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The moon would not rise till nearly nine, but the evening was delightfully calm and clear, and the horseman's way home was as straight as an arrow, over one of the best roads in the country. At precisely eight o'clock in the evening of this identical Monday, July 17th, 1854, old Jonathan Perry sat tranquilly smoking his pipe at the door of the toll-gate two miles north of Millbrook.
In the grove gate the horseman galloped ahead; but Barbara did not once look up until at the porch-steps she saw yellow Willis, the lame ploughman, smiling and limping forward round the corner of the house; Trudie, the house girl, trying to pass him by; Johanna wildly dancing; Aunt Virginia, her hands up, calling to heaven from the red cavern of her mouth; Uncle Leviticus, her husband, Cornelius's step-father, holding the pawing steed; gladness on every face, and the mistress of Rosemont drawing from the horseman's arm to welcome her ragged guest.
And now a footstep approaches a slow and a solemn footstep it pauses a moment at the door of the apartment, and then the servant flings it open, and a tall man enters. He is enveloped in the folds of a horseman's cloak, and there is the clank of spurs upon his heels as he walks into the room.
Near the chapel of Glenfinlough, in King's County, there is a ridge with a boulder on it called the Fairy's Stone or the Horseman's Stone, which presents on its flat surface, besides cup-like hollows, crosses, and other markings, rudely-carved representations of the human foot.
Come, you must not take matters so to heart; cheer up; such things will happen in connection with the trade you have taken up." "Sorrow befall the trade, and the thief who taught it me," said Murtagh; "and yet the trade is not a bad one, if I only knew more of it, and had some one to help and back me. Och! the idea of being cheated and bamboozled by that one-eyed thief in the horseman's dress."
We were solemnly cautioned not to make any excavations in the turf, especially ditches around the tents to carry off the rain, or even holes in the ground in which to build our cooking fires, as the land is hunted over, and any stray holes in the ground might break a horseman's collar bone or a horse's leg.
His face, sharp-featured, sun-burnt, and freckled, had a sinister expression of violence, impudence, and cunning, each of which seemed alternately to predominate over the others. Sandy-coloured hair, and reddish eyebrows, from under which looked forth his sharp grey eyes, completed the inauspicious outline of the horseman's physiognomy.
Here came old Roelant Cuckaburt, with a short blunderbuss on his shoulder and a long horseman's sword trailing by his side; and Barent Dirkson, with something that looked like a copper kettle, turned upside down on his head, and a couple of old horse pistols in his belt; and Dirk Volkertson, with a long duck fowling-piece without any ramrod, and a host more, armed higgledy-piggledy with swords, hatchets, snickersnees, crowbars, broomsticks, and what not; the officers distinguished from the rest by having their slouched hats cocked up with pins and surmounted with cocktail feathers.
The captain ceased speaking, and their horses picked their way over the stones, their hoofs clattering loudly, and making the people they passed turn to stare after the two military-looking cavaliers in cocked hat and horseman's cloak, and with the lower parts of their scabbards seen below to show that they were well armed.
The eighth intruder followed a tall, thin man, pale-faced and stern and young, with a heavy horseman's cloak falling from his shoulders, the front of which was gathered up across his arms. A handsome and yet worn face the face of one who had seen better days and known brighter times a picturesque kind of vagabond, take him in the candle-light.
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