He was a handsome fellow, was Frisky Fox, with his yellow-red coat shining sleek in the sunlight. And my! How his great plume of a tail fluffed out behind him! His tail was nearly as long as the rest of his body put together, and it fluffed out nearly as broadly. Mother Red Fox certainly had a son to be proud of!
Of a sudden a little breeze shifted around to where it brought the foxy one a faint scent. It told his keen black nose there was something down there besides the bush.
It wasn’t a mouse, either!
“No, sir, that’s no field mouse,” said Frisky’s nose, as the Red Fox Pup circled to windward of the tiny squeaking sounds.
“That’s the Boy at the Valley Farm! That’s what that is! Now I’ll just pretend not to see him at all till I get behind that rock, then I’ll race for the woods.”
For Frisky didn’t know that the thing the Boy was pointing at him was only a pair of field glasses. And it wouldn’t have made much difference even had he known. Frisky did not like to be watched. He therefore did exactly as he had planned, crossing the field with seeming lack of interest in anything save the purple and yellow of asters and golden-rod and the scarlet of woodbine, and the blue of the Indian summer sky, till he felt himself out of range.
At the instant of his discovery that it was one of those dangerous human creatures that sat there like a stump he had cocked his ears sharply and leaped fully two feet into the air in his surprise.
That was the only sign he made, however, of the extreme anxiety that set his heart to thumping, till he was just on the edge of the woods; then he suddenly looked back with one of his thin, husky barks, to know why the Boy should have tried to fool him.
But afterwards, from the shelter of the barberry vines that fringed the old stone wall, he peered and peeked and wondered about it all as long as the Boy remained.
