“Not hurt?” Jim stared. “How’d you catch him?”
“With my hands,” Johnny chuckled. Then, seeing that this would not stand as a bare statement, he explained briefly their method of capture.
“Say-ee,” Jim exclaimed, dropping into a chair, “you’re regular natives. And that’s a fine specimen. Time was when you’d get two thousand dollars for him.”
“Yes, we—”
“But not now,” Jim broke in. “Never again. Know much about foxes?”
“No, we—”
“Then, I’ll tell you.” Jim settled back in his chair. “I worked on a silver fox farm for three years. ‘Million Dollar Farm,’ they called it. And that’s what it was. Raised only silver foxes.
“But you don’t get that way all at once,” he laughed. “Not by a great deal. Take that fellow you got there. Suppose you find him a mate and decide to start raising silver foxes. Pretty soon you’d have a lovely lot of cute little fox cubs. But would they be silver foxes? Not one. That’s almost certain.”
“Not one?” Lawrence sat up.
“That’s it,” Jim agreed. “You’d get two or three little red foxes and, with great luck, a cross fox, that’s all.”