Hoo} Beats 



Gainsborough Farms, and with the help of his 

 two whips cast the pack into the most Ukely part. 



Mr. Leffington was not a sentimentaUst, he 

 himself would have been among the first to deny 

 it, and his new self-appointed role, as peacemaker 

 to a pair of quarrelsome lovers, did not sit com- 

 fortably on his broad shoulders. It had been 

 Mr. Leffington's sudden idea the day before w^hen 

 he had slapped his leg so smartly in the break-cart 

 and startled the Nut-Cracker from his somnolence, 

 that if he could bring it about that the hounds 

 should kill again in Bagby's barnyard, as they had 

 two years before, when Gwen had followed John 

 over the gate, and he had lifted her out of the 

 saddle, why then the same might happen again, 

 why not, and — . But foxes are notoriously untrust- 

 worthy, and cannot be expected when hotly pur- 

 sued by a pack of twenty couples and as many 

 more horses and men, to choose any particular 

 place in which to die, so Mr. Leffington was obliged 

 to think of some much more dependable scheme. 



When Mr. Leffington once made up his mind 

 he was nothing if not thorough, and from the time 

 he paid the stable boy to drag an anise-seed bag in 

 a circuitous and tortuous route from the crest of 

 the hill overlooking the Gainsborough Farms until 

 the boy finally climbed the fence into Bagby's 

 barnyard, then got out the remains of a dead fox 

 110 



