A Gentleman
It was the “yamf” of a fox again. The sun was high now. The brown byroad
stretched away like a ribbon between the fringing woods that rose on
either side of it, screening the mountain’s grandeur, shadowing the path
of the gliding automobile.
“Now where is he—the waif beastie?” said Andrew, peering ahead into the
sunlight from his chauffeur’s seat, as, once more, that “yamf” rose,
wild and desperate, between a cackle and bark of pain—heard above the
purr of the smooth machine.
“It sounds—sounds as if he were near, quite near, oh! just around the
bend ahead,” gasped Pemrose, sitting up, a statue, in the tonneau,
where, side by side with Una—a rather pale and preoccupied “Jack”—she
was fairly cushioned with glee over being off at last; off for a six
weeks’ season of grace and growing among the Green Mountains, lying over
the line in Vermont.
Andrew had vacation freedom in his veins, too. His employer had gone
abroad. For several weeks he would be at nobody’s beck but his wife’s.
Transformed into a boy again, by visions of fishing with a “canny” rod
in mountain brooks, he had been singing softly to himself, at intervals,
and much to the girls’ delight:
“Said the trout to the fluke,
Where is your new crook?”
For the last speeding quarter of a mile this had given way to a pleasing
dirge of:
“The crow kilt the pussy, O!
The crow kilt the pussy, O!
The muckle cat sat down and grat
On the back of Johnny Hoosie, O!”
The last “O” was long-drawn. Across it came the ill-dashed “yamf” of a
fox.
“Something wrong with his crying pipes. That’s no barkin’ an’ fleeing
sound,” said Andrew, flashing a glance over his shoulder at the girls
behind. “Zooks! What a mad yammer he’s makin’ the morn!”
A sad yammer it was, with a note in it of supplication that in turn
became a jabber, as of cackling laughter.
“Dear sakes! he’s cacklin’ like a hen—a hen, at a hen-wile.” The
chauffeur leaned forward over his steering wheel. “Ah! there he is—the
puir beastie. Dog out!” proclaimed the voice which had said the same of
the falling aviator. “Ha! _Trapped_ he is! Trapped, by that worming
snake-fence! Trapped—an’ by the open roadside!”
Trapped! The girls shrank together, shuddering—young shoulder to
shoulder.
“Deil tak’ it now! if this isn’t a sight to comb ’em against the
hair—make the whole day seem ill-hued,” ground out Andrew. “Taken in a
skunk trap, the bit beastie! This is no season for trappin’ foxes. Taken
in a trap that some farmer has set for a skunk that’s been bothering his
chickens! Weary fa’ the loon that set it here by the roadside!”
He shot another glance over his shoulder, the fatherly chauffeur, at the
two lassies in his charge. Una had covered her ears with her hands.
Pemrose was sitting tragically upright. Her face was pale. In her blue
eyes was the glint half-baffled, but not routed, which lit her father’s
when, driven to the last ditch of inventive ingenuity, he fought Nature
for some discovery.
“Noo, what had I better do?” panted the chauffeur to himself. “Knock the
puir thing on the head here now, afore the lassies? To drive on and
leave him to die by slow inches in that ill-teethed trap—that’s na
possible.... Ods! but he looks hangit-like—shamed—shamed o’ being
caught—like—this.”
There was moisture in Andrew’s eye now. Automatically, almost—and
looking round for a club—he had slowed down.
And from the ditch at the roadside, the wild mountain byroad, the red
fox eyed him, groveling in his last ditch.
“All his tricks an’ snecks no use to him now—an’ that’s what he seems to
feel, by fegs!”
The mist in the chauffeur’s pitying eye grew more blinding, putting out
for him the flame in the fox’s, as the poor maddened waif-beastie
dragged the steel trap shamefacedly to and fro by the three-rail fence,
curving snake-fence, that bounded the byroad.
Suddenly, thrown into a new panic, new frenzy, by the sight of the
halting car—such a juggernaut to his dimming eyes—he turned to that
fence for the hundredth time and tried to climb it, dragging the
skunk-trap, with him, but was pulled back by the six-foot chain ending
in the indomitable clog and bolt that anchored the trap to earth.
“Oo-ooo! Ah-ah-ah-kak!” The last note of earth’s agony was in that
gibbering howl which told of a hind-leg almost torn from its socket, as
the wild thing fell into the ditch again and helplessly rolled there,
biting at his slim, white-stockinged, blood-wet leg—at the trap, at the
humbling dust all lashed to lather by his fine red brush and the foam of
his dripping mouth.
“Oh! I c-can’t stand it. I can’t stand it. Do something! Do-o
something.” Una was standing upright in the car, pale and trembling in
the silky, rose-lined, fur coat which Andrew’s wife had tossed into the
automobile at the last moment, with a pleading: “Put it on, my lamb, the
morn’s chilly an’ ye look ‘blenchit’,” when she had come in, shivering,
from the garden—from experimenting with the radio ring.
