The slantwise eyes became grave, and the long tail paused.  The second ponderous paw came crashing on my knee.

“Aren’t you coming?” young Colonel seemed to say.

[Illustration:  “Aren’t you coming?” young Colonel seemed to say.]

I was flattering myself that the puppy was choosing my company to the hunt, for I always value the approval of a dog.  Now I found myself hoping that with a little coddling the young hound would forget the great doings down in the hollow and would stay with me on the ridge-top.  But I should have known better.  There is an end even to a dog’s patience.  The place for the strong-limbed is in the thick of the chase.  You can’t interest a puppy in scenery when his fellows are running a fox.

“Look, Colonel,” said I, pointing over the valley, “yonder’s where Mary lives, and I suspect that at this very minute she is looking out of the window to this very spot, and——­”

The call of a hound floated up from the hollow.  Old Captain was on a trail.  With a shrill cry young Colonel answered.  This was no time to loaf with a crippled soldier.  With a long-drawn yelp, a childish imitation of his father’s bay, he was off through the bushes.  Young Colonel was living.  And I was left alone on my log.

But this was my first day of life, too.  Some twenty-four years before I had been born, but those years were simply existence.  Now I was living.  I had a secret.  I had hinted at it to young Colonel.  Had he stayed, I would have told him more, but like a fool he had gone jabbering off through the bushes, cutting a ludicrous figure, too, I thought, for his body had not yet grown up to his feet and ears, and he carried them off a bit clumsily.  Had he stayed I might have told him all, and there never was a bit of news quite so important as that the foolish puppy missed; never a story so romantic as that he might have heard; never in the valley’s history an event of such interest.  He had scorned it.  Now he was with the dog mob down there in the gulch.  I could hear them giving tongue, and I knew they were on an old trail.  Soon they would be in full cry, but I did not care.  It was fine to be in full cry, of course, but from my post on the ridge-top, I could at least keep in sight of the house by the clump of oaks on the hillside.  Last week I should have moped and fumed here, and cursed my luck in being bound to a log on a day like this.  Now I turned my face to the sunlight and drank in the keen air.  Now I whistled as merry a tune as I knew.

“You seem to take well with solitude,” came a voice behind me.

Looking about, I saw Robert Weston fighting his way through the thicket.

“I take better to company,” I said.  “Why have you deserted the others?”

Weston sat down at my side with his gun across his knees.

“Arnold Arker says there is a fox in that hollow,” he answered.  “You can hear the dogs now, and he thinks if they start him, this is as good a place as any, as he is likely to run over on Buzzard ridge, and double back this way, or he’ll give us a sight of him as he breaks from the gully.  Then as we went away, I looked back and saw you sitting here and I envied you, for yours is the most comfortable post in all the ridges.”