"Ef he hasn't finished dem taters and run away!"
She would have been proud of him if she could have seen how wonderfully fast he did run away, down the road he had seen Quib and the other hunters.
"Dey's into de lot!" he exclaimed, when he came to the bars. "Dar's Pete Corry's ole straw hat lyin' by de stone-heap. Mus' hab been somefin' won'erful, or he'd nebber forgot his hat."
That was an old woodchuck, of course, or he would not have been so large, and it may be he knew those boys as well as Quib did. If not, it was his own fault, for every one of them had chased him before, and so had Quib.
He knew every inch of that pasture-lot, and he knew the shortest way to the head of the deep ravine.
"Boys!" shouted Abe Selover, with all the breath he had. "Boys!
He's going for the glen! Now we've got him!"
The ravine was a rocky and wonderful place, and all the boys were perfectly familiar with it, and considered it the grandest play-house in the world, or, at least, in the vicinity of the village. If Quib once got the woodchuck penned up among those rocks, they could play hide-and-seek for him till they should find him.
Some city people that had a picnic there once had called it a "glen," and the name had stuck to it, mainly because it was shorter than any other the boys could think of; and, besides that, the schoolmaster of the district two years before (who didn't suit the trustees) had been named Glenn, and so the word must have been all right.
Some of the boys were near enough to see the woodchuck make for the two maples at the head of the ravine, and Bob Hicks tumbled over Andy Thompson while he was shouting:
"Catch him, Quib!"