Away flashed Whitefoot, his lacerated forepaw marring his speed not at all. Jeffreys Holt was an old enough huntsman to act on sheer instinct. Through no conscious volition of his own he whipped to his shoulder the gun that had hung idle in his grasp while he watched Rance open the trap. Taking snap aim, he pulled trigger.
Whitefoot did not stop at once his panic flight. He continued it for two yards longer; rolling over and over like a mechanical toy, before thumping against the rock-side, stone dead.
“There’s another good stunt we done, in getting that ol’ feller,” remarked Holt, ten minutes later, as he and Venner made their way downhill with their prize. “I’ll bet my share of his pelt he’s the fox that’s been working the hencoops all along the valley, this winter. He’s a whooping big cuss. And no common-size fox could ’a busted in the coop doors like he did at a couple of places. Now that we got the fox, I s’pose it’s up to us to get the wolf.”
“What wolf?” mumbled Venner, still sucking his bitten thumb.
“Why, the one the Grange reward is out for, of course,” answered Holt in surprise at such ignorance. “First wolf that’s been in this section in thutty years or more. He’s been at sheepfolds, all over. At hencoops, too. First-off folks thought maybe it was a stray cur. But no dog c’d do the smart wolf-stunts that feller’s done. Pizen-shy and trap-wise. It’s a wolf, all right, all right.”
The store was jammed, for two hours or more, that evening, by folk who came to stare at the wonder-fox. Next day and the next the whole community was out in quest of the priceless vixen.
All the second day, after a night of successful forage, Ruff and Pitchdark denned amid the rocks of their peak. At nightfall they fared forth again, as usual. But as they were padding contentedly back to their safe eyrie at grey dawn, Pitchdark failed to note a deadfall which had been placed in a hillside gully three months earlier.
Going back and forth—always of course by different routes—during the past three days, she and Ruff had scented and avoided a score of shrewdly-laid traps scattered here and there. But this clumsy deadfall had been in place since November, when a farm lad had set it and then forgotten all about it. Rains and snow and winds had rubbed it clean of any vestige of man-scent. It seemed nothing but a fallen log propped against a tree-trunk.
By way of a short cut, Pitchdark ran under it.
There was a thump, followed at once by an astounded yell. The vixen, flattened out, lay whimpering under the tumbled log.