inches outside his yard.

Wriggling out of his tunnel, he shook himself daintily to rid his shimmering silver-flecked black coat of such dirt as clung to it. Then he glanced about him. From the nearby wire runs, twenty-three pairs of slitted topaz eyes flamed avidly at him. Twenty-three ebony bodies 4crouched moveless; the moon glinting bright on their silver stipples and snowy tailtips.

4

The eyes of his world were on the fugitive. The nerves of his world were taut and vibrant with thrill at his escapade. But they were sportsmen in their own way, these twenty-three prisoners who looked on while their more skilled fellow won his way to liberty. Not a whine, not so much as a deep-drawn breath gave token of the excitement that was theirs. No yelping bark brought the partners out to investigate. These captives could help their comrade only by silence. And they gave him silence to a suffocating degree.

With their round phosphorous eyes they followed his every move. But twenty-two of the twenty-three forbore so much as a single motion whose sound might attract human ears. Couchant, aquiver, turning their heads ever so little and in unison to watch his progress, the twenty-two watched Whitefoot make for the high wire boundary fence which encircled the four-acre kennel enclosure—the fence beyond whose southern meshes lay the frost-spangled meadow.

Beyond the meadow reared the naked black woods, sloping stiffly upward to the mountain whose sides they draped;—the mountain which was the outpost of the wilderness hinterland to southward of this farm-valley.

But, as Whitefoot set to work at the absurdly simple exploit of digging under this outer fence—a fence not extending underground and with no flat width of wire before it—the twenty-third prisoner could stand the emotional strain no longer. Young and with nerves less steady than her companions’, little Lady Pitchdark marred the perfect symphony of noiselessness.

She did not bark or even yelp. But she went into action.

5By natural genius she was a climber. Up the side of her ten-foot run-wire she whizzed; her long-clawed feet scarce seeming to seek toe-hold in the ladder of meshes they touched. Like a cat, she sped upward.

5

To provide against such an unlikely effort at jail-breaking, the four wire walls of the run sloped slightly inward. 

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