The next morning was a most forbidding and doleful looking morning, and young Travers had great hopes that the meet would be declared off, but just as he lay in doubts the servant knocked at his door with his riding things and his hot water.
He came down-stairs looking very miserable indeed. Satan had been taken to the place where they were to meet, and Travers viewed him on his arrival there with a sickening sense of fear as he saw him pulling three grooms off their feet.
Travers decided that he would stay with his feet on solid earth just as long as he could, and when the hounds were thrown off and the rest had started at a gallop, he waited, under pretense of adjusting his gaiters, until they were well away. Then he clenched his teeth, crammed his hat down over his ears, and scrambled up on the saddle. His feet fell quite by accident into the stirrups, and the next moment he was off after the others, with an indistinct feeling that he was on a locomotive that was jumping the ties.
Satan was in among and had passed the other horses in less than five minutes, and was so near the hounds that the whippers-in gave a cry of warning. But Travers could just as soon have pulled a boat back that was going over the Niagara Falls as Satan, and it was only that the hounds were well ahead that saved them from having Satan run them down.
Travers had to hold to the saddle with his left hand to keep himself from falling off, and sawed and sawed on the reins with his right. He shut his eyes whenever Satan jumped, and never knew how he happened to stick on; but he did stick on, and was so far ahead that in the misty morning no one could see how badly he rode. As it was for daring and speed he led the field, and not even young Paddock was near him from the start.
There was a broad stream in front of him—and a hill just on the other side. No one had ever tried to take this at a jump, it was considered more of a swim than anything else, and the hunters always crossed it by the bridge on the left. Travers saw the bridge and tried to jerk Satan’s head in that direction, but Satan kept right on as straight as an express train over the prairies. Fences and trees and furrows passed by and under Travers like a panorama run by electricity, and he only breathed by accident. They went on at the stream and the hill beyond as though they were riding on a stretch of turf, and though the whole field sent up a shout of warning and dismay, Travers could only gasp and shut his eyes. He remembered the fate of the second groom and shivered.
Then the horse rose like a rocket, lifting Travers so high in the air that he thought Satan would never come down again, but he did come down with his feet bunched on the opposite bank.
The next instant he was up and over the hill and stopped, panting, in the center of the pack that was snarling and snapping around the fox. And then Travers showed that he was a thorough-bred, even though he could not ride, for he hastily fumbled for his cigar case, and when the others came pounding up over the hill, they saw him seated nonchalantly on his saddle, puffing critically at his cigar and giving Satan patronizing pats on his head.
“My dear girl,” said old Mr. Paddock to his daughter as they rode back, “if you love that young man and want to keep him, make him promise to give up riding. A more reckless and more brilliant horseman I have never seen; he took that double jump at the gate and at the stream like a centaur, but he will break his neck sooner or later, and he ought to be stopped.” Young Paddock was so delighted with his future brother-in-law’s riding that that night in the smoking room he made him a present of Satan before all the men.
“No,” said Travers gloomily, “I can’t take him; your sister has asked me to give up what is dearer to me than anything next to herself, and that is my riding; you see she is absurdly anxious for my safety, and she has asked me never to ride again, and I have given my word.”