'Oh! It's an urchin!' cried Hazel delightedly.
Reddin began bruising and pulling at its spines with his gloved hands.
'Dunna!' cried Hazel.
Reddin pulled and wrenched until at last the hedgehog screamed—a thin, piercing wail, most ghastly and pitiful and old, ancient as the cry of the death's-head moth, that faint ghostly shriek as of a tortured witch. Centuries of pain were in it, the age-long terror of weakness bound and helpless beneath the knife, and that something vindictive and terrifying that looks up at the hunter from the eyes of trapped animals and sends the cuckoo fleeing in panic before the onset of little birds. Hazel knew the sound well. It was the watchword of the little children of despair, the password of the freemasonry to which she belonged.
Before the cry had ceased to horrify the quiet room, she had flung herself at Reddin, a pattern of womanly obedience no longer, but a desperate creature fighting in that most intoxicating of all crusades, the succouring of weakness.
On Reddin's head, a moment ago so smooth, on his face, a moment ago so bland, rained the blows of Hazel's hard little fists. Her blows were by no means so negligible as most women's, for her hands were muscular and strong from digging and climbing, and in her heart was the root of pity which nerves the most trembling hands to do mighty deeds.
'What the devil!' spluttered Reddin. 'Here, stop it, you little vixen!'
He caught one of her hands, but the other was too quick for him.
'Give over tormenting of it, then!'
The hedgehog rolled on the floor, and the foxhound came and sniffed it.
Reddin had her other hand now.