“Chetwood!” shrieked Laura again, knowing more about the inhabitants of the woods than 139 her chum. “Chetwood! Stop it! Come back! That’s a polecat!”
“What?” gasped all the girls, and then Bobby began to shriek with laughter. It was too, too funny—with Jess begging the boys not to let the Barnacle hurt “kitty.”
It was impossible, however, to call the dog off the trail. That camp scavenger, the American skunk, is the mildest mannered little creature in the world—providing he is left strictly alone. Being timid and otherwise defenseless, God has given him a scent-sack which––
“Nobody can tell me that the skunk only brought a cent into the Ark,” declared the exhausted Bobby. “That fellow has a dollar’s worth himself!”
“Why—why did the Creator ever make such a horrid beast?” demanded Lil.
“You ask that and wear those furs of yours in the winter?” said Nellie, laughing. “The pretty little fellow that the Barnacle has so unwisely chased away from our vicinity is becoming very valuable to the furriers. There are people who raise the creatures for the market––”
“Excuse me!” gasped Bobby. “I’d want a chronic cold in the head, if I had to work on a skunk farm.”
As Barnacle and his quarry went farther from 140 the camp the odor that had risen drifted away, too; but for two days thereafter the girls could easily tell in which part of the island Barnacle was running game, by the way in which the odor came “down wind” to them.
Liz fed him at the edge of the wood; the girls chased him from the vicinity of the tents whenever he appeared.
The Barnacle did not mind much; for he had struck a dog-hunter’s paradise. He was a fiend after small game and there had not been a dog on Acorn Island for some years, in all probability.