"Stand before me! Cover me up! Throw sprouts on me! Throw sprouts over me!"
These suggestions were not carried out, for Mr. Minnidick was of a leisurely turn of mind, and at no time of a disposition to sacrifice valuable cabbage growths without good reason. He therefore merely rested on his hoe and stared, at the same time munching the air with extraordinary rapidity and determination. And thus he was posed, like some Shakespearian rustic, when two smoking horses hove in sight, and the air was rent with the cracking of a hunting-whip, and the furious cries of one of the riders.
"Give him his head, Rodney! give him his head, I tell you!"
"I have been giving it him for the last three hours, Duke. If I give it him any more, I shall be killed, I shall indeed!"
"Take your arms from his neck, I tell you!"
"I will not. If I do I shall be thrown. Both the reins have been broken for hours."
"That's because you held 'em so damned tight. You'd break a six-foot rope that'd anchor a man-of-war. Why don't you sit straight?"
"Because I can't, because—I—am—dropping!"
The unfortunate owner of Mitching Dean did indeed seem in a parlous condition. Wrapped in the travelling ulster, his silk hat smashed into a pulp and fixed, by the edge of a rent, on his left ear, he was laid out almost flat along his horse with his arms clasped round its neck. His long white face was smothered in liquid mud, which had only dried upon the bridge of his nose, forming a sort of forbidding-looking island in the midst of his wrinkled countenance. His trousers had been torn into ribbons by the quick-set hedges through which he had passed and the five-barred gates he had reduced to splinters. One of his stirrups had gone. His reins, as he had affirmed, fluttered around his horse's chest in fragments, and he had in some mysterious manner lost a boot, possibly in a small pond in which his animal had recently lain down and rolled out of sheer gaiety of disposition. Altogether, he scarcely looked his best as he reached the hedge of the paragon's domain. On perceiving the rigid figure of Mr. Minnidick, the Duke suddenly pulled up, with the result that Mr. Rodney cannoned against him and promptly bit the mud.
"Damn you, Rodney! Why don't you look where you're going?" said his Grace crossly. "Here, you—my man, can you tell me the way to the Farm, Bungay Marshes, Lisborough?"