John Garnet laughed--"I know the way well enough," he answered. "But why should you have done work when most men are just going to begin?"
Red Rube's grey eye twinkled. He laid his horny hand on Katerfelto's mane and looked in the rider's face, with a cunning leer. "Every man to his trade," said he. "My business lies betwixt the dark and the daylight. Yours, may-be, takes you out of a warm bed when the moon's up. I've been backwards and forwards on the moor, fifty years or more, and no harm come of it yet. It's safer riding, may-be, than the road."
"Not with such cursed bogs as these about," replied the other, carelessly. "Bogs that would swallow a coach-and-six: only I don't suppose you ever saw a coach-and-six in this wild outlandish country!"
"You're a stranger may-be?" asked Rube, sorely perplexed, for how could this horseman so resemble Galloping Jack, yet betray such practical ignorance of the moor and its peculiarities? "A stranger from up the country, no doubt, though you do handle your horse prettily enough, and sit in your saddle like a rock. May-be you never heard of 'slotting' a stag, twenty score weight, with a back like a bullock, and all his rights fairly counted, into a lone quiet coombe, where you harboured him so close you could touch him with the top joint of a trout-rod? May-be you never saw an old black-and-tan twenty-six inch tufter, with long flapping ears and hanging jowl, as steady as a clock, and as wise as a bishop, snuffle and quest and traverse, till he owned the scent with a roar, deeper, louder, fuller of music than the organ I heard in Exeter fifty years ago, when I was a boy. May-be, I'm only wasting my breath. You up-country gentlemen know nothing of our sport on the moor."
The spark had caught. That strange enthusiasm common to all votaries of the chase brightened John Garnet's eye, while he continued the other's narrative of an imaginary stag hunt.
"Then, with a crash of broken twigs and leafy branches, up he starts from a brake of deep green hazels,--stares about him for half a minute, time enough to count his points, and look him over--turns his head from side to side, displaying his mighty neck and noble width of beam, lays his antlers back, and leaves the wood at a springing trot, too proud to hurry himself, and deliberating calmly where he shall go next. Presently we lose sight of him, to emerge a mile off on the open moor. When he treads heather he breaks into a gallop, and speeds away like an arrow from a bow. You have moved him fairly now. Take up your tufters and let us lay on the pack."