“Oh, say,” I shot back, “now, that’s another thing. I’ve never been out of town in one of those things—they are not bred right, and besides I’ve got religious scruples on that subject. Cut it out, Horatius. I’ll have the little mare and buggy hooked up by the time you get here.” I heard him laugh derisively. “Nonsense! Why, man, I’m going way up on Bear Creek pike—fifteen miles—and we want to go flying, for it’s 9 o’clock now. But I’ll have you there in forty minutes. Now, the little mare would be two hours and then dead tired for a long drive back home. Say, no use talking—I’ll be there in ten minutes; have your pointer ready; I’ll bring my two setters;” and he rang off. “I guess I’m in it,” I said to myself, as I went off to put on my hunting clothes. But I remembered that the Bear Creek pike was not a very public thoroughfare, and no one that I knew would be likely to meet me. “If it gets out on me,” I said, “I’ll prove that I didn’t want to. Besides, this new hunting cap I’ve got would make Moses look like a Turk in Hades—nobody’ll ever know it.” The truth is, I wanted to go hunting—it was in my blood that morning, and these beautiful December days with a hazy glow on the blue hills and that stillness that comes like a dropping nut in a forest, and the sunshine spiked with the faintest crisp of a frost would put it into anybody’s blood—anybody who had it. And when the infection hits you there is only one antidote—a dog, gun, a tramp over the hills and—whirr! bang! bang! And to-day was ideal. I had felt it all morning—the cool, bracing air with that little frosty aroma of leaves curling to crispness under the first blight of things, and that other delightful odor of pungent woodland damp with frost-biting dew. And the hills blue and beautiful are alone worth going to meet, and the trees crimson in the hectic flush of the dying year. Jack, my pointer, was jumping all over me and turning dogsprings of delight. “Down, Jack! Heigh ho, old boy; that machine is against my religion, but I’d go hunting in a negro hearse to-day. Besides,” I said, with a twinge of conscience, “he’ll get us to the field in forty minutes, and the little mare is getting old and we’ve got a late start.” I sighed and felt better. I had fought so long and said so much for the horse, and now—now—it was inexorable; they were being driven to their fate—they had to go before the relentless wheel of progress. I was virtually admitting it, I, who had said I’d never— I shouldered my gun. Somehow it didn’t seem like the old, joyous hunt. At the front gate the automobile stood—a pretty thing, to be sure. Its owner was smiling, goggle-eyed and all aglow, his hand on the wheel, or whatever you call the steering end of it.