slaty-gray infants of the red fox. A swelling rivulet of rain had been deflected from its downhill course by a wrinkle in the soil; and had poured swishingly down the opening of the woodchuck warren and thence down into the ill-constructed brood nest at its bottom.

For the safeguarding of newborn fox-babies, as of the babies of every race, dry warmth is all-essential. Chilled and soaked, despite their young mother’s frantic efforts to protect them, the five ill-nourished and perilously inbred cubs ceased to nurse and began to squeak right dolefully. Then, one by one they died. The last of them stiffened out, just before daybreak.

Rance and Ethan Venner would have cursed luridly at loss of so many hundred dollars in potential peltry. But the bereft little mother only cuddled her ice-cold babies the closer; crooning piteously to them. They were her first litter. She could not realise what had befallen them, nor why one and all of them had ceased to nurse.

Meantime, her mate was drifting like an unobtrusive black shadow through the rain toward the clutter of farm buildings at the base of the hill-pasture. His scent told him there was a dog somewhere in that welter of sheds and barns and houses. But his scent told him also that there were fowls aplenty. Preparing to match his speed and his wit against any dog’s, he crept close and closer, taking due advantage of every patch of cover; unchecked even by the somewhat more distant man-scent; and urged on by that ever stronger odour of live chickens.

13Presently he was skirting the chicken-yard. It and its coop were too fast-locked for him to hope to enter with less than a half-hour’s clever digging. He had not a half-hour. He had not a half-minute to spare.

13

Slinking from the coop, he rounded a tool-house. There he halted. For to his nostrils came again the smell of living food, though of a sort vaguely unpleasant to him. Hunger and the need to feed his brood formed too strong a combination for this faint distaste to combat.

He peered around the corner of the half-open door of the tool-house. From the interior arose the hated dog-smell, ten times stronger than before. But he knew by nose and by hearing that the dog was no longer in there.

He was correct in this, as in most of his surmises. Not five minutes earlier, the early-rising Dick Logan had opened the tool-house door and convoyed thence his pedigreed collie, Jean, to the kitchen for her breakfast.

 Prev. P 10/147 next