But that was not the worst of it, for she was longer than the enemy, a bit, and might have put up a good fight—­she had fought for her life, as a matter of course, ever since she left her mother’s side—­if the enemy had not brought with her an ally.  It was not visible to the eye, that ally, but it was to the nose—­a most distinct and appalling stink, and it could be felt, for it made her nostrils smart.  Apparently, then, that white tail was intentional, was as a red flag, insolently displayed, warning all to beware of the stink.  Well, there is more than one way of holding your own in the wild, and a most unholy smell is not such a bad way, either, when you come to think about it.

The owner of that nameless odor was a polecat—­not our polecat; worse than that—­and—­well, you know the breed.  Fear they know not; neither is pity with them a weakness, especially where the lives of their young are concerned.  This one did not wait.  She attacked quicker than you could cry “Knife,” taking off with all four feet together, in a peculiar and patent way of her own.

The would-be murderess, who was long, and absurdly short in the leg, too, just like her opponent, only with a more graceful and not such a thick-set body, turned on herself in a snaky fashion, and her neck, that the fangs had aimed at, was not there when the polecat arrived, but her teeth were, and they closed on the polecat’s cheek.

The latter gibbered horribly at the spark of pain, and set herself really down to fight.

The intending murderess said nothing at all, but, unbalanced with her game hindleg, having no force to push or spring with, and being very weak, she knew she was done for directly they closed to the clinch.

In a few seconds the polecat had her down, and only an awful, mad, desperate clashing of fang against fang kept the attacker off her throat.  It could not last.

Then it was, at that moment, that a sharp little, gray little, dark-spotted, clean-cut, close-cropped, intelligent head, on a snaky, long neck, peeped out of the shadows, and peered about, as if to see what in whiskers all the pother was about.  The head might have been there by chance, but it wasn’t.  Its owner had been running her trail for hours, and looking for it for days, and didn’t mean to let her go, now that he had finally come up with her, polecats or no polecats, smells or not.  But he was not a fool.  He knew the game, the bitter, cruel game of death, as it is played throughout the wild.  With man the inexorable law is, “Get on or get out.”  In the wild they phrase it another way:  “Kill or be killed.”  Man puts it more politely, perhaps, but it’s all the same old natural law, I guess.

The head and snaky neck developed a long, creamy, tawny-spotted body, and the body a long, banded, tapering tail—­all set on legs so short, they scarcely kept the owner off the ground; and the name of that beast was genet.  The same are a sort of distant relation of the cats, a fourth cousin once removed; but it is necessary to tell you, because you might think they were beautiful weasels, otherwise. And she was a genet, too—­the murderess that might have been.