On the morning of the fourth day, however, he was surprised to note a great bustle and stir before the club-house. From the top of his knoll he wondered at the scarlet-coated riders who were gathering quickly, with here and there among them a slenderer, dark figure, which seemed to stick mysteriously upon one side of her horse. His interest, however, turned speedily to apprehension when he saw a pack of dogs, perhaps ten or twelve in number (he did not know how to count), coming up over a rise beyond the club-house. These dogs looked very much like the tan-coloured half-breed at the settlement, whom he had so often outwitted and outrun. He understood now certain ominous, baying voices, which he had heard several times in the distance; and he realized in a second that now was an old game about to be played in a new way. He himself it was, and none other, that all this fuss was about. There was so much of it; and the colour looked so impressive. For a moment his heart sank, and his brush dropped. Then confidence returned. He sat up with sprightly cocked ears and head to one side as was his ancient custom, and eyed with shrewd semi-disdain the elaborate preparations which were being made against him. Then he slipped down from his watch-tower and betook himself to the centre of the most difficult patch of swamp.

There was one thing, however, which Red Fox, shrewd as he was, did not realize; and that was that the master of the hounds knew a lot about foxes. He knew that that rock on the top of the knoll was just the sort of place which a strange fox, if a cunning one, would be likely to choose as a lookout when anything unusual was afoot. He led the way thither, therefore, and put the pack straight at it, rather expecting an immediate find. The steaming scent, of course, was picked up almost at once; and away went the splendid pack in loud chorus, heads up and sterns down, taking the scent in the air, straight for the swamp, and the whole field following.

What Red Fox had heard before was the voice of one hound mingled with the yelping of an excitable mongrel. The deep, bell-like chorus that now fell upon his ears warned him that the emergency confronting him was something quite new and altogether trying. In order to deal with it he felt that he must know more about it than he did. Without waiting to leave any tangles in the swamp for the hounds to unravel, he slipped out on the farther side, ran hard for about a mile and a half straight away through the roughest kind of a country, then doubled back on a spacious loop and mounted another knoll to take observations.

So remarkable had been his speed that he was in time to see, below him and across a stretch of meadow, the pack just emerging from the swamp, and the gay-coloured field just closing upon them around the swamp’s edges. With the intensest interest he watched it all. He marvelled, not without a pang, at the speed of those black and tan dogs, who ran so close together and seemed to know so well what they were about. He marvelled still more at the man-creatures on horseback who followed the pack so wildly. He had taken pains to put every possible obstacle in the path,—every high stone wall, every crooked fence, every ditch and bog, every coil of the erratic brook. These, to his light and tough agility, were nothing. But it filled him with amazement to see the way in which the man-creatures—those slim, dark ones on the sides of their horses as well as the red ones that rode in the usual fashion—went boldly over the obstacles. Some, to be sure, went down in disaster; and some turned aside to rejoin the hunt later on; but most kept straight ahead with the pack, “buck-jumping” their way over certain awkward obstructions, and clearing others with magnificent, soaring leaps. Red Fox thought to himself that these man-creatures were curiously different from those he used to know,—Jabe Smith, and the Boy, and the long-legged, slouching, indifferent backwoods farmers. He got so absorbed in satisfying his curiosity that he almost forgot the important part which he himself was playing in the drama; and before he knew it the baying pack was almost back upon him. He darted down the densest side of the knoll and ran with all his might across the open,—but he was not quite in time to escape being sighted. A great shout of triumph went up from the field; and the pack was sent at a tangent across the field, cutting into the trail and saving a vast expenditure of time and wind. The burst of speed which Red Fox now put on was a revelation to all who were so fortunate as to see it; but, softened as he was from his long weeks of captivity, it cost him too much. He kept right on through the next covert, and across the next open, and through a wide belt of alder-swamp; but when next he showed himself, had there been any one near to see, it would have been observed that his brush drooped in dejection, and his bright, dapper coat was dark with wet. He halted for a moment or two, to recover his wind a little; then he set himself to try some of his old tricks.