Before daybreak he was abroad; gun in hand. Going from one sleeping neighbour’s to another’s, he loosed and took along with him no fewer than five chained foxhounds.
The dogs all knew him well enough to let him handle them. There was not one of the five that would not have followed anybody who carried a gun. So his one-man hunt was organised. He and the five hounds made for the ridge where, two days before, Whitefoot had been caught.
From reading nature-faked tales of rattlesnakes, Zeb argued that the slain fox’s mate would be haunting the scene of her spouse’s death. It was a pretty theory; as pretty as it was asinine. Like many another wholly idiotic premise it led to large results—of a sort.
As Zeb was traversing a wooded gully on the way to the ridge, the foremost hound gave tongue. The pack had come to the spot where Pitchdark had been crippled. From that point a blind mongrel puppy could have followed the pungent trail.
Oblivious of Harlow, for whom they had all a dog’s amusedly tolerant contempt for an inefficient human leader, the quintet swept away on the track. Zeb made shift to follow as best he could. Not being a woodsman, his progress was slow.
Up the gully they roared and out into the hillside birch woods beyond and thence to the patch of broken ground over which Ruff had carried Pitchdark so tenderly. The scent was rankly strong now. It was breast-high. No longer was there need to work with nostrils to earth. The dragging hindfeet of the vixen were easier to follow than an aniseseed lure.
Out into the cleared space they swung—the clearing with the ten-foot cliff behind it. There, not fifty yards in front of them, clearly visible between the braced legs of a shimmering gold-and-white collie on guard at the niche opening, crouched their prey.
Deliriously they rushed to the kill.
The kill was there. But so was the killer.
Perhaps there are two foxhounds on earth which together can down a normal collie. Assuredly there is no one foxhound that can hope to achieve the deed. Most assuredly such a hound was not the half-breed black-and-yellow leader of that impromptu pack.