But in a moment or two the sportsman’s instinct woke in him; a fish stirred in a pool under a boulder, and pulling himself together he threw a fly over the rise.  As he did so, the brooding silence was broken by the deep musical bark of a collie, followed by the sharp yap, yap of a fox-terrier.  The sudden sound almost startled Stafford; at any rate, caused him to miss his fish; he looked up with a little frown of annoyance, and saw on the break of the opposite hill some of the mountain sheep which had stared at him with haughty curiosity running down towards the green bottom of the valley followed by the two dogs.

A moment afterwards a horse and rider were silhouetted on the extreme top of the high hill.  The horse was large whereby the rider looked small; and for a moment the pair were motionless, reminding Stafford of a bronze statue.  The hill was fearfully steep, even the dogs ran with a certain amount of caution, and Stafford wondered whether the rider—­he couldn’t see if it was man or boy—­would venture down the almost precipitous slope.  While he was wondering, the small figure on the horse sent up a cry that rang like the note of a bell and echoed in sweet shrillness down the hill and along the valley.  The collie stopped as if shot, and the fox-terrier looked round, prepared to go back to the rider.  It looked for a moment as if the rider were going down the other side of the hill again; then suddenly, as if he detected something wrong in the valley below, he turned the horse and came down the hill-side at a pace which made Stafford, hard and fearless rider as he was, open his eyes.

It seemed to him impossible that the horse could avoid a false step or a slip, and such a false step he knew would send steed and rider hurtling down to something that could be very little short of instant death.  He forgot all about the big trout in the pool, and stood with his fly drifting aimlessly in the water, watching with something like breathless interest this, the most daring piece of horsemanship he had ever witnessed; and he had ridden side by side with the best steeplechaser of the day, and had watched a crack Hungarian cavalry corps at its manoeuvres; which last is about the top notch of the horse-riding business.

But the big horse did not falter for a moment; down it came at a hard gallop, and Stafford’s admiration was swallowed up in amazement when he saw that the rider was a young girl, that she was riding with about half an ounce on the reins, and that, apparently, she was as much at ease and unconscious of danger as if she were trotting on a tame hack in Rotten Row.