isn't there a whistle in the box, Phil?"
"Move on, Barty," said Darby with decision.
Darby Dillon left his fellow master glaring at the Klaxon horn and rode up to the hounds. There was no eager greeting to him of quick yaps and wagging sterns, but rather a distinctly critical surveillance, and liquid eyes looking for the men on foot whom the pack knew.
Seen gathered together, the scratch pack were not prepossessing.
Darby grinned softly at the varieties of hound types, at Greatness's crooked legs and Daisy's snub nose, and especially at the crop-tailed Grandjer, so nearly related to a terrier.
A fringe of excited onlookers, previous followers of the foot dogs, gathered close, commenting eagerly.
"That is Spinsther, that ye reared, Marty. D'ye call to mind the day he took the trail down be Conellan's dykes, an' we all at the wrong side?"
Marty rubbed his head and recalled the incident.
"An' when he had his pup, didn't he tear meself too," remarked Marty sourly. "A pair of trouser I had on but eighteen months near pulled off me. He is a savage soort of a dog that Spinsther, an' I to rear him an' all with lashin's of milk an' male."
"An' Beauty, he has the nose. When the thrail was losht down anear the say, an' the other dogs on the back thrail, wasn't it Beauty thrun a yowl of his own?"
"Grandjer was the next," put in little Andy, "or maybe the firsht; but Papa had his mind med up he was only thrailin' old Mrs. Day's cat, Grandjer bein' but a puppy then."
"They do be talkin' of the Hunt Club hounds, but we have one fox an' his pups," said the covert keeper. "Five of them no less, an' thank God ye are out to hunt them."
Darby gathered the pack and waved his hand. The hounds looked up at the passage of the dog-skin glove through the air with mild curiosity. Darby waved it again; he uttered somewhat awkwardly a variety of hunting cries.