What was that object of interest shall be told in the next chapter.

CHAPTER X

Goarly’s Revenge

The Senator and Morton followed close on the steps of Lord Rufford and Captain Glomax and were thus able to make their way into the centre of the crowd.  There, on a clean sward of grass, laid out as carefully as though he were a royal child prepared for burial, was—­a dead fox.  “It’s pi’son, my lord; it’s pi’son to a moral,” said Bean, who as keeper of the wood was bound to vindicate himself, and his master, and the wood.  “Feel of him, how stiff he is.”  A good many did feel, but Lord Rufford stood still and looked at the poor victim in silence.  “It’s easy knowing how he come by it,” said Bean.

The men around gazed into each other’s faces with a sad tragic air, as though the occasion were one which at the first blush was too melancholy for many words.  There was whispering here and there and one young farmer’s son gave a deep sigh, like a steam-engine beginning to work, and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.  “There ain’t nothin’ too bad,—­nothin,” said another,—­leaving his audience to imagine whether he were alluding to the wretchedness of the world in general or to the punishment which was due to the perpetrator of this nefarious act.  The dreadful word “vulpecide” was heard from various lips with an oath or two before it.  “It makes me sick of my own land, to think it should be done so near,” said Larry Twentyman, who had just come up.  Mr. Runciman declared that they must set their wits to work not only to find the criminal but to prove the crime against him, and offered to subscribe a couple of sovereigns on the spot to a common fund to be raised for the purpose.  “I don’t know what is to be done with a country like this,” said Captain Glomax, who, as an itinerant, was not averse to cast a slur upon the land of his present sojourn.

“I don’t remember anything like it on my property before,” said the lord, standing up for his own estate and the county at large.

“Nor in the hunt,” said young Hampton.  “Of course such a thing may happen anywhere.  They had foxes poisoned in the Pytchley last year.”

“It shows a d—­ bad feeling somewhere,” said the Master.

“We know very well where the feeling is,” said Bean who had by this time taken up the fox, determined not to allow it to pass into any hands less careful than his own.

“It’s that scoundrel, Goarly,” said one of the Botseys.  Then there was an indignant murmur heard, first of all from two or three and then running among the whole crowd.  Everybody knew as well as though he had seen it that Goarly had baited meat with strychnine and put it down in the wood.  “Might have pi’soned half the pack!” said Tony Tuppett, who had come up on foot from the barn where the hounds were still imprisoned, and had caught hold in an affectionate manner of a fore pad