Roland turned abruptly away, loth to excite comment or surprise among his friends by the strange bearing of one deemed by them his mere dependent.
So the shooting progressed, and for a time without let or impediment. Away through the King's Wood and the Fairy's Den went the sportsmen, over the harvest fields, so rich in beauty to the picture-loving eye, by the green and scented hawthorn hedgerows, where the golden spoil of the passing corn carts remained for the gleaner; among brambles and red fern—the crimson bracken that, according to the Scottish proverb, brings milk and butter in October; firing in line, as adjusted by old Gavin Fowler; and as their guns went off, bang, bang, bang, in the clear and ambient air, when the startled coveys went whirring up, the brown birds came tumbling down with outspread wings, before the double barrels.
If the autumn sunset in Scotland is lovely, not less so is the autumn sunrise, when seen from the slope of some green hill, like the spur of the Ochils that looks down on Logic, while through pastoral valley and wooded haugh the white silver mist is rolling. 'Then the tops of the trees seem at first to rise above a country that is flooded, while the kirk spire appears like some sea mark heaving out of the mist. Then comes a great wedge-like beam of gold, cutting deep down into the hollows, showing the stems of the trees and the roofs of the cottages, gilding barn and outhouse, making a golden road through a land of white mist that seems to rise on either side like the sea which Moses divided to pass through dryshod. The dew-drops on the sun-lighted summit the feet rest upon, are coloured like precious stones of every dye, and every blade of grass is beaded with the gorgeous gems.'
And never do the deer look more graceful and beautiful than when in autumn they leave their lair among the bracken, when the blue atmosphere is on a Scottish mountain side, and changing hues are on leafy grove and heath-clad slope.
As the sportsmen, now pretty far apart, after beating successfully up the slope of a stubble field on a hill-side, came upon some aged and irregular hedgerows, full of gaps and interspersed with stunted thorn-trees, and having on each side a wet grassy ditch, the warning voice of the old keeper was heard some paces in the rear:
'Tak' tent, gentlemen; tak' tent. Nae cross shots here. There is a different ground owre beyond.'
A covey of some twenty birds whirred up from a gap in the hedge, and both Elliot and Hawkey Sharpe seemed to fire at it. We say seemed, as the former fired straight to his front, the latter, who was on his right, obliquely to the left; and then there came a sharp cry of anguish and pain but seldom or never heard among a group of gay sportsmen.
'By the Lord, but he's done it at last,' cried old Fowler.
'I aye thocht he wad be the death on the field o' somebody,' cried Jamie Spens, the ex-poacher, who was acting as a beater.
'Sharpe's dune it at last,' cried Fowler again.