off on a hunt?"

"Don't let him. If he tries to git out of sight, fill him full of shot."

"The whole thing's risky, Jim."

"Well, what is it ain't risky?"

Old Frank had always associated with gentlemen, hunted with sportsmen.
Now he was to find what it means to be threatened, browbeaten, harassed
in his work by inferiors.

On the first hunt, as soon as he got out in the field, he was yelled
at. He turned in bewilderment. The men hunted on mules, their guns
across the pommels of their saddles, and now they were gesticulating
angrily for him to come in. He ran to them, looking up into their faces
with apologetic eyes, for, however scornful he might be of them in his
prison, in the field his professional reputation, his bird-dog honour,
were at stake.

"You hunt close!" ordered the burly man.

After that he tried shrewdly to get away, to manoeuvre out of sight
under pretext of smelling birds. But the burly man called him in, got
down off his mule, cut a big stick, and threatened him. Again, an
enraged yell full of danger made him turn to find both guns pointed
straight at him and the face of the burly man crimson. He came in, tail
tucked, ears thrown back, eyes wild.

"You look here, Jim," said the man called Sam, "you better be satisfied.
They're offering four hundred dollars now, and that looks good to me.
It's been more'n a week. They ain't goin' to raise it any higher."

"They'll give a thousand!" yelled the burly man.

"All right, Jim--I've warned you!"

Day after day they hunted over the same ground, along the border of a
great swamp, where there were no houses, no roads, no cultivated fields.
Day after day they grew watchful, until he was almost afraid to get out
of the shadows cast by the mule. His tail that he had always carried so
proudly began to droop, the gallop that used to carry him swiftly over
fields and hills and woodland gave way to a spiritless trot. Fields and
woods stretched all about him, the sky was overhead; but he was tied to
these ragged men on mules as if by an invisible rope, which to break
meant death.

At intervals during the silent nights he still gnawed at his board
behind the boxes, but he could not hunt all day and stay awake at night.
Sheer weariness of body and spirit made him welcome any rest, even that
of his hard prison floor. And there were times when it seemed that he
had never known any life but the one he was living now.

At first he had expected Lancaster to fi