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