Hurrying down, I caught her, and was turning back to the barn, when I heard a slow, faint rustling among the bushes behind the hen-house. I listened! Something was moving cautiously through the dead leaves! Tiptoeing softly around, I surprised a large skunk making his way slowly toward the hen-yard fence.
I grabbed a stone and hurled it, jumping, as I let it drive, for another. The flying missile hit within an inch of the creature’s nose, hard upon a large flat rock over which he was crawling. The impact was stunning, and before the old rascal could get to his groggy feet, I had fallen upon him—literally—and done for him.
But I was very sorry. I hope that I shall never get so excited as to fall upon another skunk,—never!
I was picking myself up, when I caught a low cry from the direction of the house—half scream, half shout. It was a woman’s voice, the voice of my wife, I thought. Was something the matter?
“Hurry!” I heard. But how could I hurry? My breath was gone, and so were my spectacles, and other more important things besides, while all about me poured a choking blinding smother. I fought my way out.
“Oh, hurry!”
I was on the jump; I was already rounding the barn, when a series of terrified shrieks issued from the front of the house. An instant more and I had come. But none too soon, for there stood the dear girl, backed into a corner of the porch, her dainty robes drawn close about her, and a skunk, a wee baby of a skunk, climbing confidently up the steps toward her.
“Why are you so slow!” she gasped. “I’ve been yelling here for an hour!—Oh! do—don’t kill that little thing, but shoo it away, quick!”
She certainly had not been yelling an hour, nor anything like it. But there was no time for argument now, and as for shooing little skunks, I was past that. I don’t know exactly what I did say, though I am positive that it wasn’t “shoo.” I was clutching a great stone, that I had run with all the way from behind the hen-yard, and letting it fly, I knocked the little creature into a harmless bunch of fur.
The family went over to the bean supper and left me all alone on the farm. But I was calm now, with a strange, cold calmness born of extremity. Nothing more could happen to me; I was beyond further harm. So I took up the bodies of the two creatures, and carried them, together with some of my late clothing, over beyond the ridge for burial. Then I returned by way of my neighbor’s, where I borrowed two sticks of blasting-powder and a big cannon fire-cracker. I had watched my neighbor use these explosives on the stumps in a new piece of meadow. The next morning, with an axe, a crowbar, shovel, gun, blasting-powder, and the cannon-cracker, I started for the stump in the wood-lot. I wished the cannon-cracker had been a keg of powder. I could tamp a keg of powder so snugly into the hole of those skunks!