Page:Rewards and Fairies (Kipling, 1910).djvu/350

322 'But we did it!' he said. 'After all, a woman is as good as a man to beat the woods, and the mere word that deer are afoot makes cripples and crones young again. De Aquila laughed when Hugh told him over the list of beaters. Half were women; and many of the rest were clerks—Saxon and Norman priests. 'Hugh and I had not time to laugh for eight days, till De Aquila, as Lord of Pevensey, met our King and led him to the first shooting stand—by the Mill on the edge of the forest. Hugh and I—it was no work for hot heads or heavy hands—lay with our beaters on the skirts of Dallington to watch both them and the deer. When De Aquila's great horn blew we went forward, a line half a league long. Oh, to see the fat clerks, their gowns tucked up, puffing and roaring, and the sober millers dusting the undergrowth with their staves; and, like as not, between them a Saxon wench, hand in hand with her man, shrilling like a kite as she ran, and leaping high through the fern, all for joy of the sport.'

'''Ah! How! Ah! How! How-ah! Sa-how-ah!''' Puck bellowed without warning, and Swallow bounded forward, ears cocked and nostrils cracking.

Hal-lal-lal-lal-la-hai-ie! Sir Richard answered in a high clear shout.

The two voices joined in swooping circles of sound, and a heron rose out of a red osier bed below them, circling as though he kept time to the outcry. Swallow quivered and swished his glorious tail. They stopped together on the same note.