“Well, that buck’s horns an’ hoofs was considerable lighter in color than ordinary. With them exceptions, and a few hairs on the forehead and a tuft on the hind leg, that critter was perfectly white. Queer. Jest an albino, as I said,” M’Graw concluded between puffs.
Beside the chimney on a big nail driven into a log, hung a string of rusty keys, with one big shiny brass one by itself. Agnes said:
“I guess you have to lock everything up when you leave home, don’t you, Mr. M’Graw?”
“Me? Never lock a thing. We don’t have no tramps. And if I leave home I always leave a fire laid and everything so that a visitor can come right in and go to housekeeping. It’s a purty mean man that’ll lock up his cabin in the woods. No, ma’am. I never lock nothin’.”
“But those keys?” the Corner House girl suggested curiously.
“Oh! Them? Just spare keys I picked up. All but this,” and he reached for the brass key briskly. “This is the key to the Lodge padlock, I’m goin’ to take it up to that Mr. Howbridge of yours and tell him something about it. I’ll walk back with you.”
He slipped into his leather jacket and buckled up his leggings. Then banking the fire on the hearth, he said he was ready to go. He put the big brass key in his pocket, but as he had intimated, he left the cabin door unlocked.
Once outside, they saw that the sun was clouded over again. “That storm is surely a-coming,” Ike observed. “I shouldn’t wonder, when it does get here, if it turns out to be a humdinger. ‘Long threaten, long last,’ they say.”
When they arrived at the Lodge the old man took a look at the fox Neale had hung up. He examined the small hole under the ear where the bullet had gone into the animal’s head.
“Nice shot,” he muttered. “Dropped him without a struggle, I reckon. And you sure are right, boy,” he added to Neale. “It was a twenty-two. Nothin’ bigger. Humph! mighty funny, that.