Mr. Carteret and Others

by David Gray

He rode off down the lane to the eastward, riding slowly, for there was no hurry. If he was right, he would be ahead of the fox. If he was wrong, he was so far behind that it made no difference what he did. So he jogged on up and down hill, and smoked. He rode thus for about two miles when his hope began to wither. On every side stretched the winter-green, rolling country fenced into a patchwork of great pastures. In the distance, to the south, lay the brown-gray mass of Normanhurst Wood. The landscape was innocent of any gleam of scarlet coat or black figure of horseman on hilltop against the sky.

“I’m wrong,” he said half aloud. “I guess I could think better as a codfish than as a fox.”

A moment later he saw fresh hoof-prints crossing the lane in front of him, and it burst upon him that his theory was right, but that he was too late. A dozen people must have crossed. They had come into the lane through a hand gate, and had jumped out over some rails that mended a gap in the tall, bushy hedge. Beside the hoof-prints was the evidence of a rail that was freshly broken. He contemplated the situation judicially.

“How far behind I am,” he said to himself, “I do not know; whether these people are following hounds or Lady Martingale I do not know: but anything is better than going down this interminable lane.” So he put his horse at the place where the rail was broken. The next instant, the horse, which was overfed and under-exercised, jumped high over the low rail, and jammed his hat against an overhanging bough, and, on landing, ran away. When Mr. Carteret got him in hand, they were well out into the field, and he began to look along the farther fence for a place to jump out.

In doing this he noticed at the end of the long pasture a horse grazing, and it looked to him as if the horse were saddled. He glanced around, expecting to see an unhappy man stalking a lost mount, but there was no one in sight. So he rode toward the horse. As he came nearer he saw that the saddle was a woman’s. The horse made no attempt to run away, and Mr. Carteret caught it. One glance showed him that there was mud on its ears, mud on its rump, and that one of the pommels was broken. Immediately, although he had never seen horse or saddle before, a strange and unreasonable apprehension seized him. He felt that it was Miss Rivers’s horse; and yet his common sense told him that the idea was absurd. She was probably not out hunting, and if she were, the chances were a thousand to one against it being she. Nevertheless, he opened the sandwich-box strapped to the saddle and took out the silver case. It bore the inscription S. R. from C. C. If he could believe his eyes, the thousand-to-one chance had come off.

He looked about him dazed. There was no one in sight.

“It must have happened back a way,” he said half aloud, “and the horse followed the hunt.”

Mounting, he led it by its bridle-reins, and began to gallop toward the place where the fence had been broken. Approaching the broken rail, he began to pull up when his eye caught something dark upon the grass close to the hedge.

One look, and he saw that it was a woman and that it was Sally Rivers. She was lying on her back, motionless, her white face looking up, her arms at her side, almost as if she were asleep. The apprehensive intuition that had come to him at the sight of the broken saddle came again and told him that she was dead. It must be so. That afternoon they were in the grasp of one of those terrible pranks of fate that are told as strange “true stories.”