“You’re not as bad-mannered as I am,” I laughed as we mounted, but their allusion to hounds made me enjoy the burden of my six-shooter.

As we ambled off, “What were you going to say,” one asked me, “about our ‘theory,’ or something?”

“Oh!  I see you think Mrs. Southmayd must have met up with company and left her servants to follow on to the next station alone.”

“Exactly.  We tracked the darkies along the edge of the road; but her horse tracks—­we could only see that no horse tracks left the road where any of their man tracks left it.”

When we had gone a mile or so one of the boys turned to leave us by a neighborhood road, saying:  “I’ll rejoin you, ’cross fields, where you turned back last night.  I’m going for the dogs.”

“Stop!  Gentlemen, this is too high-handed.  Do you reckon I’ll let you run down those four innocent creatures with hounds?  I swear you shan’t do it, sirs.”

“See here,” said the one still with me, “come on.  We’ll show you the very spots where those innocents left the road one by one, and if you don’t say they’ve used every trick known to a nigger to kill their trail, we’ll just quit and go home.  Does that suit you?”

“Not by a long chalk!” I retorted as I moved with him up the pike.  “Those poor simpletons—­alone in a strange land, maybe without a pass, at any moment liable to meet a patrol—­how easy for them to make the fatal mistake of leaving the road and hiding their tracks!”

“All right, come ahead, you’ll see fair play.”

We passed the scene of the breakdown and then the house to which the coach had been drawn.  I saw the coach in a stable door.  By and by a turn in the pike revealed the other clerk and a tall, slim horseman just dismounting among four lop-eared, black-and-brown dogs coupled two and two by light steel breast-yokes.  With a heavy whip and without a frown this man gave one of them a quick cut over the face as the brute ventured to lift a voice as hollow and melodious as a bell.

“He’s a puppy I’m breaking in,” said the man.  “Now here, you see”—­he pointed to the middle of the road—­“is where you, sir, met up with the madam and her niggers, and given her yo’ hoss and taken her span.  Here’s the tracks o’ the span, you takin’ ’em back; you can see they’re the same as these comin’ this way.  T’other critter’s tracks I don’t make out, but no matter, here’s the niggers’ along here—­and here, see? and here—­here—­there.”  We rode for ten minutes or so.  Then halting again: 

“Look yonder in that lock o’ fence.  There’s where one went over into the brush.”

Beyond the high worm fence grew a stubborn tangle of briers, vines, and cane.  “Mind you,” I began to call after the nigger-chaser, but one of my companions spoke for me: 

“Mr. Hardy, we got to be dead sure they’re runaways before we put the dogs on.”

“No, we ain’t,” Hardy called through the back of his head.  “Dandy and Charmer’ll tell us if they’re not, before we’ve gone three hundred yards, and I can call ’em off so quick it’ll turn ’em a somerset.”  He dismounted, and, while unyoking the two older hounds, spoke softly a few words of gusto that put them into a dumb ecstasy.  One of the boys pressed his horse up to mine.