Walking out upon the snow a little way, he halted, at a distance of perhaps thirty paces from the poachers. At the sound of his snowshoes the two men looked up scowling and apprehensive; and the kneeling one sprang to his feet. They wanted no witnesses of their illegal work.
“Good morning,” said the Boy politely.
At the sound of his soft young voice, the sight of his slender figure and youthful face, their apprehensions vanished; but not their anger at being discovered.
“Mornin’!” growled one, in a surly voice; while the other never opened his mouth. Then they looked at each other with meaning question in their eyes. How were they going to keep this unwelcome visitor from betraying them?
“I’m going to ask you,” said the Boy sweetly, “to be so kind as to stop trapping on this pond. 117 Of course you didn’t know it, but this is my pond, and there is no trapping allowed on it. It is reserved, you know; and I don’t want a single one of my beavers killed.”
The man with the axe scowled fiercely and said nothing. But the other, the one who had been driving the stakes, laughed in harsh derision.
“You don’t, hey, sonny?” he answered. “Well, you just wait an’ watch us. We’ll show ye whose beaver they be!” And turning his back in scorn of his interlocutor’s youth, he knelt down again to drive another stake. The man who had not spoken, however, stood leaning on his axe, eying the Boy with an ugly expression of menace.
The Boy’s usually quiet blood was now pounding and tingling with anger. His alert eyes had measured the whole situation, and noted that the men had no firearms but their rifles, which were leaning against a tree on the shore fully fifty yards behind them.
“Stop!” he cried, with so confident a tone of authority that the kneeling man looked up, though with a sneer on his face. “Unless you go away from this pond at once, I’ll get the men from the camp, and they’ll make you go. They’ll not be so 118 polite as I am. You’re just poachers, anyway. And the boys will like as not just run you clean out of the country. Will you do as I ask you, or shall I go and get them?”
The man with the axe spat out some French curse which the Boy didn’t understand very clearly. But the man at the stakes jumped up again with a dangerous grin.