How still it was—­this midnight—­on the fringe of the woods!  Two men sitting concealed among some bushes at the edge of Mr. Boyce’s largest cover, and bent upon a common errand, hardly spoke to each other, so strange and oppressive was the silence.  One was Jim Hurd; the other was a labourer, a son of old Patton of the almshouses, himself a man of nearly sixty, with a small wizened face showing sharp and white to-night under his slouched hat.

They looked out over a shallow cup of treeless land to a further bound of wooded hill, ending towards the north in a bare bluff of down shining steep under the moon.  They were in shadow, and so was most of the wide dip of land before them; but through a gap to their right, beyond the wood, the moonbeams poured, and the farms nestling under the opposite ridge, the plantations ranging along it, and the bald beacon hill in which it broke to the plain, were all in radiant light.

Not a stir of life anywhere.  Hurd put up his hand to his ear, and leaning forward listened intently.  Suddenly—­a vibration, a dull thumping sound in the soil of the bank immediately beside him.  He started, dropped his hand, and, stooping, laid his ear to the ground.

“Gi’ us the bag,” he said to his companion, drawing himself upright.  “You can hear ’em turnin’ and creepin’ as plain as anything.  Now then, you take these and go t’ other side.”

He handed over a bundle of rabbit nets.  Patton, crawling on hands and knees, climbed over the low overgrown bank on which the hedge stood into the precincts of the wood itself.  The state of the hedge, leaving the cover practically open and defenceless along its whole boundary, showed plainly enough that it belonged to the Mellor estate.  But the field beyond was Lord Maxwell’s.

Hurd applied himself to netting the holes on his own side, pushing the brambles and undergrowth aside with the sure hand of one who had already reconnoitred the ground.  Then he crept over to Patton to see that all was right on the other side, came back, and went for the ferrets, of whom he had four in a closely tied bag.

A quarter of an hour of intense excitement followed.  In all, five rabbits bolted—­three on Hurd’s side, two on Patton’s.  It was all the two men could do to secure their prey, manage the ferrets, and keep a watch on the holes.  Hurd’s great hands—­now fixing the pegs that held the nets, now dealing death to the entangled rabbit, whose neck he broke in an instant by a turn of the thumb, now winding up the line that held the ferret—­seemed to be everywhere.

At last a ferret “laid up,” the string attached to him having either slipped or broken, greatly to the disgust of the men, who did not want to be driven either to dig, which made a noise and took time, or to lose their animal.  The rabbits made no more sign, and it was tolerably evident that they had got as much as they were likely to get out of that particular “bury.”