The pain, severe enough for anything at all, was ten times as excruciating to a cat's complex nervous system. Frosty still refused to panic. He could not fight this thing, so he must outwit it. He looked at the water and shuddered, then he heard Luke coming back.
Dragging the trap with him, Frosty crawled into the sycamore. He crouched, and mounting fury served to counteract pain. Luke reached the knob. His light flashed once and went out. Frosty stayed quiet, hoping to escape detection by so doing.
But if Luke came near him, he would fight as hard and as viciously as he could.
Andy walked slowly back to his house because there was no need to hurry. Whatever he did from this point on—and he intended to do much—would be carried out in black night, and it still lacked a couple of hours until darkness. As he walked, Andy saw almost everything in a clear light.
He should have known, and he blamed himself for not knowing, that the mysterious predator could be none other than Luke Trull. He had been lulled into a false sense of security by Luke's failure to come raiding all autumn and all winter. But he should also have known that, when he came, Luke would strike at that time when muskrats were most valuable. He was nobody's fool, and naturally he would do his poaching at night.
All this was so unbelievably simple that anyone should have figured it out. Andy had not, but since he finally knew, the problem was far more complex than it appeared on the surface.
He might, he supposed, go to the State Police and say that he had seen Luke Trull wearing a muskrat-skin hat. The police would look at him, and each other, then they would consult their copy of the State Game Laws and point out that muskrat season was open to anyone who had a trapping license and it would be open for two weeks more. No doubt they would remember that he had had previous trouble with Luke, and even on the far-fetched possibility that they took him seriously, no State Trooper would stumble around anyone's swamp at night simply because the swamp's owner had seen someone wearing a muskrat-skin hat.
There was only one way. Turn time backwards for thirty years, and once again a Gates and a Trull would settle their differences in their own way. But Andy knew that he must stop short of killing. Murder, any way one considered it, was murder, and the law had no bearing on the fact that Andy did not want another's blood on his hands. But he looked forward with savage joy to fighting. He would find Luke, beat a confession out of him, and take him to the Police himself. There were a number of reliable witnesses who knew that Andy had bought the muskrats with which the swamp was stocked. If he found Luke poaching, nothing else should be necessary.
At the same time, Andy felt the need for caution.