"A nice, dry, cheerful sort of place to meet your cousin in, too; uncommon lively; hope it'll raise his spirits to see all his cousins a-grinning there; his spirits don't seem much in sorts now," continued the ruthless inquisitor, with a glance at the "keeper's tree" by which they stood, in the middle of dank undergrowth, whose branches were adorned with dead cats, curs, owls, kestrels, stoats, weasels, and martens.

To what issue the passage of arms might have come it is impossible to say, for at that moment the colt took matters into his own hands, and bolted with a rush that even Rake could not pull in till he had had a mile-long "pipe-opener." "Something up there," thought that sagacious rough-rider; "if that red-haired chap ain't a rum lot, I'll eat him.

I've seen his face, too, somewhere; where the deuce was it?
Cousin; yes, cousins in Queer Street, I dare say! Why should he go and meet his 'cousin' out in the fog there, when, if you took twenty cousins home to the servants' hall, nobody'd ever say anything?
If that Willon ain't as deep as Old Harry----" And Rake rode into the stable-yard, thoughtful and intensely suspicious of the rendezvous under the keeper's tree in the out-lying coverts.

He would have been more so had he guessed that Ben Davis' red beard and demure attire, with other as efficient disguises, had prevented even his own keen eyes from penetrating the identity of Willon's "Cousin" with the welsher he had seen thrust off the course the day before by his master..