Harriet had grabbed the only true hound in the pack, a daintily-finished model that Bluecaster had brought Helwise from Grasmere, and was playing in her usual fashion, barking orders and rattling the dice like an enemy’s brains. After Lanty came in, she barked rather louder than before, especially at Wiggie, for whom she seemed to have a measureless contempt. Nobody noticed it, though, but Wiggie himself, with all his little thread-ropes of intuition flung out like so many cables.
Dandy was having very bad luck, laboriously boosting a pincushion-backed dachshund over a pink mountain of Lanty’s best blotting-paper. She wooed the fates with a variety of chants and curses, but to no purpose. For her the dice would not fall. Her cheeks were as pink as the paper by the time Pincushion’s head came over the hill.
“He despises me for being a wretched town-person!” she said dismally. “Wiggie’s getting on all right, but then Wiggie’s a magician. All hairy and feathery and furry things love him. We can’t keep the birds out of his bedroom.”
“Birds in your room mean bad luck!” Harriet observed brutally, slinging the dice-box at the magician, and adding “Butter-thumbs!” when he missed it. “Rotten luck—illness—death! You’d better be making your will.”
A fresh shadow drifted almost imperceptibly across Wiggie’s tired face. Dandy looked up quickly, but, as once before, he smiled her into holding her peace, and with a sharp fling of the dice she scrambled Pincushion down the mountain and over a wall of matches.
He took heart of grace after that, and began to forge rapidly ahead, passing Helwise’s pug-nosed St. Bernard and Wiggie’s black and tan with the Pomeranian tail. Harriet’s hound was leading easily. Her fierce throws seemed to frighten the dice into showing their most lucrative faces. The fox—as represented by an ancient pen-wiper lately chewed by mice—was in imminent danger.
Pincushion gained, however, straining clumsily after Cragsman’s delicate grace. The others withdrew, leaving them to fight it out, and then a curious thing happened. The moment Pincushion’s head drew level with Cragsman’s lean flank, Harriet began to throw blanks. Cragsman stayed stubbornly glued to the same spot, while Dandy’s monstrosity, in a succession of twos, finished the course and claimed the quarry. Harriet reached for her gloves and announced that she must be going. Dandy stood up, too, still looking at the game.
“That was queer, wasn’t it?” she asked. “The finish, I mean? Cragsman stopped playing!”
“The luck changed,” Lancaster said briefly. “All the same, they say in the fells that if a mongrel joins in the chase the pure-bred hound drops the fox instantly. No wonder Cragsman took steck at that overfed pincushion of yours!”
“I know a song about that,” Wiggie put in. “Yes, I shall say it if I like!” He began to quote softly—