“Come out, and I’ll get some of these chaps to look.”
Mr Boxall came out of the ditch with his handkerchief held to the left side of his forehead.
“Why, your watch and chain are on you!” cried the General.
“So they are,” said Mr Boxall, pulling the watch out with his left hand, and putting it back. “I’m off to the house—I want to wash.”
“Not in the least, only my forehead scratched.”
“What’s up?” cried Dicky Fanshawe, who had just arrived.
“Nothing,” replied his uncle. “Fellow hit him by mistake—no bones broken. Will you take the governess-cart back to the house, Boxall?”
“His legs is all right,” murmured the sympathetic crowd, as the injured one departed still with his handkerchief to his face, “and his arums. Sure, it’s the mercy and all his neck wasn’t bruck.”
“Musha! Sure, I thought it would have sent his head flying into Athy, like a gulf ball.”
Patsy, who had pulled the governess-cart up, rose to his feet; his sharp eye had caught sight of something lying on the road.
“Hould the reins a moment, Mr Robert,” said he, putting them into Lord Gawdor’s hands. He hopped out of the cart, picked up the object in the road, whatever it was, put it in his trousers pocket, and then stood holding the pony’s head; whilst the meet, from which Bob Mahony had departed as swiftly as his donkey could trot, turned its attention to the business of the day, and Shan, collecting his dogs, declared his intention of drawing the Furzes.
“Was that a marble you picked up, Patsy?” asked Lord Gawdor, as the red-headed one, hearing Shan’s declaration, climbed into the “tub” again and took the reins.
“Be sittin’ still, now,” said he, hitting the pony a flick with the whip, “or the ould General will, maybe, be sendin’ us back. It’s the Furzes Shan’s goin’ to draw.”
“Look at Shan and the dogs and ould Rafter cockin’ his tail,” said Patsy. “It’s the fine sport we’ll be havin’ if there’s a hare in the Furzes.”
The Furzes, a tract of waste land bordering a big stretch of ploughed fields and arable land, was reached in twenty minutes’ walk, General Grampound walking between Dick and Violet and rigorously dividing them.
It was a splendid day for the business—one of those grey, damp days one gets only in Ireland.