All athrill with excitement, Mrs. Gammit hurried through her morning’s chores, and allowed herself no 240 breakfast except half a dozen violent cups of tea “with sweetenin’.” Then, satisfied that the weasel in the rain-barrel was by this time securely and permanently dead, she fished it out, and reset the trap in its place under the barn. The other trap she discovered in the swill-barrel, after a long search. Relieved to find it unbroken, she cleaned it carefully and put it away to be returned, in due time, to its owner. She would not set it again––and, indeed, she would have liked to smash it to bits, as a sacrifice to the memory of poor Red Top-knot.
“I hain’t got no manner o’ use fer a porkypine trap what’ll go out o’ its way to ketch hens,” she grumbled.
The silent summer forenoon, after this, wore away without event. Mrs. Gammit, working in her garden behind the house, with the hot, sweet scent of the flowering buckwheat-field in her nostrils and the drowsy hum of bees in her ears, would throw down her hoe about once in every half-hour and run into the barn to look hopefully at the traps. But nothing came to disturb them. Neither did anything come to disturb the hens, who attended so well to business that at noon Mrs. Gammit had seven fresh eggs to carry in. When night came, and neither weasels nor porcupines had given any further sign of their existence, Mrs. Gammit was puzzled. She was one of those impetuous women who expect everything to happen all at once. When milking 241 was over, and her solitary, congenial supper, she sat down on the kitchen doorstep and considered the situation very carefully.
What she had set herself out to do, after the interview with Joe Barron, was to catch a porcupine in one of his traps, and thus, according to her peculiar method of reasoning, convince the confident woodsman that porcupines did eat eggs! As for the episode of the weasel, she resolved that she would not say anything to him about it, lest he should twist it into a confirmation of his own views. As for those seven eggs, so happily spared to her, she argued that the capture of the weasel, with all its attendant excitement, had served as a warning to the porcupines and put them on their guard. Well, she would give them something else to think about. She was now all impatience, and felt unwilling to await the developments of the morrow, which, after all, might refuse to develop! With a sudden resolution she arose, fetched the gnawed and battered remains of the herring-tub from their concealment behind the kitchen door, and propped them up against the side of the house, directly beneath her bedroom window.
At first her purpose in this was not quite clear to herself. But the memory of her triumph of the previous night was tingling in her veins, and she only knew she wanted to lure the porcupines back, that she might do something to them. And first, 242 being a woman, that something occurred to her in connexion with hot water. How conclusive it would be to wait till the porcupines were absorbed in their consumption of the herring-tub, and then pour scalding water down upon them. After all, it was more important that she should vanquish her enemies than prove to a mere man that they really were her enemies. What did she care, anyway, what that Joe Barron thought? Then, once more, a doubt assailed her. What if he were right? Not that she would admit it, for one moment. But just supposing! Was she going to pour hot water on those porcupines, and scald all the bristles off their backs, if they really didn’t come after her eggs? Mrs. Gammit was essentially just and kind-hearted, and she came to the conclusion that the scheme might be too cruel.
“Ef it be you uns as takes the aigs,” she murmured thoughtfully, “a kittle o’ bilin’ water to yer backs ain’t none too bad fer ye! But ef it be only my old herrin’-tub ye’re after, then bilin’ water’s too ha’sh!”
In the end, the weapon she decided upon was the big tin pepper-pot, well loaded.
Through the twilight, while the yard was all in shadow, Mrs. Gammit sat patient and motionless beside her open window. The moon rose, seeming to climb with effort out of the tangle of far-off treetops. The faint, rhythmic breathing of the wilderness, 243 which, to the sensitive ear, never ceases even in the most profound calm, took on the night change, the whisper of mystery, the furtive suggestion of menace which the daylight lacks. Sitting there in ambush, Mrs. Gammit felt it all, and her eager face grew still and pale and solemn like a statue’s. The moonlight crept down the roofs of the barn and shed and house, then down the walls, till only the ground was in shadow. And at last, through this lower stratum of obscurity, Mrs. Gammit saw two squat, sturdy shapes approaching leisurely from behind the barn.
She held her breath. Yes, it was undoubtedly the porcupines. Undaunted by the memory of their previous discomfiture, they came straight across the yard, and up to the house, and fell at once to their feasting on the herring-tub. The noise of their enthusiastic gnawing echoed strangely across the attentive air.
Very gently, with almost imperceptible motion, Mrs. Gammit slid her right hand, armed with the pepper-pot, over the edge of the window-sill. The porcupines, enraptured with the flavour of the herring-tub, never looked up. Mrs. Gammit was just about to turn the pepper-pot over, when she saw a third dim shape approaching, and stayed her hand. It was bigger than a porcupine. She kept very still, breathing noiselessly through parted lips. Then the moonlight reached the ground, the shadows 244 vanished, and she saw a big wildcat stealing up to find out what the porcupines were eating.