The scent served well; the
gurgling music with now and then a sharper note, like a fife among
flutes and 'cellos, flowed on, and Larry and Joker, two happy
creatures, the world forgetting (though by no means by their world
forgot) galloped and rejoiced.
The little mountain sheep with their black, speckled faces sprang
before them, quick as rabbits; green plover flopped up from the grassy
places, wheeling and squealing; a woodcock whirred out of a furze bush
so near Larry that he could have struck it down with his crop.
Long-legged mountain hares fled right and left of the driving pack,
unheeded. Great spaces of the mountain were bare of fences, but in
those tracts where the grass had mastered the heather, it was
"striped" with broad banks, sound, and springy, and bound, as with
wire, by the heather roots. To feel Joker quicken his big stride and
leap at the banks out of his gallop, to realise the perfect precision
of his method, as he changed feet and flicked off into the next field,
to race him at the walls of smooth round stones, weathered in the long
centuries, and grey with lichen, and to know that if they were three
times their height Joker would have sailed over them with the same
ease--whatever might have been Larry's burden of care, it would have
fallen from him, forgotten, in the pure glory of that ride.
The hounds ran hard for nearly a half hour before they checked, and
Larry bethought him of those unfortunates between whom and himself
that great gulf had been fixed.
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