Mr. Punch in the Hunting Field by J. A. Hammerton and John Leech (literature books to read .txt) 📗

Irate M.F.H. (who has had half an hour in the big gorse trying to get a faint-hearted fox away, galloping to "holloa" on the far side of covert.) "Confound you and your pony, sir! Get out of my way!"

Little Binks, who has been trying to keep out of people's way all day, thinks he can quite understand the feelings of the hunted fox.

[Pg 162]

Last week our Point to Point steeplechase came off. So did several of the riders: this merely par parenthèse. I offered to mark out the course, and, as I intended to escape the dread ordeal of riding by scratching my horse at the last moment, I thought it would be great fun to choose a very stiff, not to say bloodthirsty, line. Awful grumbling on the part of those unhappy ones who were to ride. Just as the bell rang for saddling, Captain Sproozer, ready dressed for the fray, came up to me with very long face, and said, "Beastly line this, you know, Phunker. I call it much too stiff."

I smiled in pitying and superior manner. "Think so, my dear Sproozer? My horse can't run, worse luck, but I only wish I were going to have the gallop over it."

"So you shall, then!" cried a rasping voice, suddenly, from behind me. Sir Hercules[Pg 165] Blizzard was the speaker, an awful man with an awful temper. "So you shall. My idiot of a jockey broke his collar-bone trying to jump one of the fences on this confounded course of yours to-day, so, as I am without a rider, you shall ride my mare Dinah."

Swallowed lump in my throat as I thanked him for his offer, but thought I had better decline, as I didn't know the mare, and besides that, I——

"Oh! all right, I know what you are going to say: that you're not much good on a horse"—(nothing of the sort! I was not going to say any such thing, confound the man!) "Of course, I know all that, and that you're not much of a rider; but I can't help myself now. It's too late to get a decent horseman, so I shall have to make shift with you."

Deuced condescending of him. I made a feeble effort to escape, and would cheerfully have paid a hundred pounds for the chance of doing so. Phil Poundaway, great friend of mine, came up and said (sympathetically, as I thought at first), "I should think you'd prefer to get off it, wouldn't you, Phunker?"

[Pg 168]

Thought he would volunteer in my place, so was perfectly frank with him. "My dear Phil, I'd give a hundred to get off——"

"Ah! you will, I expect, at the first fence, without paying the money!" he grinned, as he turned away.

Murder was in my heart at that moment. I got on Dinah, and, feeling like death, rode down to the starting-post. Thoughts of a misspent youth, of home and friends and things, came o'er me. I seemed once more to see the little rose-covered porch, the——

"What on earth are you mooning about?" thundered the Blizzardian voice in my ear. "Take hold of her head tighter than that, or you'll be off!"

The next moment the starter yelled "Go!" and away, like a whirlwind, we sped across the first field, towards a huge, thick blackthorn fence, the one I had thought to see such fun with. Fun! I never felt less funny in my life, as we approached it at the rate of two thousand miles an hour! The mare jumped high, but I jumped much higher, and seemed for a brief moment to be soaring through the blue empyrean. Somehow, the mare managed to evade me on the return journey earthwards, and, instead of alighting on the saddle, I found myself "sitting on the floor." A howl—it might have been of sympathy, but it didn't sound quite like that—arose from the crowd, and then I thought that I would go home on foot, instead of returning to explain matters to Sir Hercules. As a matter of fact, I don't much care for associating with old Blizzard, at all events, not just now.

[Pg 163]