David reached the hedge, reached over, hurled the stone, and sent after it a burst of objurgations, ending with—
“Yah! G’long home with yer. Beast!”
“That’s about settled him,” he said as he came back, smiling very widely.
“Strange dog, David?”
“Strange, sir? Not him. It’s that ugly, hungry-looking brute o’ Pete Warboys’. That’s four times he’s been here this morning, chyiking and yelping. You must have been giving him bones.”
“I? No, I never fed him.”
“Then cook must. We don’t want him here. But I don’t think he’ll come again.”
“Did you hit him?”
“Hit him, sir? What with that there stone? Not I. Nobody couldn’t hit him with stick or stone neither. Keepers can’t even hit him with their guns, or he’d been a dead ’un long ago. He’s the slipperest dog as ever was.”
“Hy—yow—ow—oo—ooo!” came from a distance—a pitiful cry that was mournful in the extreme.