Simultaneously with her cry the red fox, in his new terra-cotta
coat—poor little skinny ten-pound victim—ceased beating the earth with
his bushy tail, that had a creamy powder puff at the tip, sat up on his
haunches, ruff bristling, mouth stretching in a tortured grin over the
bared, white fangs, chest heavily panting—and looked at them.
“Gosh! he’s all in. He—he looks as if he was making sifflication to us.”
The cry was wrenched from Andrew; his answer to that dumb supplication
was to throw the throttle open and shoot the big car forward.
But, like a flash, Pemrose was upon him from behind.
“Oh! he _is_ begging us. He is begging us,” she cried, clutching
throttle and wheel herself, so that the big car rocked in groaning
indecision. “We—we just can’t go on and leave him—leave him to
die—slowly.”
“Who’s about doin’ it?” growled Andrew. “Sit down, lassie. Don’t tak’
the fling-strings or ye’ll hae us in the ditch. I’m just for driving on
to the top o’ yon hill, there; then I’ll come back an’ free him—I’ll
come back an’ win’-free him.”
The girl half loosed her hold, but a glance at the chauffeur’s leaking
eye-corners and she was upon him fiercely again.
“You mean—you mean you’ll come back and kill him—knock him on the head
with an iron ‘jack’ or a club. Oh! I won’t have it. I won’t have it,”
she raved. “’Tisn’t the time for killing foxes, any way. We m-must, we
can, we _may_ free him now, somehow—somehow.”
She was jabbering like the wild thing, herself, all the while that
something was struggling to the fore in her—hereditary
resourcefulness—the inventor’s ingenuity.
Revelation came, as it always does, in a staggering flash.
She whipped round upon her girl companion, so white-cheeked and
whimpering.
“Your c-coat, Una!” She seized upon the fine beaver, which had,
presumably, been stripped from some trapped animal, too—but that did not
at the moment matter. “Your fur coat! We could throw it over him, hold
him down, while—while Andrew springs the trap.”
“Do ye think I’m a madded fool?” came angrily from the chauffeur.
“Oh! we don’t. We know you’re a brick. We know you’ll help us. Oh! don’t
you—don’t you see how this would spoil all the trip?”
She shivered—and in the paling forgetmenot blue of the eyes near his own
Andrew saw the blight that would fall over the hiking start, at least,
and cursed his luck that they should meet up with the “black
cow”—misfortune—this early in the day.
The fox still sat, making “sifflication.”
“But—but you must help, too, Una.” Pem was plucking the smart little
costly coat from her friend’s shoulders, as she spoke. “You—you’ll have
to help hold him down.”
“Oh! I daren’t. He might—bite.” Great, glassy tears rolled over Una’s
eyelids, down her cheeks.
Did—did one of those passive tears, as it fell upon her bare hand,
suddenly become a detector, a crystal detector, through which she picked
up something from the air, by eye not by ear now, the memory, the ghost
of a faint claim, it seemed, wafted from somewhere, made upon
somebody—through a radio ring.
“Yes, I-I’ll help! Oh-h! it must be awful to be trapped.” She stumbled
from the car.
“Warry—warry now!” Andrew was springing, at the same time, from his
seat, drawing on thick gloves. “Hoot! I suppose a mon has got to make
the ill-best of a bad job—but he’ll be an ill one to tackle, all tooth
an’ claw.”
Already Pemrose, with the glossy huddle of soft beaver in her arms, was
stealing towards the tortured thing that groveled and cackled again upon
three legs—the fourth stuck out straight.
“Now, Unie, _now_ quick—jump in—hold it down over him, tight,” she
gasped “Over his head!”
And while girlish pluck pinned the coat—and the stifled form under it—to
earth, Andrew’s quick hand found the spring of the steel trap, shaped
like a bear’s jaws, and pressed it.
A convulsion under the smothering coat! A scraping—tearing and ripping!
They jumped all three.
All four! The fox jumped, too.
He had a free try at the fence now. But he was weak. He fell back—licked
his leg passionately and tried again.
He was over. Looking neither to the right hand nor to the left, he was
limping between waving grasses across the strip of rank meadow that
separated the snake-fence from the woods.
“Fair gude day to ye!” grunted Andrew. “But ye might say: ‘Bethankit’!”
The wild thing reached the wood-line, brush waving.
Suddenly, before the trees swallowed him—and the undergrowth—he
half-halted, half-turned—shot a backward glance.
“He’s a gentleman,” cried Pemrose. “That did mean, ‘Thank you’!”
“He’s left me to mend a big tear in the lining of my coat,” said Una.
“But, oh! how awful to be trapped.”