iars I did
at least fifty."

"No, I didn't get a shot," replied Gay, "but I met a poacher on my land
who appeared to have been more successful. There seems to be absolutely
no respect for a man's property rights in this part of the country. The
fellow actually had the impudence to stop and bandy words with me."

"Well, you mustn't be too hard on him. His ancestors, doubtless, shot
over your fields for generations, and he'd probably look upon an attempt
to enforce the game laws as an infringement of his privileges."

"Do you mean that the landowner is utterly unprotected?"

"By no means--go slow--go slow--you might search the round globe, I
believe for a more honest or a more peaceable set of neighbours. But
they've always been taught, you see, to regard the bird in the air as
belonging to the man with the gun. On these large estates game was so
plentiful in the old days and pot-hunters, as they call them, so few,
that it didn't pay a man to watch out for his interest. Now that the
birds are getting scarce, the majority of farmers in the State are
having their lands posted, but your uncle was too little of a sportsman
to concern himself in the matter."

"Well, I knocked a tooth out of the fellow, so the whole county will be
after me like a pack of hounds, I suppose. I wonder who he was, by the
way--young, good looking, rather a bully?"

"The description fits a Revercomb. As they are your next neighbours it
was probably the miller or his brother."

"I know the miller, and it wasn't he--but when I come to think of it,
the youngster had that same rustic look to him. By Jove, I am sorry it
was a Revercomb," he added under his breath.

A frown had settled on the face of the old gentleman, and he poured the
syrup over his buckwheat cakes with the manner of a man who is about to
argue a case for the defence when his natural sympathies are with the
prosecution.

"They are an irascible family from the mother down," he observed, "and
I'm sorry you've got into trouble with them so soon for the miller is
probably the most popular man in the county." He paused, cleared his
throat, and after a tentative glance at Kesiah, which fell short of her
bosom, decided to leave the sentence in his mind unspoken while they
remained in her presence.

A little later, when the two men were smoking in the library, Gay
brought the conversation back again to the point at which the lawyer had
so hastily dropped it.

"Am I likely, then, to