y ma and brother and sister. Brother started to yell 'Yoicks!
Yoicks!' But ma shut him off with a good deal of severity that caused
him to blush at his words. It seems Yoicks is a cry you give at some
other critical juncture in life. When beagles start you must yell 'Gone
away!' in a clear, ringing voice. Brother meant well, but didn't know.

"Anyhow, they followed those pups, and I trailed along at a decent
distance on my horse; and pretty soon they got the rabbit which had been
fool enough to come round in a wide circle back to where it started
from. Say! It was mere child's play for that plucky little band of nine
dogs to clean up that rabbit. They never had a minute's fear of it and
the rabbit didn't have the least chance of winning the fight, not at
any stage. Yes, sir! any time you see nine beagles setting on a tuckered
rabbit--I don't care how wild he is--you'll know how to put your money
down.

"I never did see a rabbit put up a worse fight than that one did. I rode
up to its fragments, and the old lady was saying how ripping it was and
calling sister a mollycoddle, because here was sister crying like a baby
over the rabbit's fate--a rabbit she'd never set eyes on before in her
life. Brother didn't look like he had gone in keenly for the sport,
either. He was kind of green and yellow, like one of these parties on
shipboard about the time he's saying he don't feel the boat's motion the
least bit; and, anyway, he's got a sure-fire remedy for it if anything
does happen. I just kind of stood around, neutral and revolted.

"Pretty soon the pack beagles off again with glad cries; and this time,
up on the hillside, what do they start but a little spike buck that has
been down to a salt lick on the creek flat! They wasn't any more afraid
of him than they had been of the rabbit and started to chase him out of
the country. Of course they didn't do well after they got him
interested. The last I saw of the race he was making 'em look like they
was in reverse gear and backing up full speed. Anyway, that seemed to
end the sport for the day, because the dogs and the buck must of been
over near the county line in ten minutes. The old lady was mad and
blamed it on the valet, who come up and had to take as sweet a roasting
as you ever heard a man get from a lady word painter. It seems he'd
ought to have taught 'em to ignore deer.

"Then I lied like a lady and said it was a ripping sport that I would
sure go in keenly for if I