He paused, with a poacher's instinct, as he neared the gate that opened into the parsley-field. The moon was scarcely past full, and every bent and clump of bracken stood out clear in the bluish light. In the middle of the field a hare was squatting—a big fellow, with a body as still as sleep, and a head that shifted warily this way and that, to learn if there were any danger abroad. The night air crawled into Griff's throat, and he could not keep back one little gasp of a cough. Straight as a die the hare made for a point in one of the boundary walls; there was a succession of sharp cries, like the cries of a teething baby, and after that a silence.
"There's one of the boys over there; I'll have a word with him," thought Griff.
He crossed the field quietly, and skimmed over the wall through which the hare had disappeared. A surly "Who's there?" greeted him as he dropped on to the grass, almost into the arms of a burly, grizzled five-feet-ten of iniquity, standing with the dead body of a hare in his hands.
"You ought to know me by this time, Will Reddiough," laughed Griff, softly.
"It's ye, sir, is 't? That shapes things different, like." A genial grin overspread Will's knotty features as he recognized the intruder.
"What luck?"
"Nobbut a couple, an' I've carred two hour under th' wall for 'em."
"Well, it's poor sport, netting, at the best of times. First, you have to slink round here in the daytime, and see which way the hares take home again; then you've to wait under a wall till the frost nips you; and at the end of it all you have precious little to show. I say, Will, what fools these hares are always to go through the same hole!"
"No more fooils nor men-folk, what allus taks th' same stile through a field. An' if they war sharper, sir, what 'ud be th' use o' setting a net?" Will smiled at the transparency of his own reasoning; he could not conceive a scheme of the universe in which poaching-nets played no part.
"But look here, Will," said Lomax, after a pause of rumination, "if my training goes for anything, I know that a hare never starts home from its feed till the day is breaking, unless some one disturbs it."