“Whitefoot was worth an easy $600 as he stood,” grunted Rance Venner, miserably; as his flashlight’s ray explored the hole under the fence. “Nearer $700, in the coat he’s carrying this fall. And Pitchdark isn’t more’n a couple of hundred dollars behind him. Two of the best we had. A hundred per cent loss; just as we’re getting started.”
“Nope,” contradicted Ethan. “Not a hundred per cent loss. Only about fifty. The pelt of either one of ’em will bring $300, dressed. Any of a dozen dealers will pay us that for it.”
“If they was to pay us three million, we wouldn’t be any richer,” complained Rance. “We haven’t got the pelts to sell. You’re talking plumb foolish, Ethan.”
“We’ll have ’em both by noon to-morrow,” declared Ethan. “Those two foxes were born in a kennel. They don’t know anything else. They’re as tame as pet squirrels. We’ll start out gunning for ’em at sunrise. We’ll take Ruby along. She’ll scent ’em, double quick. Then all we’ll have to do is plant the shots where they won’t muss the pelt too much.”
“We’ll do better’n that,” supplemented Rance, his spirits rising at his brother’s tone of confidence. “We won’t shoot ’em. We’ll get out the traps, instead. They’re both tame and neither of ’em ever had to hustle for a meal. They’ll walk right into the traps, as quick as they get the sniff of cooked food. C’mon in and help me put the traps in shape. We ought to be setting ’em before sunrise. The two foxes will be scouting for breakfast by that time.”
The newly optimistic Rance was mistaken in all his forecasts. The two fugitives were not scouting for breakfast at sunrise. Hours earlier they twisted their way in through the narrow little opening of an unguarded chicken-house belonging to a farm six miles from the kennel. Thither they were drawn by the delicious odour of living prey.
There, like a million foxes since the birth of time, they slew without noise or turmoil. There they glutted themselves; carrying away each a heavy fowl for future feasting; bearing off their plunder in true vulpine fashion with the weight of the bird slung scientifically over the bearer’s withers.
Daybreak found them lying snugly asleep in a hollow windfall tree that was open at either end and which lay lengthwise of a nick in the hillside, with briars forming an effective hedge all about it.
Nor did the best casting efforts of Ruby, the partners’ foxhound, succeed in following their cleverly confused trail across a pool and two brooks. In the latter brook, they had waded for nearly a furlong before emerging on dry ground at the same side.
Thus set in a winter of bare sustenance for the runaways. They kept to no settled abiding place, but drifted across country; feasting at such few farmsteads as had penetrable hencoops; doing wondrous teamwork in the catching of rabbits and partridges; holing in under windfalls or in rock-clefts when blizzards made the going bad.