Being an emotional person in a spasmodic and egotistical fashion, he found himself thinking presently of Janet Merryweather, as he had thought more than once during the wakeful hours of the night.  He felt, somehow, that she had been treated detestably, and he was angry with his uncle for having left him, as he described it, “in such a deuce of a hole.”  “One can’t acknowledge the girl, I suppose, though for the matter of that those tell-tale eyes of hers are not only an acknowledgment, but a condemnation.”

With a low whistle, he brought his gun quickly down from his shoulder as a partridge, rising with a gentle whir from the red-topped orchard grass in front of him, skimmed lightly into the golden pathway the sun made through the mist.  At the same instant a shot rang out close beside him, and the bird dropped at his feet while Archie Revercomb sauntered slowly across the pasture.  A string of partridges and several rabbits hung from his shoulder, and at his heels a pack of fox-hounds followed with muzzles held close to the moist ground.

For a minute Gay’s angry astonishment left him rooted to the spot.  Accustomed to the rigid game laws of England, and ignorant of the habits of the country into which he had come, he saw in the act, not the ancient Virginian acceptance of the bird as the right of the hunter, but a lawless infringement of his newly acquired sense of possession.

“You confounded rogue!” he exclaimed hotly, “so you’re not only shooting my partridges, but you’re actually shooting them before my eyes.”

“What’s that?” asked Archie, only half understanding the words, “were you after that bird yourself then?”

“Well, rather, my friend, and I’ll trouble you at the same time to hand over that string on your shoulder.”

“Hand them over?  Well, I like that!  Why, I shot them.”

“But you shot them on my land didn’t you?”

“What in the devil do you mean by that?  My folks have shot over these fields before yours were ever heard of about here.  A bird doesn’t happen to be yours, I reckon, just because it takes a notion to fly over your pasture.”

“Do you mean to tell me that you don’t respect a man’s right to his game?”

“A man’s game is the bird in the bag, not in the air, I reckon.  This land was open hunting in the time of the Jordans, and we’re not going to keep off of it at the first bid of any Tom-fool that thinks he’s got a better right to it.”

The assumption of justice angered Gay far more than the original poaching had done.  To be flouted in his own pasture on the subject of his own game by a handsome barbarian, whom he had caught red-handed in the act of stealing, would have appealed irresistibly to his sense of humour, if it had not enraged him.

“All the same I give you fair warning,” he retorted, “that the next time I find you trespassing on my land, I’ll have the law after you.”

“The law—­bosh!  Do you think I’m afraid of it?”