SECOND PART
ONE who has never tried the experiment can have no idea how easy it is to miss when firing from horseback at a buck who sends your heart up into your mouth by springing up from beneath your horse’s heels, and then speeds away, twisting and turning among the boles of the trees. Men who could bring down a partridge with each barrel have been known to shoot away half a bag of shot before they began to get the hang of the thing.
The shades of evening were falling. Humiliating though it was, we had fallen, too, with a will on our gameless supper.
“S-t! Listen! What’s that?”
We pricked up our ears. Presently there came softly echoing from far away in the forest a long-drawn cry, ringing, melodious, clear as a bugle call.
“Billy!”
The welkin rang with our joyous shouts. Half our party sprang to their feet and red-hot coffee splashed from tin cups. “Hurrah!”
“Marse Billy got the keenest holler I ever hear!” chuckled Beverly. “Bound he fetch luck ‘long wid him! No mo’ bacon for supper arter dis.”
We craned our necks to catch the first glimpse of our mascot. Obviously, from the direction of the joyous yells with which he answered our welcoming shouts, he had abandoned the road and was riding straight through the open woods. Presently we descried through the deepening twilight his portly form looming up atop a tall gray. Then two vivid flashes and two loud reports, followed by a mad rush of the gray, which came tearing down on us in wild terror, and for a minute we were treated to something like an amateur episode from one of Mr. Buffalo Bill’s entertainments. Amid roars of laughing welcome the ponderous knight was at last helped down from his trembling steed, whose bridle Beverly had been able luckily to snatch as he floundered among the tent ropes.
“And where the deuce did you pick up that wild beast? Surely you can’t expect to shoot from him!”
“Oh, I’ll cool him down in a day or two; he’ll soon get used to it.”
In point of fact a horse who dreads a gun gets more and more terror stricken as the hunt goes on, the mere sight of a deer, the cocking of a gun even, sufficing to set him off into plungings that grow day by day more violent. This none should have known better than Blount; for never, by any chance, did he ride to the hunt with an animal that would “stand fire.” The discharge of his gun, the rise of a buck even, was always the opening of a circus with him. But he managed invariably to let off both barrels – one perhaps through the tree tops, the other into the ground. In one particular alone was he provident. He brought always so immense a supply of ammunition that toward the close of the hunt his tent was a supply magazine to the less thoughtful.
“What!” exclaimed Blount, “not a single one! Ah! boys, that was because I was not with you.” The jovial soul had not a trace of conceit; he was merely sanguine – contagiously, gloriously, magnificently sanguine.
“Ah, but won’t we knock ‘em over tomorrow!” And straightway we lifted up our hearts and had faith in this prophet of pleasant things.
“Beverly, will that mule Ned stand fire?”
“I dunno, Marse Billy; nobody ain’t nebber tried him. But I ‘spec’ you wouldn’t ax him no odds.”
“I’ll go and have a look at him.”
Shortly afterward we heard two tremendous explosions, followed by a frenzied clatter of hoofs and the sound of breaking branches, and up there came, running and laughing, a Monsieur Wynen, a Belgian violinist, a real artist, who was one of our party (though never a trigger did he pull during the entire hunt).
“What’s the matter?”
Wynen was first violin in an opera troupe.
“It is only Blount rehearsing Ned.”
Any man in the world except Blount would have tested that demure wheel mule’s views as to firearms by firing off his gun in his neighborhood as he stood tethered. Not so Billy. Mounting the guileless and unsuspecting Ned, and casting the reins upon his bristly neck, he had let drive.
Shocked beyond expression by the dreadful roar and flash (it was now night) Ned had made a mad rush through the woods. In vain; for Blount had a good seat. Then had there come into Ned’s wily brain the reminiscence of a trick that he had never known to fail in thirty years. He stopped suddenly, still as a gate post, at the same time bracing his vertebrae into the similitude of a barrel hoop, and instantly Blount lay sprawling upon his jolly back; and there was a second roar, followed by a rush of buckshot among the leaves and around the legs of the audience that was watching the rehearsal. “Never mind, Jack,” said he to me, shortly afterward, “I’ll find something that will stand fire” and throwing his arm around my shoulder for a confidential talk of the slaughter he was to do on the morrow, his sanguine soul bubbled into my sympathetic ear:
“I say, Jack, don’t tell the boys; but I have got two bags of shot. They would laugh, of course. Now, how many ought a fellow to bring down with two bags? I mean a cool-headed chap who does not lose his head. How does one dozen to the bag strike you? Reasonable? H’m? Of course. Twenty-four, then. Well, let us say twenty-five, just to round off things. Golly! Why, nine is the highest score I ever made. Twenty-five! Why, that is a quarter of a hundred. Did you notice that? Whee-ew! The boys will stop bedeviling me after that, h’m? I should say so. Not a rascal of them all ever killed so many. Cool and steady, that’s the thing, my boy. Up he jumps! What of that? Don’t be flustered, I tell you. Count ten. Then lower your gun. There is not the least hurry in the world. Drop the muzzle on his side, just behind his shoulder. Steady! Let him think you are not after deer this morning. If it is a doe let it appear that you are loaded for buck. Bang! Over he tumbles in his tracks. You load up and are off again. Up hops another – a beauty. Same tactics – boo-doo-ee! Got him! What’s the sense of throwing away your shot? Costs money – delays the line. Cool – cool and steady – that’s the word, my boy. Get any shots to-day? Three? Hit anything?”
It was too dark for him to see how pale I went at this question. “Mr. Blount,” said I, with a choking in my throat (nobody could help telling the big-hearted fellow everything), “you won’t tell my father, will you?”
“Tell him what?”
“Well, you see, he cautioned me over and over again never, under any circumstances, to fire at a deer that ran toward a neighboring huntsman.”
“Of course not – never!” echoed Blount with conviction.
“And to-day – and to-day, when I was not thinking of such a thing, a big buck jumped up from right under my horse’s belly, and did you notice that gray-headed old gentleman by the fire? Well, the buck rushed straight toward him – and I forgot all about what my father had said and banged away.”
“Did you pepper him?” put in Billy eagerly.
“Pepper him!”
“I mean the buck.”
“I don’t know, he went on.”
“They will do it, occasionally, somehow.”
“When I saw the leaves raining down on the old gentleman, my heart stopped beating. You will not tell my father?”
“Pshaw! There was no harm done. We must trust to Providence in these matters. What did the old gentleman say?”
“Not a word; it was his first campaign, too. His eyes were nearly popping out of his head. He let off both barrels. The shot whistled around me!”
“The old fool! He ought to know better. To-morrow your father must put you next to me.”
Blount brought us hilarity and hope, but no luck, at any rate at first. When we rode slowly into camp on the following day, just as the sun went down, we had one solitary doe to show. Blount – Blount of all men – had killed it. The servants