But to-day the dog-fox feared neither pack nor horseman. They saw him, a red shape at covert's edge; saw him grin at them from fifty yards' range, and lope disdainfully back through the wooden palings to his mate!
Ronnie, laughing at the incident, halted Miracle, dismounted, and called the rabbit-eager Ponto to heel. The half-hour or so of open air had steadied his nerves. Lighting a cigarette, looking at his watch, he saw that his hands no longer trembled. "Alie's all right," he said to himself. "Everything's all right."
He mounted again, and headed away from the covert toward Lomondham. From Lomondham to Little Overdine by the highroad is four good miles. "That'll get me home comfortably by five," thought Ronnie. But just before he made the Lomondham road, fear gripped him again. Suddenly some instinct, an instinct so strong that he dared not even fight against it, warned him that Alie was in danger.
And with fear came self-reproach. He had been away a whole hour, a whole hour of life or death for the woman he loved. He had been enjoying himself, enjoying himself, dreaming of a son when perhaps--perhaps----
Miracle, trotting at ease, felt himself abruptly gathered together, felt the ring of the snaffle hard against his off cheek, felt the grass at roadside under his hoofs, broke to a canter and from a canter to a gallop. Ponto, caught unawares fifty yards in rear, heard man and horse disappear round a bend in the hawthorn hedges; Ponto, quickening his lollop round the bend, saw the pair streak hell-for-leather up the hill; Ponto, laboring desperately not to be left behind, saw them halt for a moment at the gate of Lomondham Lane and knew that his master had taken the short cut home. "He can't have forgotten me," thought Ponto angrily.
But Ronnie, in that moment of fear, had forgotten everything except Aliette. The lane saved a mile and a half, and the lane was all soft turf--good going--the first five furlongs of it straight as a race-course.
Down those first five furlongs Miracle went like a steed possessed. The turf thudded under his hoofs. The hawthorn-hedges streaked past him like snowbanks alongside a train. "Hope to God we don't meet any one at the bend," thought Ronnie, his silk-socked ankles thrust home in the irons, his trousered knees gripping the saddle-flaps, his hands low and his body a little forward.
For now there was no controlling Miracle. The fear of the thoroughbred man on his back had communicated itself in some mysterious way to the thoroughbred horse. He, too, wanted to get home. Grandly he swept the ground from under him. Scarcely, with voice and rein, Ronnie succeeded in checking speed as they tore madly round the bend; scarcely, leaning hard over, he succeeded in keeping his seat.
And then, abruptly, he remembered the tree!
The tree, a great elm, overturned by the gale, was a bare four hundred yards on, just around the next bend, beyond the bridge that arched up like the back of a big red hog from the green of the lane.