“All his tricks an’ snecks no use to him now—an’ that’s what he seems to feel, by fegs!”
The mist in the chauffeur’s pitying eye grew more blinding, putting out for him the flame in the fox’s, as the poor maddened waif-beastie dragged the steel trap shamefacedly to and fro by the three-rail fence, curving snake-fence, that bounded the byroad.
Suddenly, thrown into a new panic, new frenzy, by the sight of the halting car—such a juggernaut to his dimming eyes—he turned to that fence for the hundredth time and tried to climb it, dragging the skunk-trap, with him, but was pulled back by the six-foot chain ending in the indomitable clog and bolt that anchored the trap to earth.
“Oo-ooo! Ah-ah-ah-kak!” The last note of earth’s agony was in that gibbering howl which told of a hind-leg almost torn from its socket, as the wild thing fell into the ditch again and helplessly rolled there, biting at his slim, white-stockinged, blood-wet leg—at the trap, at the humbling dust all lashed to lather by his fine red brush and the foam of his dripping mouth.
“Oh! I c-can’t stand it. I can’t stand it. Do something! Do-o something.” Una was standing upright in the car, pale and trembling in the silky, rose-lined, fur coat which Andrew’s wife had tossed into the automobile at the last moment, with a pleading: “Put it on, my lamb, the morn’s chilly an’ ye look ‘blenchit’,” when she had come in, shivering, from the garden—from experimenting with the radio ring.
Simultaneously with her cry the red fox, in his new terra-cotta coat—poor little skinny ten-pound victim—ceased beating the earth with his bushy tail, that had a creamy powder puff at the tip, sat up on his haunches, ruff bristling, mouth stretching in a tortured grin over the bared, white fangs, chest heavily panting—and looked at them.
“Gosh! he’s all in. He—he looks as if he was making sifflication to us.”
The cry was wrenched from Andrew; his answer to that dumb supplication was to throw the throttle open and shoot the big car forward.
But, like a flash, Pemrose was upon him from behind.
“Oh! he is begging us. He is begging us,” she cried, clutching throttle and wheel herself, so that the big car rocked in groaning indecision. “We—we just can’t go on and leave him—leave him to die—slowly.”