Mr. O'Gorman bellowed, and a variety of youths whipped until the pack, upset and hustled, had reached the tuft vacated by the hare.
"It's ... immense," gurgled the General, almost sobbing. "Blow again, George! Whirrrr, and I know it's a hare! There are two hounds hunting right-handed up-stream by the bank from which they checked!
"And I've never known a fox turn this way," wailed Gheena. "It's a part we absolutely left to the foot dogs."
Hounds got on; they were always enthusiastic. They circled round the next field and turned where the hare had turned up by a straggling hedge.
"Fox never ran that way," said the General; "back again, round this field, I believe."
Then they crossed the road and over a bog and crawled on over a steep hill, to encounter at the bottom a vast and ragged ditch, unpleasantly vague as to its depth and very decided as to its width. When Gheena and the General had got over with a scramble, they found themselves completely alone in another driving storm of rain and hounds disappearing into grey misty distance over a high bank.
"That's the Quilty bog near the sea, utterly unrideable," said Gheena hopelessly. "The fishermen can only go through by paths." They floundered along the edge, keeping to the driest parts of the cart track, which was only used in summer, with deep ruts and patches from which the rapidly tiring horses had to wrest their limbs free, and came to a slightly better road with a surface of loose stone, to look across two miles of bog on one side and on to the sea at the other. Far off, faintly, they could hear the sound of hounds hunting.
Gheena pulled up her roan, now black with bog slime and sweat, and pointed hopelessly to the track which they must wallow over again if they followed the line taken by the circling hare.
General Brownlow's refusal ever to go along that track again was short but soldier-like in its decision.
"Even to catch the German Emperor," he said emphatically.