Page:Redcoat (1927).djvu/207

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pursuers or get by the men in the roadway and thus escape to his mountain. Once again he tried the highway, but the horsemen were there waiting for him, shouting and waving their caps, so he turned back to the north. Redcoat had always made it a part of his policy to know every rod of the country over which he hunted and where he led the hounds on these wild chases, so there was not a square rod of the Holcome farm that he did not know nearly as well as did Bud Holcome himself. A quarter of a mile north of the Holcome farm buildings was an old stone wall, a boundary fence that divided the Holcome farm from that of their nearest neighbor. When Redcoat reached the southern end of this wall his pursuers were barely a furlong away. His plight was getting desperate. Something must be done, and his sharp fox wits never stood him in better stead than they did on this memorable chase, for when the hounds came up to the stone wall they followed it for about thirty rods northward and then at a barway, an artificial break in the stone wall,