For a moment the Baron hesitated. The idea of destroying so beautiful an animal seemed to be abhorrent to his nature, which, warrior-like as he is, has something of the tenderness of a woman about it. A second glance at the superb creature, however, changed all that, for the Baron then saw that to shoot to kill was necessary, for the beast was about to force a fight in which the hunter himself would be put upon the defensive.
“I won’t shoot you through the head, my beauty,” he said, softly, “nor will I puncture your beautiful coat with this load of mine, but I’ll kill you in a new way.”
With this he pulled the trigger. The powder exploded, the string binding the long black spring into a coil broke, and immediately the strip of steel shot forth into the air, made directly toward the neck of the rushing moose, and coiling its whole sinuous length tightly about the doomed creature’s throat strangled him to death.
As the Twins’ father said, a feat of that kind entitled the Baron to a high place in fiction at least, if not in history itself. The Twins were very much wrought up over the incident, particularly, when one too-smart small imp who was spending the summer at the same hotel where they were said that he didn’t believe it,—but he was an imp who had never seen a cheap watch, so how should he know anything about what could be done with a spring that cannot be wound up by a great strong man in less than ten minutes?
As for the Baron he was very modest about the achievement, for when he first appeared at the Twins’ home after their return he had actually forgotten all about it, and, in fact, could not recall the incident at all, until Diavolo brought him his own letter, when, of course, the whole matter came back to him.
“It wasn’t so very wonderful, anyhow,” said the Baron. “I should not think, for instance, of bragging about any such thing as that. It was a simple affair all through.”
“And what did you do with the moose’s antlers?” asked Angelica. “I hope you brought ’em home with you, because I’d like to see ’em.”
“I wanted to,” said the Baron, stroking the Twins’ soft brown locks affectionately. “I wanted to bring them home for your father to use as a hat rack, dear, but they were too large. When I had removed them from the dead animal, I found them so large that I could not get them out of the forest, they got so tangled up in the trees. I should have had to clear a path twenty feet wide and seven miles long to get them even as far as my friend’s hut, and after that they would have had to be carried thirty miles through the woods to the express office.”
“I guess it’s just as well after all,” said Diavolo. “If they were as big as all that, Papa would have had to build a new house to get ’em into.”
“Exactly,” said the Baron. “Exactly. That same idea occurred to me, and for that reason I concluded not to go to the trouble of cutting away those miles of trees. The antlers would have made a very expensive present for your father to receive in these hard times.”