I wondered whether I should know any of the people out with the Potford, and wished I had made a better job of tying my white stock that morning. Tying a stock was very difficult, especially as I didn’t know how to do it. Mr. Gaffikin’s was wonderful, and I wished I knew him well enough to ask him how the effect was produced.
I was keen to see what the new Master of the Potford was like. Dixon had heard quite a lot about him. His name was Guy Warder, and he was a middle-aged man who hunted the hounds himself and did everything as cheaply as possible. He bought the most awful old screws for next to nothing at Tattersalls, made his stablemen ride them all the way down from London to save the expense of a horsebox, and brought them out hunting next day. It seemed that the Hunt was already divided into factions for and against him, and it was doubtful whether he would be allowed to hunt the country another season. It was said that he was a bad rider and always held on to the pommel of his saddle when jumping his fences. It was also rumoured that he sometimes got very drunk. People complained that he was slow, and often drew the coverts on foot. But he was popular with the farmers, and had been killing an abnormal number of foxes.
There he was, anyhow, sitting low down in the saddle among his hounds on a patch of grass in front of the Bull Inn. He was a dumpy little man with a surly red face, and he wore a coat that had once been scarlet and was now plum-coloured. He was on a good-looking horse, but the whips were mounted on underbred and rawboned animals which might well have been sent to the kennels for the hounds to eat. The hounds were dull coated and hungry looking. Evidently Mr. Guy Warder cared nothing for smartness.
Dixon saw me into the saddle with a quietly satisfied air and I rode out of the stable-yard. The first person I recognized was Bill Jaggett, who was hoisting himself on to the back of a slim, skittish, and startled-looking roan mare. He greeted me with a scowl and then remarked with a grunt, “You’ve brought your old skin over here, have you? Don’t give him much rest, do you?” The sneer in his voice made me hate him more than ever, but I was too diffident and confused to reply.
With him was his boon companion, Roger Pomfret, a ginger-haired, good-for-nothing nephew of Lord Dumborough who blundered about the country on a piebald cob and vied with Jaggett in coarseness of language and general uncouthness. But Pomfret, who was impecunious and spent his spare time in dubious transactions connected with the Turf, had a touch of bumpkin geniality about him, and was an amiable and polished gentleman when closely compared with his unprepossessing associate, who, at that moment was adjuring him (with the usual epithets) not to knock the guts out of that horse or he’d never lend him another (at the same time jogging his own mare unmercifully in the mouth and kicking her with one of his long spurs). “Will you stand still, you—” but before the last word was out of his mouth the huntsman had shaken up his hounds with a defiant little toot of the horn and was trotting down the road.
“The old rat-catcher doesn’t allow much law, does he? It’s only six minutes past eleven now!” remarked Pomfret, consulting his ticker with an oafish grin.
I dropped behind them, and was at once joined by Mr. Gaffikin, effusively cheerful, elbows well out, and a bunch of violets in his buttonhole. His friendliness revived my spirits, and he seemed to regard Jaggett and Pomfret as an excellent joke. “It’s as good as a play when they start slanging one another,” he said, eyeing their clumsy backs as they tit-tupped along.
He then told me, in an undertone, to keep pretty wide-awake today, as he’d heard that old Warder’d got something up his sleeve. He winked expressively. “I hear they’ve had one or two very queer foxes lately,” he added. I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I nodded sagaciously.
Nothing exciting happened, however, at the first covert. In accordance with his usual habit, the huntsman got off his horse and plunged into the undergrowth on foot.
“They say the old boy’s got a better nose than any of his hounds,” someone remarked.
In spite of my anxiety to avoid him, I found myself standing close behind Jaggett, who was bragging about a wonderful day he’d had “up at Melton” the week before. But I was feeling more at my ease now, and I was expressing this by swinging the lash of my crop lightly to and fro. The result was appalling. Somehow the end of it arrived at the rump of Jaggett’s roan mare; with nervous adroitness she tucked in her tail with my lash
