“I’m afraid they’ll make rather a mess of your linen, parson, if they don’t of you.”
“I must chance that, as you say yourself,” said the vicar, calmly.
Ned nodded, and saying he would be back in a moment, he disappeared through the porch with a grim chuckle. When he returned, a few minutes later, holding in his rough fingers a handful of mouldy bones, the vicar was leaning against the porch, thoughtfully turning up his cuffs and his coat sleeves with the most scrupulous neatness.
“Not a very tempting feast that, one would have thought.”
“Well, if they want anything more tempting than that to make them hunt with a will, I’ve been deceived in them, that’s all, and back they go to the man I bought them from.”
As he spoke he took up the spade, and began to search for a suitable place in which to bury the fleshless bones. He decided on a spot in the back garden, under the prickly leaves of an auricula. There, right under the branches, he dug a deep hole, not without much damage to his hands and his clothes. Into this hole he threw the bones, covering them carefully with the displaced earth. The vicar laughed as Ned flattened down the mould and stamped upon it.
“You are expecting too much of those unlucky brutes,” said he. “I quite believe that they might grub up a nice fresh leg of mutton, or the body of a newly-killed rabbit. But old bones like that, and under two feet of earth! No, my dear Mitchell, it’s not in reason.”
“All right,” said Ned, putting his hands in his pockets. “If you think my little experiment is not worth watching, I won’t trouble you with my company or my dogs.”
“Oh, but of course I must see the end of this. And if your hounds do answer your expectations after all, I quite agree with you that the best room in the house is not too good for such clever beasts.”
They went round to the front of the cottage again, and through the porch into the narrow passage. Ned brought a lighted candle from the kitchen, and proceeded to search among a bunch of large keys which hung from a nail in the wall. Meanwhile the dogs, disappointed at the disappearance of their master, from whom they had expected food, howled and yelped with redoubled vehemence, and flung themselves against the door of the room in which they were confined until it shook and creaked on its old hinges. Ned glanced at the vicar with a sardonic smile.