expectation of trouble, and of a sudden refusal from the colt to jump until the crowd of skirters and gap-hunters drew round, and escape was impossible until Mrs. Tom Graves’s splinty old carriage horse had ploughed its way through the bank, and all those whom he most contemned had flaunted through the breach in front of him.  He rode the pony now and then, but he more often lent her to little Mary O’Grady, “Owld Sta’s” untidy, red-cheeked, blue-eyed, and quite uneducated little girl.  It was probable that Mary could only just write her name, and it was obvious that she could not do her hair; but she was afraid of nothing that went on four legs—­in Ireland, at least—­and she had the divine gift of “hands”.  From the time when she was five, up till now, when she was fifteen, Mr. Denny had been her particular adherent, and now he found a chastened pleasure in having his eye wiped by Mary, on the grey pony; moreover, experience showed him that if anything would persuade the colt to jump freely, it was getting a lead from the little mare.

“Upon my soul, she wasn’t such a bad bargain after all,” he thought one pleasant December day as he jogged to the Meet, leading “Matchbox,” who was fidgeting along beside him with an expression of such shrewishness as can only be assumed by a pony mare; “if it wasn’t that Mary likes riding her I’d make her up a bit and she’d bring thirty-five anywhere.”

There had been, that autumn, a good deal of what was euphemistically described as “trouble” in that district of the County Cork which Mr. Denny and the Kilcronan hounds graced with their society, and when Mr. O’Grady and his field assembled at the Curragh-coolaghy cross-roads, it was darkly hinted that if the hounds ran over a certain farm not far from the covert, there might be more trouble.

Dinny Johnny, occupied with pulling up Mary O’Grady’s saddle girths, and evading the snaps with which “Matchbox” acknowledged the attention, thought little of these rumours.

“Nonsense!” he said; “whatever they do they’ll let the hounds alone.  Come on, Mary, you and me’ll sneak down to the north side of the wood.  He’s bound to break there, and we’ve got to take every chance we can get.”

Curragh-coolaghy covert was a large, ill-kept plantation that straggled over a long hillside fighting with furze-bushes and rocks for the right of possession; a place wherein the young hounds could catch and eat rabbits to their heart’s content comfortably aware that the net of brambles that stretched from tree to tree would effectually screen them from punishment.  From its north-east side a fairly smooth country trended down to a river, and if the fox did not fulfil Mr. Denny’s expectations by breaking to the north, the purplish patch that showed where, on the further side of the river, Madore Wood lay, looked a point for which he would be likely to make.  Conscious of an act which he would have loudly condemned in any one else, Mr. Denny, followed by Mary, like his shadow, rode quietly round the long flank of the covert to the north-east corner.  They sat in perfect stillness for a few minutes, and then there came a rustling on the inside of the high, bracken-fringed fence which divided them from the covert.  Then a countryman’s voice said in a cautious whisper:—­