"Harky!" Mun roared. "Men don't hit wimmen!"
"Why don't they?" Harky growled.
"You're being childish, Harold," Melinda said sweetly. "Duckfoot's
simply gone off somewhere. Perhaps he got tired and went home."
Harky tried to speak and succeeded only in choking. If it was insult to
assert that Duckfoot could not be half duck, it was heresy even to imply
that he left a hunt and went home because he was tired. Harky recovered
his breath.
"Duckfoot didn't go home!" he screamed.
"Really, Harold," Melinda said, "it isn't necessary to make so much
noise."
Harky was saved by the bell-like tones of a suddenly-tonguing hound.
"Queenie's got one," Raw Stanfield said.
"That's Glory tonguing," Melinda corrected. "She's pitched just a shade
higher than Queenie."
"Now, Miss," Raw stuffed his tobacco into a corner of his mouth, "I know
my own hound."
"There she is," Melinda said.
A second hound, almost exactly like the first but with subtle
differences that were apparent when both tongued at the same time, began
to sing. Raw Stanfield promptly swallowed his chew. Butt Johnson and Mun
were momentarily too shocked to move.
Harky gasped. There was witchery present that had nothing to do with
Duckfoot. Raw didn't know his own hound when he heard it, but Melinda
did. Then Harky put the entire affair in its proper perspective. What
else could you expect when you brought a girl on a coon hunt? Raw was
just so shook up that he might be pardoned for failing to recognize
Queenie even if he saw her.
"Le's git huntin'," Raw muttered.
[Illustration]
Guiding himself by the blended voices of Queenie and Glory rising into
the night air, and seeming to hover at treetop level for a moment before
they faded, Harky began to run. The cold air whipped his face. The night
whispered of all the marvels that have been since the beginning of time
and will be until the end. For a moment, he even forgot Melinda.
This, he thought, was what coon hunting really meant. Listening to the
hounds and trying to keep pace; knowing that somewhere far ahead, swift
and silent-running Thunder was also on the coon's trail; drawing mental
pictures of the coon and his scurry to be away; Thunder bursting upon
and surprising the coon, who'd be listening to the tonguing hounds; the
chorus as all hounds gathered at the tree. Harky laughed out loud.
Now he knew what a running deer knew, he told himself, and almost
instantly the swiftest deer seemed unbearably slow. He was the wind
itself, and he exulted in the notion that the other plodding humans,
who would surely be running, would just as surely be far behind. They
hadn't had his experience in running away from Mun.
[Illustration]
Glory and Queenie, who seemed to run at the same pace even as they
tongued in almost the same pitch, drew farther ahead but remained well
within hearing. Harky frowned thoughtfully as he sped through the night.
The way that coon was running, and the way the dogs became quiet at
intervals, as though they'd been thrown off the scent, he had a feeling
that they were on Old Joe himself.
When he climbed a knoll and was able to hear nothing, he no longer
doubted. Queenie and Glory were casting for the trail, and Old Joe was
the only coon that could keep Queenie puzzled this long. Harky halted.
"Old Joe sure enough," he said out loud.
"Don't you think," Melinda asked calmly, "that we should go directly to
his big sycamore?"
Harky jumped like a shot-stung fox. He blinked, not daring to believe
she'd kept pace with him but unable to discredit his own eyes. Suddenly
he felt far more the plodding turtle than the speeding deer, but he
extricated himself as neatly as Old Joe foiled a second-rate hound.
"If I hadn't slowed down on accounta you," he said belligerently, "I'd
of been at Old Joe's tree by now."
Melinda said meekly, "I know you were running slowly, Harold, but you
needn't have. I could have gone much faster."
Harky gulped and felt his way. Melinda, he decided, must have brought
her rabbit's foot with her and probably she'd rolled in a whole field of
four-leaf clovers. Beyond any doubt, she'd also observed the phases of
the moon and conducted herself accordingly.
"What do you know about Old Joe's sycamore?" he asked.
"What everyone knows," she said casually. "Old Joe runs to it every time
he's hard pressed by hounds."
"He's probably lost a thousand hounds and two thousand hunters at that
tree," Harky said.
"Pooh!" Melinda scoffed. "There haven't been a thousand hounds and two
thousand hunters in the Creeping Hills during the past hundred years!"
"Old Joe's been prowling that long," Harky declared.
"Rubbish!" said Melinda. "He's just a big raccoon who's smart enough to
climb a tree that can't be felled or climbed. Even my own father
believes he's been here forever, but you should know better. You've been
taught by Miss Cathby."