As she spoke there was a responsive yelp from a tract of briars in the lower part of the wood; two or three couples jostled downwards to their comrade, and a full chorus, led by the soprano squeals of the Hunt terrier, arose and streamed along the wood above the road. I came to a full stop, and, just in front of us, a rabbit emerged very quietly from the fence of the wood, crept along in the ditch, and disappeared in a hole in the bank. The hounds still uttered the classic pæans of the Chase; hoofs clattered in a steep lane on the hill-side, and Flurry Knox charged on to the road a little ahead of us.
"Forrad, forrad, forrad!" he shouted as he came.
"Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit!" cackled his grandmother at him in malevolent imitation.
I let the car go, and as we flew past him he asked me, sideways out of a very red face, what the devil I was doing there. It was evident that Mrs. Knox's observation had been accepted in the spirit in which it was offered.
"That will do my young gentleman no harm!" said Mrs. Knox complacently, as we became a speck in the distance.
It was about ten o'clock when we ran down a valley between steep hills to Killoge cross-roads. The hill-sides were set thick with tree stumps, like the crowded headstones of a cemetery, with coarse grass and briars filling the spaces between them. Here and there a slender, orphaned ash sapling, spared because despised, stood among the havoc, and showed with its handful of yellow leaves what the autumn colours might once have been here. A starkly new, cemented public-house, with "J. Goggin" on the name board, stood at the fork of the roads. Doubtless into it had flowed the blood-money of the wood; it represented the alternative offered to the community by Mr. Goggin. I slowed up and looked about me.
"I suppose this is—or was—Killoge Wood?" I said to my passenger.
Mrs. Knox was staring through her spectacles at the devastated hill-side.
"Ichabod, Ichabod!" she murmured, and leaned back in her place.
A man got up from a heap of stones by the roadside and came slowly towards the car.