“I don’t want to walk in these woods any more,” said Kathleen with sudden conviction.  “Please come home, all of us.”

“Nonsense,” he said.  “I won’t stand for being hustled out of my own woods.  Give me that rifle, Geraldine.”

“I certainly will not,” she said, smiling.

“What!  Why not?”

“Because it rather looks as though I’m about to win my bet with you,” observed Geraldine.  “Please show me your boar, Scott.”  And she threw a cartridge into the magazine and started forward.

“Don’t let her!” pleaded Kathleen.  “Scott, it’s ridiculous to let that child do such silly things——­”

“Then stop her if you can,” said Scott gloomily, following his sister.  “I don’t know anything about wild boar, but I suppose straight shooting will take care of them, and Sis can do that if she keeps her nerve.”

Geraldine, hastening ahead, rifle poised, scanned the woods with the palpitating curiosity of an amateur.  Eyes and ears alert, she kept mechanically reassuring herself that the thing to do was to shoot straight and keep cool, and to keep on shooting whichever way the boar might take it into his porcine head to run.

Scott hastened forward to her side: 

“Here’s the place,” he said, looking about him.  “He’s concluded to make off, you see.  They usually go off; they only stand when wounded or when they think they can’t get away.  He’s harmless, I suppose—­only it made me very tired to have him act that way.  I hate to be backed out of my own property.”

Geraldine, rather relieved, yet ashamed not to do all she could, began to walk toward a clump of low hemlocks.  She had heard that wild boar take that sort of cover.  She did not really expect to find anything there, so when a big black streak crashed out ahead of her she stood stock still in frozen astonishment, rifle clutched to her breast.

“Shoot!” shouted her brother.

“Oh, dear, oh, dear,” she said helplessly, “he’s gone out of sight!  And I had such a splendid shot!” She stamped with vexation.  “What a goose!” she repeated.  “I had a perfectly splendid shot.  And all I did was to jump like a scared cat and stare!”

“Anyway, you didn’t run, and that’s a point gained,” observed her brother.  “I had to.  And that’s one on me.”

A moment later he said:  “I believe those impudent boar do need a little thinning out.  When is Duane coming?”

“In November,” said Geraldine, still looking vaguely about for the departed pig.

“Early?”

“I think so, if his father is all right again.  I’ve asked Naida, too.  Rosalie wants to come——­”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, don’t,” he protested.  “All I wanted was a shooting party to do a little scientific thinning out of these boar.  I’ll do some myself, too.”

Geraldine laughed.  “Rosalie is a dead shot at a target, dear.  She wrote asking us to invite her to shoot.  I don’t see how I can very well refuse her.  Do you?”