All agreed cheerfully to this, and the dogs were taken up, while the men, peeping down the steep ridges, got a shot or two at any of the coney race who might be dining carelessly. Then, as all of these proved to be of the common grey sort, Garrod's boy was sent home for a couple of rough terriers, to run the furze thickets, while the guns should watch the rides, for two or three yellow fellows had skipped away unscathed.
That boy took a long time in carrying out his message, and when he came back with his father behind him, the dusk of September was settling in the valley, while a wisp of silvery vapour stole along the brown halberds of the gorse, and the russet clumps of bramble. But the hillside now was ringing with the merry yelps of dogs, or the squeak of some puppy in a tangled grip, while the low covert ruffled, or was channelled here and there, with the sway of some resolute terrier hot in chase.
This holiday had been a rare enjoyment to me, though crossed with anxiety now and then, among so many barrels governed less by experience than excitement. Most of all, as I said, about Lord Melladew, who strode along so poetically, clad in green velveteen, beautifully made, but terminating unluckily in very smart buff gaiters short and spruce—concerning him I had prayed all day that he were safe back in the onion loft. Not that he carried a gun to his own disadvantage as the reckless do, neither did he fire at random, but was well content, in the manner of the public, to shout according to the hit or miss.
"Shut up all," I called out sharply; "too dark, too dark! I expect to see at least a dog shot, every moment."
A dog indeed! If I had said a man, and that man a live Earl—for bang, bang, went the guns, just as if I had never spoken, and four or five puffs of smoke, as if the hillside were on fire, rose from the avenues poor bunny had to cross. "Yellow! Did you see, Shorje? yellow as ze gold is!" The German doctor shouted as he pointed down a ride. "Shackson shot too, but ze rabbit is to me. I will have ze guinea. Ach, mein Gott!"
Instead of a rabbit giving the last kick of death, what did we see half-way down the slope but two buff coneys flying ever so much faster than any coney ever flew before, each flashing in front of each other, as if father fox were after both of them. "I am blowed if it isn't my Lord," cried Garrod; "the foreigner have shot him morshial!"
"Vat you know, ze clods-having-to-hop-by-night-as-well-as-by-day fe-loe? But keep your business, good fe-loe. If I have put ze shot in, I can pull him out again. You shall see."
Guns were laid aside, and the doctor left there (for he seemed to make nothing of peppering a lord, in comparison with basting partridges), and down the steep pitch we raced after the Earl, who with a long start was going like the wind. Do all we might, we could not get near him, until he was brought up by a heavy post and rail, where the Dorking road winds along the bottom. There he struck his chest, and in spite of being winded, did no small credit to his lungs, by a power of shrieks that rent the valley.
"What a coward!" cried Stoneman, who had kept up with me, though we both had "gone croppers" once or twice. "He is all there for holloaing, at any rate!"
But the worst of the business was yet to come. As we drew a pull of breath, before rushing to the rescue, we heard a sudden clatter in the road below, then we saw a wild dash of something dark, and a woman lay on her back under a low tree. I leaped the rail fence, to which the Earl was still clinging, and there lay my sister Grace, in her riding-habit, while the sound of the runaway pony's hoofs came clanging round the corner.