The fox before me shifted his position a little to get a better view and watched with a most human interest all the circling of the hound.  He was so close that I saw the hair of his shoulder bristle a little when the dog came in sight.  I could see the jumping of his heart on his ribs, and the gleam of his yellow eye.  When the dog was wholly baulked by the water trick it was comical to see:—­he could not sit still, but rocked up and down in glee, and reared on his hind feet to get a better view of the slow-plodding hound.  With mouth opened nearly to his ears, though not at all winded, he panted noisily for a moment, or rather he laughed gleefully just as a dog laughs by grinning and panting.

Old Scarface wriggled in huge enjoyment as the hound puzzled over the trail so long that when he did find it, it was so stale he could barely follow it, and did not feel justified in tonguing on it at all.

As soon as the hound was working up the hill, the fox quietly went into the woods.  I had been sitting in plain view only ten feet away, but I had the wind and kept still and the fox never knew that his life had for twenty minutes been in the power of the foe he most feared.  Ranger would also have passed me as near as the fox, but I spoke to him, and with a little nervous start he quit the trail and looking sheepish lay down by my feet.

This little comedy was played with variations for several days, but it was all in plain view from the house across the river.  My uncle, impatient at the daily loss of hens, went out himself, sat on the open knoll, and when old Scarface trotted to his lookout to watch the dull hound on the river flat below, my uncle remorselessly shot him in the back, at the very moment when he was grinning over a new triumph.

IV

But still the hens were disappearing.  My uncle was wrathy.  He determined to conduct the war himself, and sowed the woods with poison baits, trusting to luck that our own dogs would not get them.  He indulged in contemptuous remarks on my by-gone woodcraft, and went out evenings with a gun and the two dogs, to see what he could destroy.

Vix knew right well what a poison bait was; she passed them by or else treated them with active contempt, but one she dropped down the hole, of an old enemy, a skunk, who was never afterward seen.  Formerly old Scarface was always ready to take charge of the dogs, and keep them out of mischief.  But now that Vix had the whole burden of the brood, she could no longer spend time in breaking every track to the den, and was not always at hand to meet and mislead the foes that might be coming too near.

The end is easily foreseen.  Ranger followed a hot trail to the den, and Spot, the fox-terrier, announced that the family was at home, and then did his best to go in after them.