"
"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.
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