rangely, too--not for the
first time, since she had been one of his wives in the dim peaceful
past--with the guns thundering away so close, and their sons and their
daughters being slain almost all around them. They had, however,
little time to think about it, for they came, after about twenty yards,
to a gap spanned by barbed wire, and they stopped, the cock about a
foot behind the hen's tail, in cover scarcely enough to hide them.

But that was not all. Two men in fawn overcoats stood in the road by
the gap, looking through it at the shooting; and a boy with a bicycle
stood close to them, interested in the same thing.

It was the boy with the bicycle that did it; or, rather, it was the
unhappy hen-pheasant that made him. She, being _in extremis_, had made
some noise among the stiff dead leaves. It was not much of a noise,
but it caught the boy's young ear, and he bent forward to peer at the
hedge.

One of the men saw him, said something, to which the boy nodded, jumped
down into the ditch, and thrusting in a long arm, began to feel with a
purposeful hand. The hen-pheasant, whose nerves were already shattered
to little pieces, struggled to get out of reach, and in a second had
given the whole show away.

But I like to think of what our cunning old cock-pheasant did then. He
did nothing--absolutely nothing at all. Crouching as flat as an
overturned saucer, just, behind the hen-pheasant's tail, he remained
stiller than a bunch of dead leaves, and far more silent. And this,
mark you, when the hen-pheasant was pulled out, frantically fluttering
and helpless, and there and then had her neck wrung in front of his
very eyes. That, my masters, needed a nerve, after all that he had
gone through. What?

The two men, seeming to think that they had got enough for one quiet
walk, departed, not quickly, but without unnecessary delay. The man
who had been looking for the hen-pheasant, and had seen nothing of what
took place at the gap, gave it up, and went away over the grass to the
shooters. The shooting ended with one last double shot, at one last
old cock-pheasant driven reluctantly from the last hush of the covert;
the dogs were out, galloping all over the ground for the wounded and
the slain; the watchers in the road departed; the shooters gradually
merged into groups, and drew farther and farther away up the park; and
the boy, who was shy, mounted his bicycle and rode off into the sad
blue-gray of the gatherin