“Get him—did you get him?” palpitated Spotty.
“I reckon I did,” answered the young Texan coolly, stooping to peer through the bushes and perceiving the bunch of brown feathers that lay so still some distance away.
But the rabbit was still coming, if the approaching staccato of the hound was to be accepted as positive evidence, and Rod, satisfied that the partridge would remain where it had dropped, again turned his attention to the business from which it had been temporarily distracted.
“By, jinks!” muttered Spotty. “I guess he can shoot, all right.”
Over in the woods beyond, the fleeing rabbit had stopped short at the crashing report of the gun, sitting straight up on its haunches for a fleeting moment, its whole body aquiver with terror. Only for a moment did it linger. The clamoring dog on its track was coming, filling the whole woods with a racket which plainly told that the scent was rapidly growing warm. Ahead silence had followed that double burst of terrible sound, but behind was the relentless pursuer, who was making the forest ring. The hunted thing seemed to know where the crossing of the stream could most easily be made, and beyond the stream, up the bank, were the thick firs and the deep, sheltering shadows.
On it came once more, with great bounds, long ears flattened back. Gray almost as the snow itself, it leaped forth into the little opening.
This time the butt of the gun in Rodney Grant’s hands was pressed to his shoulder for an instant. The left barrel belched smoke, and the rabbit, shot-riddled in the midst of a leap, was practically dead when it struck the snow.
“Get him—did you get him?” yelled Spotty once more.
“I sure did,” laughed Grant, breaking down the gun to eject the empty shells. Blowing through the barrels, he slipped in fresh cartridges, snapped the gun together, pushed through the bushes to pick up the partridge, and had almost reached the rabbit when Rouser came bellowing forth from the woods to stop in surprise and sniff around the furry, blood-stained body.
“Say, you’re a holy terror!” spluttered Davis, as he came crunching and crashing through the alders. “You can shoot some, can’t you?”