“They’ve got him, my lady,” said a young farmer on a rough three-year-old to Mrs. Pat, as he stuffed his pipe in his pocket.  “That’s Patience; we’ll have a hunt out o’ this.”

Then came another and longer squeal as Patience plunged out of sight again, and then, as the glowing chorus rose from the half-seen pack, a whip, posted on a hillside beyond the covert, raised his cap high in the air, and a wild screech that set Pilot dancing from leg to leg broke from a country boy who was driving a harrow in the next field:  “Ga—­aane awa—­ay!”

Mrs. Pat forgot her annoyances.  Her time had come.  She would show that idiot Booth that Pilot was not to be insulted with impunity, and—­But here retrospect and intention became alike merged in the present, and in the single resolve to get ahead and stay there.  Half a dozen of Pilot’s great reaching strides, and she was in the next field and over the low bank without putting an iron on it.  The horse with the harrow, deserted by his driver, was following the hunt with the best of them, and, combining business with pleasure, was, as he went, harrowing the field with absurd energy.  The Paste Brooch and the Shelburne Porter—­so Mrs. Pat mentally distinguished them—­were sailing along with a good start, and Major Booth was close at their heels.  The light soil of the tilled field flew in every direction as thirty or more horses raced across it, and the usual retinue of foot runners raised an ecstatic yell as Mrs. Pat forged ahead and sent her big horse over the fence at the end of the field in a style that happily combined swagger with knowledge.

The hounds were streaking along over a succession of pasture fields, and the cattle gaps which were to be found in every fence vexed the proud soul of Mrs. Pat.  She was too good a sportswoman to school her horse over needless jumps when hounds were running, but it infuriated her to have to hustle with these outsiders for her place at a gap.  So she complained to Major Booth, with a vehemence of adjective that, though it may be forgiven to her, need not be set down here.

“Is all the wretched country like this?” she inquired indignantly, as the Shelburne Porter’s pony splashed ahead of her through a muddy ford, just beyond which the hounds had momentarily checked; “you told me to bring out a big-jumped horse, and I might have gone the whole hunt on a bicycle!”

Major Booth’s reply was to point to the hounds.  They had cast back to the line that they had flashed over, and had begun to run again at right angles from the grassy valley down which they had come, up towards the heather-clad hills that lay back of Carnfother.

“Say your prayers, Mrs. Pat!” he said, in what Mrs. Pat felt to be a gratuitously offensive manner, “and I’ll ask the lady in the pretty blue habit to have an eye to you.  This is a hill fox and he’s going to make you and Pilot sit up!”