an 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.

"There's the place," he said. "Now watch the dogs find it."

As the pair sprang from Hardy's hands one began to nose the air, the
other the earth, to left, to right, and to cross each other's short,
swift circuits. With stony face while assuming a voice of wildest
eagerness he cried in searching whispers: "Niggeh thah, Dandy! Niggeh
thah, Charmer! Take him, my lady!"

Skimming the ground with hungry noses, the dogs answered each cry with
a single keen yap of preoccupied affirmation. Almost at once Charmer
came to the spot pointed out to me, reared her full length upon the
rails and let out a new note; long, musical, fretful, overjoyed. Hardy
mounted breast-high to the fence's top, wreathed two fingers in the
willing brute's collar, lifted her, and dropped her on the other side.
There she instantly resumed her search.

At the same time her yoke-mate's deep bay pealed like a trumpet, from a
few yards up the roadway. He had struck the broad, frank trail of the
other three negroes. The "puppy," still in leash, replied in a note
hardly less deep and mellow, but the whip of cool discipline cut him
off. From an ox-horn the master blew a short, sharp recall and at once
Dandy returned and began his work over, knowing now which runaway to
single out.

Hardy remained on the fence, watching his favorite, over in the brush.
By a stir of the bushes, now here, now there, we could see how busy she
was, and every now and then she sent us, as if begging our patience,
her eager promiss