To my surprise Mr. Gaffikin came up and congratulated me admirably on the way I had “pulled Bill Jaggett’s leg.” He said it was the neatest thing he’d ever seen and he wouldn’t have missed it for worlds. He slapped his leg in a paroxysm of amusement, and I modestly accepted the implication that I had done it on purpose. Guy Warder then emerged from his investigations of the undergrowth and blew his hounds out of covert.
“Where are you going now, Master?” shouted a sharp-faced man with a green collar on his cutaway coat.
“You’ll find out when I get there,” growled Warder, hunching his shoulders and trotting briskly down the lane.
Mr. Gaffikin explained that the green-collared man was a notoriously tardy and niggardly subscriber. Nevertheless, we were apparently making an unexpected excursion, and people were audibly wondering what the old beggar was up to now. Anyhow, I gathered that we were heading for the best bit of the vale country, though it had been expected that we would draw some big woods in the other direction. After a couple of miles he turned in at a gate and made for a small spinney. Word now came back from the first whip that “an old dog-fox had been viewed there this morning.” Halfway across the field to the spinney the Master pulled up, faced round, and exclaimed gruffly, “I’d be obliged if you’d keep close together on this side of the covert, gentlemen.” He then cantered off with his hounds and disappeared among the trees.
“Stick close to me,” said Mr. Gaffikin in a low voice. “The old devil’s got a drag laid, as sure as mutton!”
He was right. A minute afterward there was a shrill halloa; when we got round to the far side of the spinney there was the huntsman going hell for leather down the slope with his hounds running mute on one side of him. With my heart in my mouth I followed Mr. Gaffikin over one fence after another. Harkaway was a bold jumper and he took complete control of me. I can remember very little of what happened, but I was told afterwards that we went about four miles across the only good bit of vale in the Potford country. The gallop ended with the huntsman blowing his horn under a park wall while the hounds scrabbled and bayed rather dubiously over a rabbit-hole. There were only eight or ten riders up at the finish, and the credit of my being among them belonged to Harkaway. Jaggett, thank heaven, was nowhere to be seen.
Warder took off his cap and mopped his brow. Then he looked with grudging good humour at the remnant of his field and their heaving horses. “Now let the bastards say I don’t go well enough!” he remarked, as he slipped his horn back in its case on his saddle.
III
My successful scramble across the Potford Vale obliterated all the dreariness and disappointment of my days with the Dumborough. My faith in foxhunting had been reinforced in the nick of time, and I joggled home feeling a hero. Highly strung old Harkaway seemed to share my elation. His constitution was equal to a fast hunt, but he needed to be taken home early in the afternoon. The long dragging days in the Dumborough woodlands wore him out. Even now he had a dozen miles to go to his stable, but they seemed short ones to me for I was thinking all the way how pleased Dixon would be. For the first time in my career as an independent sportsman I had a big story to tell him.
In the light of my mature experience I should say that I had very little to tell Dixon, unless I had told him the truth. The truth (which I couldn’t have admitted even to my inmost self) was that my performance had consisted not so much in riding to hounds as in acting as a hindrance to Harkaway’s freedom of movement while he followed Mr. Gaffikin’s mare over several miles of closely fenced country—almost pulling my arms out of their sockets in the process. Had I told the truth I’d have said that during that gallop I was flustered, uncomfortable, and out of breath; that at every fence we jumped I was all over the saddle; and that, for all I had known, there might have been no hounds at all, since they were always a couple of fields ahead of us, and we were, most of us, merely following the Master, who already knew exactly which way they would go.
I lay stress on these facts because it is my firm belief that the majority of foxhunting riders never enjoy a really “quick thing” while it is in progress. Their enjoyment therefore, mainly consists in talking about it afterwards and congratulating themselves on their rashness or their discretion, according to their temperaments. One man remembers how he followed the first whip over an awkward stile, while another thinks how cleverly he made use of a lucky lane or a line of gates. Neither of them was able to watch the hounds while they were running. And so it was with me. Had I been alone I should have lost the hounds within three fields of the covert where they started.
But my complacency had been unperturbed by any such self-scrutinies when I clattered into the stable-yard in the twilight, just as Dixon emerged from the barn with a sieve of oats and a stable-lantern. His quick eyes were all over the horse before I was out of the saddle.
“Going a bit short in front, isn’t
