Suddenly a young chipmunk, with back and tail striped like a garter snake’s, ran out of the hole. One of the hooked claws made a grab, snap went the beak, the little animal was secured, and the owl, spreading its broad wings, flew into a hemlock, where it began to eat at its leisure. Then only did Tommy remember his gun, and about his promise to Miss Letty.
“Never mind,” he said to himself; “father says owls are usefuller than most things they eat, and that they oughtn’t to be killed, so I’m glad I let him go; but rabbits eat lots of our garden things every year. I must look for that bunny, because it’s here somewhere, for when Mr. Hugh says so, it always happens.”
Tommy found his way back to the path, and met Waddles hurrying along; he also had found poor hunting, and was now willing to follow. After walking some distance, and having several false alarms (for when on the watch a couple of beech leaves or a tuft of wild grass take fanciful shapes), Tommy actually saw a pair of long ears held erect, and a pair of bright eyes glistening around the corner of a rock just before him. His first fear was that Waddles should see the prize and chase it away before he had a chance to aim and cock his trigger, which was quite a feat, the spring was so strong. For once, Waddles neither scented nor suspected anything, but kept close to Tommy’s heels, nosing about in the moss.
One step more, the child raised his gun, shut his eyes, and fired, and then a reaction came, and he didn’t like to open them again, so sure he was of having killed the pretty creature. Finally he peeped a little, then stared, for there sat the rabbit as round-eyed and placid as before; it had not even moved!
Tommy’s impulse to fire again was stopped by the thought that it would be very mean to shoot such a tame animal, and that it must be some one’s pet, though it was not Pinkie Scott’s, for everybody in Dogtown knew her rabbits by heart, they had carried them home to her so many times, when they had strayed off gardening on their own hook.
Tommy meets the Rabbit.
Waddles sauntered slowly forward, saw the rabbit, and making a spring, knocked it over with one blow of his paw; but still it did not move. Then Tommy saw that it was a stuffed beast mounted on a little wooden platform, to which moss and dead leaves were glued. When he had recovered from his astonishment he was ready to cry with rage. “It was too mean of Mr. Hugh,” he muttered. “He promised—he promised, and then he didn’t do it.” Then the exact words of the promise came to him; it was that he was to “meet a rabbit face to face.” “I s’pose I have,” he continued; “only he didn’t say its insides would be stuffing instead of real.” But when he picked up his gun, which he had dropped, and looked it over, and felt the bag which sagged his pocket, he remembered that he had forgotten to put any shot in the gun. Then he walked along, leaving the poor stuffed rabbit resting on one ear, wondering which was the worst, to have shot at a real rabbit with no shot, or to have been fooled by a stuffed one, and at the moment that he made up his mind that the first would be the most aggravating, he turned into the low meadow that was divided from its neighbour by the old barbed wire fence, and from which the lane led to Robin Hood’s Inn.
A yelping of dogs sounded afar off in the rear, with straggling cries on both sides of him and in front. Off started Waddles, quickly disappearing in the bushes, and Tommy followed as fast as his legs could carry him, for he heard a voice and the trampling of hoofs, and if the run was over, it must be luncheon time.