This is a very solemn oath, and only used about real things, and never for pretending ones, so ****y said--'Oh, all right; go ahead! I thought you were only rotting.'
So they all took the secret oath. Noel made it up long before, when he had found the first thrush's nest we ever saw in the Blackheath garden:
'I will not tell, I will not reveal, I will not touch, or try to steal;And may I be called a beastly sneak, If this great secret I ever repeat.'
It is a little wrong about the poetry, but it is a very binding promise. They all repeated it, down to H. O.
'Now then,' ****y said, 'what's up?'
Oswald, in proud silence, drew the pistol from his breast and held it out, and there was a murmur of awful amazement and respect from every one of the council. The pistol was not loaded, so we let even the girls have it to look at. And then ****y said, 'Let's go hunting.'
And we decided that we would. H. O. wanted to go down to the village and get penny horns at the shop for the huntsmen to wind, like in the song, but we thought it would be more modest not to wind horns or anything noisy, at any rate not until we had run down our prey. But his talking of the song made us decide that it was the fox we wanted to hunt. We had not been particular which animal we hunted before that.
Oswald let Denny have first go with the pistol, and when we went to bed he slept with it under his pillow, but not loaded, for fear he should have a nightmare and draw his fell weapon before he was properly awake.
Oswald let Denny have it, because Denny had toothache, and a pistol is consoling though it does not actually stop the pain of the tooth. The toothache got worse, and Albert's uncle looked at it, and said it was very loose, and Denny owned he had tried to crack a peach-stone with it. Which accounts. He had creosote and camphor, and went to bed early, with his tooth tied up in red flannel.
Oswald knows it is right to be very kind when people are ill, and he forbore to wake the sufferer next morning by buzzing a pillow at him, as he generally does. He got up and went over to shake the invalid, but the bird had flown and the nest was cold. The pistol was not in the nest either, but Oswald found it afterwards under the looking-glass on the dressing-table. He had just awakened the others (with a hair- brush because they had not got anything the matter with their teeth), when he heard wheels, and, looking out, beheld Denny and Albert's uncle being driven from the door in the farmer's high cart with the red wheels.
We dressed extra quick, so as to get downstairs to the bottom of the mystery. And we found a note from Albert's uncle. It was addressed to Dora, and said--'Denny's toothache got him up in the small hours. He's off to the dentist to have it out with him, man to man. Home to dinner.'
Dora said, 'Denny's gone to the dentist.'
'I expect it's a relation,' H. O. said. 'Denny must be short for Dentist.'
I suppose he was trying to be funny--he really does try very hard.
He wants to be a clown when he grows up. The others laughed.
'I wonder,' said ****y, 'whether he'll get a shilling or half-a-crown for it.'
Oswald had been meditating in gloomy silence, now he cheered up and said--'Of course! I'd forgotten that. He'll get his tooth money, and the drive too. So it's quite fair for us to have the fox-hunt while he's gone. I was thinking we should have to put it off.'
The others agreed that it would not be unfair.
'We can have another one another time if he wants to,' Oswald said.
We know foxes are hunted in red coats and on horseback--but we could not do this--but H. O. had the old red football jersey that was Albert's uncle's when he was at Loretto. He was pleased.
'But I do wish we'd had horns,' he said grievingly. 'I should have liked to wind the horn.'
'We can pretend horns,' Dora said; but he answered, 'I didn't want to pretend. I wanted to wind something.'
'Wind your watch,' ****y said. And that was unkind, because we all know H. O.'s watch is broken, and when you wind it, it only rattles inside without going in the least.
We did not bother to dress up much for the hunting expedition--just cocked hats and lath swords; and we tied a card on to H. O.'s chest with 'Moat House Fox-Hunters' on it; and we tied red flannel round all the dogs' necks to show they were fox-hounds. Yet it did not seem to show it plainly; somehow it made them look as if they were not fox-hounds, but their own natural breeds--only with sore throats.
Oswald slipped the pistol and a few cartridges into his pocket. He knew, of course, that foxes are not shot; but as he said--'Who knows whether we may not meet a bear or a crocodile.'
We set off gaily. Across the orchard and through two cornfields, and along the hedge of another field, and so we got into the wood, through a gap we had happened to make a day or two before, playing 'follow my leader'.
The wood was very quiet and green; the dogs were happy and most busy. Once Pincher started a rabbit. We said, 'View Halloo!' and immediately started in pursuit; but the rabbit went and hid, so that even Pincher could not find him, and we went on. But we saw no foxes.
So at last we made ****y be a fox, and chased him down the green rides. A wide walk in a wood is called a ride, even if people never do anything but walk in it.
We had only three hounds--Lady, Pincher and Martha--so we joined the glad throng and were being hounds as hard as we could, when we suddenly came barking round a corner in full chase and stopped short, for we saw that our fox had stayed his hasty flight. The fox was stooping over something reddish that lay beside the path, and he cried--'I say, look here!' in tones that thrilled us throughout.
Our fox--whom we must now call ****y, so as not to muddle the narration--pointed to the reddy thing that the dogs were sniffing at.
