"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 have trouble with the Revercombs?" he asked, with a disturbing memory of Blossom's flaxen head under the hooded shawl. "It's not improbable that the family will take up the matter. These country folk are fearful partisans, you see. However, it may lead to nothing worse than the miller's refusing to grind your corn or forbidding you to use the bridle path over his pasture." "Had my uncle any friction in that quarter when he lived here?" Mr. Chamberlayne's cigar had gone out while he talked, and striking a match on a silver box, he watched the thin blue flame abstractedly an instant before he answered. "Were you ever told," he inquired, "that there was some talk of arresting Abner Revercomb before the coroner's jury agreed on a verdict?" "Abner? He's the eldest of the brothers, isn't he? No, I hadn't heard of it."