"Hold hard!" roared Flurry; "don't you see the hounds, you fool?"
Mr. Shute, to do him justice, held hard with all the strength of his body, but it was of no avail. The bay horse had got his head down and his tail up, there was a piercing yell from a hound as it was ridden over, and Flurry's brown mare will not soon forget the moment when Stockbroker's shoulder took her on the point of the hip and sent her staggering into the laurel branches. As she swung round, Flurry's whip went up, and with a swift backhander the cane and the looped thong caught Bernard across his broad shoulders.
"O Mr. Shute!" shrieked Miss Sally, as I stared dumfoundered; "did that branch hurt you?"
"All right! Nothing to signify!" he called out as he bucketed past, tugging at his horse's head. "Thought some one had hit me at first! Come on, we'll catch 'em up this way!"
He swung perilously into the main ride and was gone, totally unaware of the position that Miss Sally's quickness had saved.
Flurry rode straight up to his cousin, with a pale, dangerous face.
"I suppose you think I'm to stand being ridden over and having my hounds killed to please you," he said; "but you're mistaken. You were very smart, and you may think you've saved him his licking, but you needn't think he won't get it. He'll have it in spite of you, before he goes to his bed this night!"
A man who loses his temper badly because he is badly in love is inevitably ridiculous, far though he may be from thinking himself so. He is also a highly unpleasant person to argue with, and Miss Sally and I held our peace respectfully. He turned his horse and rode away.
Almost instantly the three couple of hounds opened in the underwood near us with a deafening crash, and not twenty yards ahead the hunted fox, dark with wet and mud, slunk across the ride. The hounds were almost on his brush; Moonlighter reared and chafed; the din was redoubled, passed away to a little distance, and suddenly seemed stationary in the middle of the laurels.
"Could he have got into the old ice-house?" exclaimed Miss Sally, with reviving excitement. She pushed ahead, and turned down the narrowest of all the rides that had that day been my portion. At the end of the green tunnel there was a comparatively open space; Flurry's mare was standing in it, riderless, and Flurry himself was hammering with a stone at the padlock of a door that seemed to lead into the heart of a laurel clump. The hounds were baying furiously somewhere back of the entrance, among the laurel stems.