Old Isaac’s features were distorted once more into the mahogany grin.
“Well, if Marathon didn’t, Jack did,” said he quietly. “You couldn’t tell one from the other in their clothing when it’s dark, and the Dandy would win the Derby if it wasn’t over half-a-mile.”
It was too true: though the smart little nag never could stay a mile at a racing pace in his best days, he was as quick on his legs as a rabbit, and nothing could touch him, for five furlongs. Swaddled up in his clothes under the dubious twilight of a winter’s morning, Mr. Tiptop never suspected him, and went home with the conviction that Marathon, and none other, was the horse that had beaten his favourite.
Mr. Sawyer laughed to himself as he rode Jack very gingerly on to Barkby.
CHAPTER XVI
RIDING TO SELL
If Mr. Sawyer had kept a hunting journal (which he didn’t) he would have noted down the meet at Barkby, as one of those gorgeous spectacles, which makes an ineffaceable impression on the eye of the unpractised beholder. There appeared to be more hounds, more horses, more servants, more carriages, and altogether a larger staff and retinue attached to the establishment, than he had ever hitherto seen paraded for the purpose of killing a fox. Nevertheless, with all this show, there was no mistake about the workmanlike tendency of the turn-out. If the pack was numerous, it was also exceedingly level and in faultless condition; the huntsman and whips looked as if they must have been born and bred for the especial offices they respectively filled, and the second-horse men, notwithstanding their number, appeared to be all cut from the same pattern. As for the hunters, Mr. Sawyer would have wished no better luck than to ride the worst of them at a hundred and fifty guineas. One magnificent bay with a side-saddle, destined, no doubt, to carry a beautiful and precious burden, quite put him out of conceit with Hotspur and the grey. As for Marathon! why he would never have got on him, in such company, had not the pleasing reflection crossed his mind, that perhaps to-day he should get rid of the brute altogether.
He had ridden The Dandy very leisurely to covert, in consideration of the animal’s services before dawn, and had sent on the grey with an occasional helper from the inn, under the superintendence of The Boy, who was perched on Marathon: old Isaac, who wanted to buy some hay cheap, having given himself leave of absence for the day. The helper, with many injunctions to go steadily, was entrusted with the homeward-bound hack; and The Boy shifted to the second horse, whilst Mr. Sawyer himself bestrode the redoubtable bay. All these arrangements, with the accompanying pulling up of curb-chains and letting down of stirrup-leathers, took some little time. Before our friend was fairly mounted and under way, the hounds had gone on to draw, and he found himself nearly the last of the lengthening cavalcade. Under existing circumstances this was no great disadvantage, and the quieter he kept the bay, he thought, the better was his chance of selling him; yet he could not help wishing old Isaac had left the whole business alone. He might then have been forward with the hounds, looking out for a start on whichever horse he liked best, uninfluenced—as a man always should be, really to enjoy fox-hunting—by the sordid considerations of £. s. d.
Marathon was very fresh, and set his back up, squeaking in a most undignified manner, and swishing his heavy tail, till it reached his rider’s hat.
A horse galloping up from behind set him plunging with a violence that was scarcely pleasant, even to so practised a rider as our friend. He returned the greeting of the new comer—no less a personage than the Honourable Crasher, late as usual, and cantering to the front on Boadicea by Bellerophon out of Blue Light—with a preoccupied air of a man who expects every moment to be on his back.