At this moment the hounds were put on the trail, and the party started off, Miss Letty, who looked very girlish in the white cloth shirt waist and white felt sailor hat that replaced the linen and straw of summer, rode with Pinkie Scott’s brother, who admired her exceedingly. “Follow me, and we will show them steel heels,” he said under his breath, cutting across the orchard, and Miss Letty, holding a firm rein and leaning slightly forward, followed.
Meanwhile Tommy and Waddles, whom, after much difficulty, he had coaxed to follow him, started from Robin Hood’s Inn to hunt on their own account, the way indicated by Mr. Hugh being very plain, and through the part of the land where the drag-hunt was not.
Tommy walked on in Silence.
At first Waddles moved about here and there, treeing squirrels, digging spasmodically for ground mice, who were travelling in the burrows of moles, while Tommy wandered down the bed of a dried-up brook, his gun held in a sportsmanlike grip, and his eyes searching the trees for the big owl he promised himself that he would shoot, and ask Baldy to stuff as full as life to grace the top of Miss Letty’s desk.
But it often happens, when one goes a-hunting, that the birds, beasts, and fishes have engagements elsewhere. A hawk soared over toward the river, and crows were quarrelling up in their roost in the cedars, but the only birds that came near were a downy woodpecker, a nuthatch, and a chickadee, and Anne’s brother would not think of even aiming at these.
Tommy walked on in silence, a state to which he was quite a stranger, until he began to feel that not to speak even to a dog gave one a queer, chilly feeling; then he noticed that he had wandered out of the beaten path, and he stopped to look about, and whistled for Waddles. He was not afraid, for he was quite accustomed to taking care of himself, but he was disappointed about the rabbit, and angry with Waddles because he had gone off without finding a trail. Then he spied a quantity of hickory nuts lying on the rocks where a squirrel had evidently collected them, and he began to crack them with a stone, and pick out the meats very deliberately, which showed that Tommy was tired.
Presently he heard a sound close behind that reminded him of the noise the mother screech-owl had made when she snapped her beak. Getting up cautiously he looked about. There, in deep shade, perched on the gnarled root of a hickory tree that overlapped the rock, was a great owl with a smooth, round head, blue-black eyes, and brown, barred feathers. The bird sat still without blinking, watching a small hole under the root. Tommy stood still, scarcely breathing, in his wonder at the bird, hoping that it would not see him and flap in his face as the screech-owl had in Anne’s.