He is looking towards the lower side of the moor, over the shoulder of which lies the sea, fringed with surf where it frets the black precipice of a headland. He is watching a bird that flies close to the stunted furze. The white of its plumage gleams as the sun catches it. Threading the sinuous lanes between the bushes, appearing at the distance almost like the shadow of the overhanging magpie, is the hunted game; and though Tregellas cannot hear the chattering of the bird, he knows that it is mobbing the fox whose mask is set in the direction of Deadman. As his form comes well in view Tregellas fancies that his stride is perhaps not quite so easy as when he swung so lithely across the turf, and it may be he was shaken by those terrible leaps adown the jagged rocks where a whipper-in, a coastguard, and a truant schoolboy are at this moment attending to two crippled hounds. “Es eh failin’ a bit, do ee think, ’Gellas?” “Caan’t hardly tell,” said he, answering the question put to himself. And then the hounds heave in view. At what a pace they sweep over the waste, how silently they are running! With anxious eyes he follows them as they cross the moor above. “Dear life, they’re niver headin’ for Deadman, are ’em? Iss . . . iss . . . wonder ef An’rew stopped the eearth. . . . Hooray!” for standing on tip-toe he saw the blurred pack swerve near the heart of the haunted moor as though at that point the fox had been headed.
“I knowed ee raather die in th’ open nor go to ground in that wisht auld plaace.”
Then the field at full gallop passed before his gaze. “Lor’ a mercy, passon’s bin and falled into the bog,” and he laughed as only a yokel can laugh.
Tregellas lingered until the desolate waste swallowed up the hindmost of the field; the circling flight of a snipe being the only sign that the hunt had swept across the moor.
The stout fox held bravely on; but the pack, racing for blood, with hardly a check, kept lessening his lead as moor and croft were left behind.
With what a crash of music they dashed through the Forest Rocks and through the belt of pines to the open heath beyond. Though death was ringing in his ears there was the gallant fox struggling gamely forward. Racing from scent to view they pulled him down on the dead bracken below the now deserted cairn.
The huntsman, Squire Tremenheere and Sir Bevil close behind him, galloped up in time to rescue the carcass from the ravenous pack. The who-whoop was heard by the parson as he urged his grey mare, mud to the girths, between the pine boles. To him, when he came up, Sir Bevil handed the mask; the brush he had presented to the Squire.
Late the same night the parson sat in his study recording the incidents of the chase and, despite the strains of “Trelawny” which reached his ears from the “One and All” hard by, where Tregellas and his friends were making merry, kept true to the line of the fox and with graphic touches described the run.
Closing the book, he returned it to the shelf between the door and the pegs, where his hunting-cap hung. Then for the first time that season he took a map from its tin case and spread it on the table. It was a map of West Penwith, and was crossed by lines in all directions, reminding one of threads of dodder on a furze-bush. Those thin red lines represented the best runs of the hounds during the five and thirty years he had followed them. Having put on his spectacles, he dipped the fine-pointed nib in the ink and, starting from near the pool under Ding Dong, traced the run to the adit at the foot of the cliffs. Why did he pause there, why not let the pen skirt the coast and the headland and cross the moor to Deadman?
See! there is another red line—a line that starts at Lamorna Cliffs—which ends at the adit, and as his eye wandered along the converging tracks he was wondering whether the fox which gave that great run from sea to sea was the one whose death he had just recorded. That is why his hand dwelt and why he raised his questioning eyes to the wall facing him.