Into it Tom now cheered his hounds, again thinking how much better it would have been if Sir Moses had let him go to the supper. “Cover hoick! Cover hoick!” cheered he to his hounds, as they came to the rickety old gate. “I wouldn’t ha’ got drunk,” added he to himself. “Yoi, wind him! Yoi, rouse him, my boys! what ‘arm could it do him, my going, I wonders?” continued he to himself. “Yoi, try for him, Desp’rate, good lass! Desp’rate bad job my not gettin’, I know,” added he, rubbing his nose on the back of his hand; and so with cheers to his hounds and commentaries on Sir Moses’s mean conduct, the huntsman proceeded from ride to road and from road to ride, varied with occasional dives into the fern and the rough, to exhort and encourage his hounds to rout out a fox; not that he cared much now whether he found one or not, for the cover had long existed on the reputation of a run that took place twelve years before, and it was not likely that a place so circumstanced would depart from its usual course on that day.
There is nothing certain, however, about a fox-hunt, but uncertainty; the worst-favoured days sometimes proving the best, and the best-favoured ones sometimes proving the worst. We dare say, if our sporting readers would ransack their memories, they will find that most of their best days have been on unpromising ones. So it was on the present occasion, only no one saw the run but Tom and the first whip. Coming suddenly upon a fine travelling fox, at the far corner of the cover, they slipped away with him down wind, and had a bona fide five and thirty minutes, with a kill, in Lord Ladythorne’s country, within two fields of his famous gorse cover, at Cockmere.
“Ord! rot ye, but ye should ha’ seen that, if you’d let me go to the supper,” cried Tom, as he threw himself off his lathered tail-quivering horse to pick up his fox, adding, “I knows when to blow the horn and when not.”
Meanwhile Sir Moses, having got into a wrangle with Jacky Phillips about the price of a pig, sate on his accustomed place on the rising ground by the old tumble-down farm-buildings, wrangling, and haggling, and declaring it was a “do.” In the midst of his vehemence, Robin Snowball’s camp of roystering, tinkering besom-makers came hattering past; and Robin, having a contract with Sir Moses for dog horses, gave his ass a forwarding bang, and ran up to inform his patron that “the hunds had gone away through Piercefield plantins iver see lang since:”—a fact that Robin was well aware of, having been stealing besom-shanks in them at the time.
“Oh, the devil!” shrieked Sir Moses, as if he was shot. “Oh, the devil!” continued he, wringing his hands, thinking how Tom would be bucketing Crusader now that he was out of sight; and catching up his horse, he stuck spurs in his sides, and went clattering up the stony cross-road to the west, as hard as ever the old Jack could lay legs to the ground, thinking what a wigging he would give Tom if he caught him.
“Hark!” continued he, pulling short up across the road, and nearly shooting Billy into his pocket with the jerk of his suddenly stopped horse, “Hark!” repeated he, holding up his hand, “Isn’t that the horn?”
“Oh, dom it! it’s Parker, the postman,” added he,—“what business has the beggar to make such a row!” for, like all noisy people, Sir Moses had no idea of anybody making a noise but himself. He then set his horse agoing again, and was presently standing in his stirrups, tearing up the wretched, starvation, weed-grown ground outside the cover.
Having gained a sufficient elevation, he again pulled up, and turning short round, began surveying the country. All was quiet and tranquil. The cattle had their heads to the ground, the sheep were scattered freely over the fields, and the teams were going lazily over the clover-lays, leaving shiny furrows behind them.
“Well, that’s a sell, at all events!” said he, dropping his reins. “Be b’und to say they are right into the heart of Featherbedfordshire by this time,—most likely at Upton Moss in Woodberry Yale,—as fine a country as ever man crossed,—and to think that that wretched deluded man has it all to himself!—I’d draw and quarter him if I had him, dom’d if I wouldn’t,” added Sir Moses, cutting frantically at the air with his thong-gathered whip.
Our friend Billy, on the other hand, was all ease and composure. He had escaped the greatest punishment that could befall him, and was so clean and comfortable, that he resolved to surprise his fair friends at Yammerton Grange in his pink, instead of changing as he intended.