“You’m wanting your supper, my red hero, no doubt, an’ can’t reach it. Well, well, you’ll have to go content wi’ a rabbit; the long-tails be for your betters.”
He had crossed a drive ten minutes later and was now in the midst of the preserves. Presently, at a spinney edge, he got the moon between himself and the fringe of the wood, and sneaked stealthily along examining the boughs above him as they were thrown into inky relief against the shining sky. Many birds he passed until at length he came to two sitting near together. Then, working to a point from which one bird came half into line with the other, he fired and dropped both. Like thunder the gun bellowed in that deep silence, and a lurid flame dimmed the silver of the night. Then peace returned, and long before a flat layer of smoke had risen above the tree-tops and dislimned under the moon; while still a subdued flutter and cry in the woods told of alarm, and the sharp smell of burnt powder hung in the air, Daniel Sweetland was off the Moor with two fine pheasants under his coat and his gun on his shoulder.
A mile away three keepers, watching round the best and richest covers of Westcombe, heard the poacher’s gun and used bad language. Then two started whence the sound had come.
“I’ve christened you, anyway,” said Dan to his new weapon. “Come to think of it, old Wilkins, the keeper at Westcombe, never gived my Minnie a wedding present, though a cousin by marriage. So now these here birds will do very nice instead, an’ make us quits.”
Within the hour he was back in the Moor and soon returned to his cottage. But a surprise awaited him, for upon the high road, as he passed the Warren Inn and prepared to turn off to where Hangman’s Hut lay, with its two little windows glimmering like eyes under the moon, Daniel heard steady feet running slowly behind him and saw a man approaching along the way. Dan leapt off the high road instantly and hid himself beside the path. But the other apparently had not seen him, for he trotted past and went forward. Daniel left his hiding-place just in time to see a man vanishing into the night.
No little remained to be done before he sought the room he occupied in his father’s house at Middlecott lodge gates. First he returned to Hangman’s Hut; then he put up his gun and, taking a hammer, a big nail, and a piece of string, entered his garden and lifted the cover off a little well that stood there. He then bent over it and drove in his nail as far down as he could reach from the top. Next he fastened his pheasants to the string and lowered them twenty-five yards into the gloom beneath. The string he fastened to the nail.
“They’ll do very nice an’ comfortable there till us feel to want ’em,” he thought. Then he locked up the house once more and started for Middlecott.
Again, as he passed over the Moor to the main road, did he hear the sound of feet not far off, and again did a man take shape out of the darkness and move away before him. This time the figure leapt up out of the heath right in his path, and hastened in the direction of Hangman’s Hut.
“Be blessed if the whole parish ban’t up an’ doing to-night!” laughed Daniel. “’Tis some blackguard trapping Johnny Beer’s rabbits, I lay.”
Then he set off briskly homewards and did not stop until he passed the corner of Westcombe woods and saw two men standing together at the stile over which he had himself crept some hours before.