Gheena chose the road. She had often jogged up it out hunting; now it seemed to wind interminably, and the surface to grate away under each step she took.
High banks, with blackberry vines and honeysuckle sprawling over them, kept away the wind. Gheena toiled up a steep glen and thought out what she would say to Darby. In the glen the clinging friendship of the blackberry and honeysuckle gave way to bare red banks spangled with slabs of drab slate, which caught and gave back the heat of the sun, little oozing trickles of moisture being quite insufficient to cool them.
The glen ended at cross roads. Gheena stood still there. She was extremely hot, her feet ached in the buckled shoes, and she eyed the winding brown ribbon of road turning towards the left towards Marty Casey's house with bitter dislike.
It was a road advancing without apparent method, turning up to the right, then finding that scenery dull, and running off to the left again, climbing steep hills which it apparently might have avoided, and avoiding others which would have shortened its way by miles, its surface, two ruts and gravelly stones, and its edges inhospitable ditches of boggy water.
It was only the prospect of telling Darby of his slackness which made Gheena draw a long breath and look toward the road with gloomy determination. Perhaps Marty Casey had a trap or a cart which he could drive her back to the town in.
The tuff-tuff of a motor made her look round hopefully; a long grey nose glided round the sharp corner where the roads branched to the right, and Basil Stafford put down his foot-brake with a jar.
"I was out at Cloony Point, and I thought that I might find you and Dillon seeing the hounds," he said.
Gheena greeted him ill-humouredly. His grey tweed suit was so completely unlike khaki, and she was in the mood to be jarred.
She wished to know irrelevantly, "Why roads could not go straight to places? Up and down, and round about," said Gheena, with a note of hysterical over-fatigue in her voice, "and everywhere, as if they were playing 'Round the Mulberry Bush' instead of going to Marty Casey's. You make drains. Why don't they go straight?"
Stafford thought apologetically that perhaps it was because there were several places to go to. In the still soft air little trails of blue-brown smoke showed where houses stood.