Page:Hornung - Fathers of Men.djvu/122

 several of the masters' wives as well, to see the finish; and it is going to be one of the best finishes they ever have seen. Here come the gigantic gentlemen, red as Indians with the sun upon their faces, and one of them plunging headlong in a plain distress. They rush down that hill, and are half-way up this one, the wet mud shining all over them like copper, when the first handful of hounds start up against the sky behind them. "Surely that's rather a small boy to be in the first dozen," says Miss Heriot, pointing out a puppy in an untrimmed jersey, who is running gamely by himself between the first and second batches of hounds.

"In no fifteen, either," says Heriot, noticing the jersey rather than the boy, who is still a slip of muddy white on the opposite hill.

The hares are already home. They have been received with somewhat perfunctory applause, the real excitement being reserved for the race between the leading hounds, now in a cluster at the foot of the last hill; but half-way up the race is over, and Sprawson is increasing his lead with every stride.

"Well run, my house!" says Heriot, with laconic satisfaction.

"The house isn't done with yet, sir," pants Sprawson, turning his back to the sun. "There's young Rutter been running like an old hound all the way; here he is, in the first ten!"

And there indeed was the rather small boy in the plain jersey whom neither Heriot nor his sister had recognised as Jan; but then he looked another being in his muddy flannels; slimmer and trimmer, and somehow more in his element than in the coat and collar of workaday life; and the flush upon his face is not merely the result of exercise and a scarlet