‘Just a dozen more,’ we heard one of them say.
‘Right oh!’ answered another. He spoke out loud, for by this time the gang had been so long undisturbed that they had become quite reckless, and neglected the precautions which they had at first observed.
The words were hardly out of his mouth before there was a sudden rush of feet, and there came the keeper, his son, another man, and the fourth was no other than the new tenant himself.
Ginger recklessly rushed forward shouting. Next instant a gun cracked—I never saw who fired the shot—and Ginger, with a hideous yell, fell forward on his face, and lay twitching in a horrid fashion on the ground.
I saw Ginger’s son charge forward, swinging his stick, with the other man close behind him. I saw the poachers run for their lives, leaving the spoil behind them. But what was the new Squire about? He never budged, but stood there like a stuck pig; and even in the dim light it was easy to see his legs quaking and the shivers that shook his podgy frame.
Not until poachers and pursuers had vanished through the trees, and the crashing sound of their running feet had almost died in the distance, did the cowardly little man move slowly up to where his keeper lay.
‘Are—you—much—hurt, Tompkins?’ he stammered, in shaking accents.
Tompkins only groaned, and the stout man, kneeling beside him, fairly wrung his hands in hopeless incompetency. At last he seemed to remember something, and pulling out a flask from his pocket, put it to Tompkins’s lips just as the keeper’s son and the other man returned empty-handed.
The new Squire turned on them, storming at them for having allowed the poachers to escape, without seeming to heed the fact that his keeper still lay unconscious at his feet. He stamped and swore and almost shrieked in his impotent anger. Presently his son and the other man hoisted up Tompkins, who seemed to have got the charge in his legs, and between them carried him off, the little stout man stalking growling along in the rear. Then, at last, Walnut and I were left to get some sleep.
However, there was no peace for us. By ten o’clock next day the coppice was full of beaters, making noise enough to rouse a dormouse, and scaring the remaining pheasants nearly out of their feathers. Instead of running or hiding, the silly birds immediately rose and flew up over the trees, and then began such a salvo of firing as none of us had ever heard in our lives before. The whole coppice was full of the sharp, sour smell of smokeless powder, and as for us and the other coppice dwellers, we cowered in the very deepest corners of our various refuges, and waited with shaking bodies and aching heads for the din to cease. At last it did stop, but only to break out afresh at the next spinney, and so on all day round the whole country-side.