It had changed very much during luncheon. The fair promise of the
morning had departed, the sky was overcast, and a wind, blowing in
strong gusts, was rising rapidly, driving before it occasional scurries
of snow.

"My word," said Lord Ragnall, who had joined me, "the Lake
covert--that's our great stand here, you know--will take some shooting
this afternoon. We ought to kill seven hundred pheasants in it with this
team, but I doubt if we shall get five. Now, Mr. Quatermain, I am going
to stand Sir Junius Fortescue and you back in the covert, where you
will have the best of it, as a lot of pheasants will never face the lake
against this wind. What is more, I am coming with you, if I may, as
six guns are enough for this beat, and I don't mean to shoot any more
to-day."

"I fear that you will be disappointed," I said nervously.

"Oh, no, I sha'n't," he answered. "I tell you frankly that if only you
could have a season's practice, in my opinion you would make the best
pheasant shot of the lot of us. At present you don't quite understand
the ways of the birds, that's all; also those guns are strange to you.
Have a glass of cherry brandy; it will steady your nerves."

I drank the cherry brandy, and presently off we went. The covert we
were going to shoot, into which we had been driving pheasants all the
morning, must have been nearly a mile long. At the top end it was broad,
narrowing at the bottom to a width of about two hundred yards. Here it
ran into a horse-shoe shaped piece of water that was about fifty yards
in breadth. Four of the guns were placed round the bow of this water,
but on its farther side, in such a position that the pheasants should