“Yah, ye damn spoil-sport. You ought to be ducked in the damn mill-pond.”
“You go threaten the fox,” Frampton said, stopping his car and switching off the engine. “That’s about all you’re fit for. But don’t you threaten me, or you’ll find yourself in queer street.”
“Yah,” the man said.
Half a dozen others, thinking that there might be fun, rode up and also called: “Yah”: “Who closed Spirr”: “Dirty gun-maker”: “Son of a Stanchester pie-man”: “Hot pies”: “Nice puppy pies; nice as Mother makes ’em.”
It was quite good-humoured, and a great delight to the crowd. A policeman shoved through the throng and reproved Frampton for stopping in the crowded street.
“What are you blocking the road for?” he said. “Can’t you see you’ve all these cars behind you, wanting to get by? Move on. You ought to know better than to stop like that.”
Frampton said nothing, but set the car going. The riders laughed and booed; the crowd gave derisive cheers.
Frampton drove out of Stubbington pretty fast. When he reached the outskirts, he accelerated. He met a good many riders on very fresh horses coming in to the meet. Some of these lifted their hands for him to slow as he passed. He did not slow for any of them; he whirled past, and enjoyed the image in his mirror of the horses careering across the road, with the riders clinging to their necks. About a couple of miles from Stubbington, he met the hounds, and gave them the same measure. He rejoiced exceedingly to hear the oaths of the hunt servants as he passed them.
“Damn you,” he muttered. “Get off the roads into the fields if you want to come hunting in this twentieth century.”
A mile farther on, he passed the blood-red car, in which, as he knew, the Tilter fellow went to the meets. He saw the Tilter and his wife, and spat towards them, but the gesture was lost upon them.
Before lunch that day, he walked up to his new purchase on the Waste, for a quiet hour with the trial piece sent to him from the Works. This was a light, sporting model of his new gun, No. 123, with some clips of his new explosive, Mansellite, in practice charges. The gun took clips of a hundred charges, and even when loaded weighed less than three pounds. He had tried it at the Works, and had had no doubt that it was a marvellous weapon. He walked up to the Waste with it, to a gulley with high ground at its end, which he had long noted as a trial range. Against this high ground, he fixed his target-cards; he then passed a happy hour shooting and making notes. He judged that the gun needed two or three adjustments, which would add to its weight, but that even without these it was the best weapon in the world.
“This time I’ve got it,” he said to himself; “not its semblance, but itself. This’ll do the trick. Here go ten pounds off the load the P.B.I. will have to carry in the next war. Still, I suppose,” he added, “the hardy Annuals will make them carry their tombstones instead, to maintain that spirit of subservience, without which no hardy Annual can misdirect a war.”
He was always careful to keep one cartridge undischarged before turning home. He did so now. He had often found some tempting target on his way home, some fine coloured leaf or tree-boss.
“One shot on my way home,” he said, “then lunch.”
He saw nothing to shoot at, but strolled along, thinking of things which might be done to improve the weapon. The morning had given him a new interest in his work.
“This will be the gun of the future,” he said. “There can be no doubt of that.”
He was walking home thus, late for lunch but very happy, by way of the lake-head, when he heard the cry of hounds away to the south-east. Three or four cries came as though hounds were on to something but doubtful of it; he heard a distant horn and, in the stillness, a huntsman’s cheer.
“There the swine are,” he growled, “checked on the clay there. Get down and smell for yourselves, why don’t you, instead of leaving it to the nobler beasts?”
However, they neither heard nor obeyed; the horn and the cheering continued; then presently hounds spoke to something, were cheered to it, and seemed to make it good. They had hit off the line; they broke into cry, and were in an instant away down-hill.
“They’ll not get into this estate again,” Frampton said; but remembered, as he spoke, that the fencing along his southern and south-eastern borders had not been made, as he called it, “skunk-proof.”
He was at that moment near the end of the lake where Margaret had first caught sight of it. He was looking towards the open southern side of the valley. As he looked, he saw hounds coming over the brow of the slope; they were coming fast, with little whimpers, with their heads up and their sterns straight. The huntsman appeared, rather on their right, watching them intently. Almost at that instant, Frampton saw their fox coming straight towards him. He had been a fine, big fellow, that morning, when pushed from his covert, but he had gone eight miles since then, and was done for now. He was draggled, plastered with mud, so wet that he seemed all skin and bone, with his back hunched up in the middle, and his filthy brush trailing. Some memory of the lake may have been in his reeling brain. He may have had a wild duck there, perhaps, and remembered reeds which might shelter him; but he was tottering on his feet, his tongue was out like a wet flag, not like a lancer’s pennon. He might get to the reeds and sink there, but wherever he sank he would never get up again. The hounds were romping down the valley a hundred yards away, Frampton said to himself:
“The swine will kill him here. Well, they shan’t do that.”
He did not stop to think of consequences. Just as the huntsman urged his hunter up the bank on to Frampton’s land, Frampton shot the fox dead, with his last cartridge, rushed to it, and flung the corpse far out into the lake. The leading hounds ran to the lake margin after it, and there threw up.
“Take your damned dogs out of this,” he called to the huntsman. “Call your damned dogs out of it.” The hounds were round him. The huntsman was swearing at him and at the hounds. From all the valley-side, horsemen and horsewomen and children on ponies appeared. Annual-Tilter was there. “Get off this estate,” Frampton said. “I’ve shot your fox. Clear out of it and get another. Get to hell out of it, the lot of you.”
A big man, with a tough face, called:
“Horsewhip the swine. Let’s duck the mucker. Come on, you, let’s duck him.”
“No threats,” Frampton said. “Any man who touches me’ll die.”
“What d’you mean by shooting our fox?” the Annual-Tilter called. “What d’you mean, sir?”
“What do I mean, you bun-headed ape?” Frampton said. “The poor thing was run off his legs and on my land, and therefore mine to do what I choose with. I shot him out of mercy. I’m only sorry someone can’t do as much by you.”
There were thirty riders, all hot, blowsy, fuming, angry and raging. Each one of the thirty behaved like one of a pack; even the children called in shrill voices that he was a swine and a spoil-sport; the women were not backward; the men cursed him. One of the women, with a very clear, hard, penetrating voice, the one who had spoken at the Meeting, called:
“Do you fellows call yourselves men, that you can’t horsewhip him within an inch of his life?”
“No, madam,” Frampton called to her, “they don’t call themselves men. They know that I’ve got a gun, and am pretty good at using it. They are only fox-hunters. But, Golly, they can chase a fox to death, if all his earths are stopped.”
Bynd appeared at this instant; he had not seen and did not know what had happened; he had had a fall and was covered with mud, but in some swift, human way, native to him, he judged the situation.