"Phil appears to have gone home to tell your mother," said George Freyne, answering.
"She won't mind a bit until you come to advise her about it, so that doesn't matter," returned Gheena. "Yes, he's gone."
"He said he was off to the Missus," said Andy, "an' ye none of ye heard him go."
"Three times I repeated: When my _orders_ come!" wailed Keefe. "And I should not have said even that, but I was just trying to break it easily to you all that there will be orders as to invasion, if there is an invasion; and when they come..."
"If you say it again, Keefe, I shall set Grandjer at your horse," said Darby loftily.
Mr. Freyne then got off his horse, and suggested learning the hounds' names, which they had come out for instead of talking nonsense. Andy knew them all. But, as in a kaleidoscope, tan and pied bodies and flapping ears and wistful eyes seemed to shift and melt before the would-be learner.
"That is Doatie, with the sphot above his tail. Call him. That is Sergeant ye called, an' his biggest sphot is on his eye."
"Didn't you call the first one a he," said Freyne heatedly, "and that other--and both?"
"Well, he--Doatie--do have pups surely," said Andy patiently; "but he has a sphot on his tail annyways, an' that is Sergeant."
Grandjer, yellow tan and tailless, was unmistakable. So was Sweetheart, who had lost an ear, and the enormous Home Ruler. The two small black hounds called respectively the Divil and the Tailor could only be mistaken for each other. They were, Andy told them, "Holy terrors to hunt, but apt to be yowlin' if a fence was very high, bein' baygles entirely."
The pack sat or rolled, greatly interested in the increasing reiteration of its names.
Beauty, being polite, thumped her tail without pause; it was really hardly worth while stopping. All the more obliging hounds shifted and oozed from side to side as they were called, and the lesson terminated at length by Darby suggesting that dinner-time would be upon them and they had better go on.
It was too late to wander into the mountains. Darby took a road which wound up to a little group of houses, and then back again to the coast, with the pack lumbering along quite placidly and the four whippers-in all repeating names behind them.