“My face feels as if the cat had sharpened her claws on me,” said Spider.
“My knee’s bleeding,” puffed Dumplin’.
Mr. Vreeland kept on up through the open woods of the ridge, and suddenly pulled his horse to a sharp halt, in a little patch of light made by the rising sun. Here he spoke softly to the dogs, who had been padding along at his horse’s heels with a bored air, as if a bear were the very last thing they were thinking about. As the dogs trotted sharply forward under the horse’s nose and began to sniff where he pointed, Mr. Stone got his camera out of the case and made ready. Suddenly all four dogs began to utter little moaning sounds, like barks just beginning in their throats, and with a loud bay the two younger ones started off down the mountain, while Mr. Stone’s camera whirred. Ben, however, didn’t go. He kept on moaning and sniffing around.
“They are back tracking. You watch Ben and Cap, the wise old boys!” Mr. Vreeland cried, his eyes dancing with excitement.
Then Ben and Cap, too, suddenly uttered deep, silvery, triumphant bays, and sprang down the farther side of the ridge into a second ravine. An instant later the other two dogs came crying back and followed them, just in time to get into the last foot of the film. Then Mr. Vreeland put his horse down after them at a gallop, and vanished into the pines, followed by Tom and the doctor and Pep. Mr. Stone had a hard time holding his horse while he got his camera back into the case. Then he, too, went down the side of the ravine and into the lodge-poles.
“Now, darling, please take it easy! Whoa! Whoa!” yelled Bennie at his horse, as that animal cascaded down the soft soil of the bank and made for the wall of tearing little trees.
Holding their legs as close to the horses’ sides as they could, ducking to protect their faces, wriggling and squirming in their saddles to avoid having their legs torn and bruised by trees between which the horses squeezed, the boys got through, and followed the hunt. They could hear the dogs baying in the next ravine, and over the ridge they went, in time to see the tail of Mr. Stone’s horse vanishing into another thicket of scrub.
This kept on for an hour or more—it seemed ages to the three boys. In their efforts to get through the ravines without any more injury to their clothes or their persons than was necessary, they had to slow their horses down, and the hunt, which was working steadily up the mountain, got farther and farther ahead of them. They had long since lost all sight even of Mr. Stone, and the deep, bell-like baying of the hounds grew fainter and fainter. At last it ceased altogether.
When that happened Bennie pulled up his horse and waited for Spider and Dumplin’ to catch up.
“Say, fellers,” he asked, “what are we going to do? We’ve lost the hunt, all right. I can’t hear a sound now, and we’ve been off the tracks for twenty minutes, I guess. Those last two ravines we came through hadn’t been broken before, and I haven’t seen a hoof-print for a long while.”