ps that wasn't driven well home on me last Fall!"

"Out to us came a little woman, a scant ninety-pounder I should say, so
frail she wouldn't look safe in a drag, and a good bit away on the off
side of middle age; but the mouth of her had a set that showed she'd
never run off the bit in her life, and her eye--my eye! but she had an
eye, did that woman. And it was hell-bent to hunt she was, bound to
follow the bounds, though all she knew of a saddle came of
five-mile-an-hour jogs along town park bridle paths, and all her hands
looked fit for was holdin' a spaniel.

"Well, it was Lory and Priest took her on, turn about, usually me that
carried her, and it was break her slender little neck I thought the
divils would in spite of me. Took her at everything and spared her
nowhere, bowled her along across meadow and furrow, over water, timber,
and walls, like she was a lusty five-year-old, and all the time a
guyin' her in a way to take the heart out of anything but a
thoroughbred. 'Don't mind the fence!' Lory would sing out, 'if you get
a fall, just throw your legs in the air and keep kickin' to show you're
not dead; we never want to stop for any but the dead on this hunt.'
And smash on my quarters would come her crop, and on we'd go!

"Again, when we'd be nearin' a fence across which two were scramblin'
up from croppers, Lory would brace her with: 'Don't git scared at that
smoke across the fence; it's nothin' but the boys that couldn't get
over burnin' up their chance of salvation!' And into me slats her
little heel would sock the steel, and high over the timber I'd lift her
for sheer joy of the nerve of her!

"But it was not always me that had her. One day I saw a cold-blood
give her a fall you'd think would smash the tiny little thing into
bran; landed so low on a ditch bank he couldn't gather, and up over his
head she flew and on till I thought she was for takin' the next wall by
her lonesome. And when finally she hit the ground it was to so near
bury herself among soft furrows that it looked for a second as if she'd
taken earth like any other wily old fox tired of the runnin'.

"But tired? She? Not on your bran mash! Up she springs like a
yearlin' and asks Lory is her hat on straight--which it was, straight
up and down over her nigh ear. 'Oh, damn your hat,' answers Lory;
'give us your foot for a mount if you're not rattled. Why, next year
you'll be showin' your friends holes in the ground on this hunt cour