“Come and beat the furze with me, will you, Derrick? the captain has not his gaiters on. It is well to make quite sure that we are all alone before we begin,” said the horse-trainer. The two men accordingly stepped into the gorse, and commenced walking through it in parallel lines, as though in pursuit of game.
When he came to a patch of gorse a little higher and thicker than the rest, Mr Chifney struck it violently with his foot as if for rabbits. All of a sudden, there was a violent ejaculation from Derrick; he threw himself down upon some crouching object, and then came a struggle and a choking scream. “Hollo, don't kill the fellow,” exclaimed Chifney running up. “See, he's black in the face, man.—Master Walter, my Lord—-help, here, help!”
The two men who had been left in the rubbing-house came quickly forward, but it took the combined strength of all three of them to release the poor wretch from the powerful grasp of the Cariboo miner.
“Damn the rogue; I 'll teach him to come spying here,” cried he, nodding with his head towards a shattered telescope, upon which he had just stamped his foot. “I'll squeeze his throat for him.”
“You seem to have done that already, sir,” said the man in the broad-brim coolly; “a very little more of it, and you would probably have had your throat squeezed for you by the hangman. Poor devil, he doesn't seem to have much beside his life belonging to him, so that it would be hard to take that.”
A wretched object, clothed in ragged black, and with wisps of straw for shoes, wet with the dew amid which he had been lying, and shivering with pain and fear, hear crawled to the last speaker's feet.
“Don't let 'em murder me, my Lord. They will if you don't interfere,” screamed the wretched “tout,” whose mission it was to procure racing intelligence under difficulties of this sort, but who had been fairly cowed by Derrick's rage and violence. “I swear to you that I will never tell a soul that I have seen your lordship”——
“Quiet, fool!” interrupted the other sternly, “unless you want to have your lying tongue cut out.—It's bad enough,” whispered he to the trainer, “that he should have seen me hear; but do you think he has seen the horses?”
“That's quite certain, my Lord,” returned the trainer coolly; “and this is a mouth as can't be shut about that matter. But he shall see nothing more of this morning's work.—Come here, you sir.”
Taking the trembling wretch by the collar, he led him to the edge of the furze, and, having securely tied his arms and legs, enveloped his head in a horse-cloth which he brought out of the rubbing-house. From the same building there now emerged two horses, not in the clothes in which exercise was generally taken, but ready in all respects for racing, and ridden not by stable-boys as usual, but by regular jockeys.