Then came the road.  He was on it before he knew.  There was the wedge-shaped, low-browed head of a stoat racing up along one side of him, with murder plainly written in the gleam of its beady eyes; there was the hot breath of another beating on his opposite flank; there was one with feet out and all brakes on, trying its best to pull out one of the feathers of his long and beautiful tail; and—­there was the road dead ahead.

It was one of three—­the road, the air, or death where he was.  He chose the road, and crossed, like a hunted cat crossing a back-yard.  His feet seemed scarcely to touch the dust as he negotiated the open, yet he had time to take in a fact or two.  One was that the stoats had stopped—­a little bunch of peering heads on a group of craning necks on the edge of the ditch behind him.  Another was that several people and a motor-car were standing still in the road quite close, watching the shooting.  I don’t think any of them saw him, but he felt as if all of them did.

Arrived in the hedge on the far side of the road, he clapped down, panting.  The hedge ran along the road.  On the other side of it was the grass of the park-land, stretching away two hundred yards or so to the edge of the covert, which came down to a point here.  He could hear the tapping of sticks in the covert—­beaters’ sticks.  He could hear an occasional shout.  Men in tweeds stood motionless on the edge of the covert, and suddenly moved.

Then came the infernal crash of the guns again, and he saw a hen-pheasant pitch sickeningly on her head from a height, and a cock-pheasant, flaming like a rocket in the sinking sun, run the gauntlet of four shots, only to turn over and slide down at a fifth.

Then—­and then, he jumped.

Something had pushed past him.  In the din he had not heard it.  He turned as he crouched, and saw that it was a hen-pheasant, with blood on her breast and one wing trailing alongside.  And in the same instant he was aware of a man—­an under-keeper—­crackling about in the hedge only ten yards away, looking for that hen-pheasant.

And the unwounded old cock, crouching almost till he looked like a tortoise, followed the blundering, staggering, wounded hen.  It was the only thing he dared do.

It was a strange creep, and an erratic one, with many stops, those two hunted ones took together, meeting, so strangely, too—­not for the first time, since she had been one of his wives in the dim peaceful past—­with the guns thundering away so close, and their sons and their daughters being slain almost all around them.  They had, however, little time to think about it, for they came, after about twenty yards, to a gap spanned by barbed wire, and they stopped, the cock about a foot behind the hen’s tail, in cover scarcely enough to hide them.

But that was not all.  Two men in fawn overcoats stood in the road by the gap, looking through it at the shooting; and a boy with a bicycle stood close to them, interested in the same thing.