“He holds that Professor in deadly fear, and is more afraid of offending him than of vexing us. I can understand how such a crank with his wild, magnetic eyes can gain a hypnotic power over the simple fellow, but he ought to throw off the spell when he knows the man is a long distance away and we are near him.”
The route was so rough that Dick, who did not hurry, spent a long time in traversing it. He had gone the greater part of the way when a threshing in the underwood in advance brought him to an abrupt halt. He sprang behind the nearest tree and held his Winchester ready for use. He knew from the peculiar racket that an animal of some kind was approaching. As in the case of his brother, the gentle breeze was in his favor and the brute as yet was unaware of his presence.
“Well, I’ll be hanged!”
The very buck about which he had written home in glowing terms, and which he had seen several times in the neighborhood, was stalking through the brush like a forest monarch, his course such that unless alarmed, he must pass within a few paces of the young hunter.
The temptation to bag the prize was almost resistless. Dick had only to reach out his hand, as may be said, to seize the treasure. With the deadly weapon in his grasp and many shots at command, he could drop the gigantic animal in his tracks. It would be easy to remove the magnificent antlers, hide them among the rocks, and return for them weeks later when the season was open. After that he would fill his classmates with rank unbearable jealousy.
It was natural perhaps that Dick Hamilton should fall back upon the specious reasoning which comes to him who meditates breaking the law. How can it be right to shoot an elk or deer on the sixteenth of September, and wrong to do so on the fifteenth? Can the simple wording of a statute decide the question? Of course not. Besides, none of the game protectors were near and at the most Dick would be compelled only to pay a big fine, for which the accommodating “governor” would readily stand.
It has been said that, as to the question of free moral agency, a logician may argue so subtly as to convince his hearers that such a thing is impossible. And yet there always remains one person whom he cannot convince, and that person is himself. So it came about that Dick’s conscience would not down. He could not hush the still small voice.
Twenty yards away the buck was warned by his strange instinct that danger was in the air. He came to a halt, his big brown body only partially disclosed among the foliage, but when he reared his head, that and the glorious crown of curving prongs rose in relief against the emerald background. It was an ideal target and Dick Hamilton in a tremor brought his rifle to his shoulder. Slight as was the movement and imperceptible the noise, the buck wheeled and fled on the instant. Just then the youth should have pressed the trigger, but instead he lowered his weapon.
“I can’t do it!” he said, compressing his lips; “it isn’t out of mercy for you, my fine fellow, but because the law says ‘No!’”
It will be understood that the buck had finished with the younger brother, who escaped his knife-like hoofs through accident. The query naturally occurs as to why the creature should run toward one youth and away from the other. Ask any veteran or amateur hunter, and he will answer that it was because in one case the biped had a deadly weapon and in the other he had not. It sounds absurd, but you can never make a ranger of the woods believe that the game animals do not govern their actions in accordance with the open and close seasons.