The weight was nearly even, with the dog having perhaps a five-pound advantage. In addition, before he came into the possession of Sad Hawkins, he'd made the rounds of behind-the-barn dog-fights and he had never lost one. He could win over most coons.
The dog was a slugger. But Old Joe was a scientific boxer who knew better than to stand toe-to-toe and trade punches. He yielded to the dog's rushes even while he inflicted as much punishment of his own as possible. However, the battle might have been in doubt had it not been for one unforseen circumstance.
Hard-pressed by a determined and fearless enemy, Old Joe reached deep into his bag of tricks. He knew the terrain, and some fifteen feet away was a steep little knoll. It was elemental battle tactics that whatever might be in possession of any height had an advantage over whatever might attack it. At the first breathing spell, Old Joe scurried to the knoll, climbed it, and waited.
He was more than mildly astonished when the dog did not rush immediately. But the dog hadn't had a keen sense of smell to begin with. The numerous fights in which he'd engaged wherein his hold on a vanquished enemy was broken with a liberal application of ammonia, had ruined the little he did have. The dog was now unable to smell a dish of limburger cheese on the upwind side if it was more than three feet away, and he could not renew the battle simply because he couldn't find his enemy.
Never one to question good fortune, Old Joe turned and ran as soon as he could safely do so. First he put distance between himself and Pine Heglin's remaining guinea hens, that were standing on the roost screeching at the tops of their voices. Next he made a resolution to leave Pine's remaining guinea hens alone, at least for as long as this dog was guarding them.
Hard on the heels of that came anger. One needn't apologize for running away from one's angry mate. To be vanquished by a dog, and not even a coon hound, was an entirely different matter. Old Joe needed revenge, and just as this necessity mounted to its apex, he happened to be passing the Mundee farm.
Ordinarily he'd never have done such a thing. He knew nothing about Duckfoot, and a cornfield, with the nearest safe tree a long run away, was a poor place to start testing any unknown hound. Old Joe was too angry to rationalize, and too hungry to go farther. He turned aside, ripped a shock of corn apart, and was in the act of selecting a choice ear when Duckfoot came running.
In other circumstances, Old Joe would have stopped to think. Duckfoot, who would have the physical proportions of his father, had almost attained them. But he was still very much the puppy and he could have been defeated in battle.
Old Joe had had enough fighting for one night. He reached Willow Brook three jumps ahead of Duckfoot, jumped in, ran the riffles and swam the pools for a quarter of a mile, emerged in a little runlet, ran up it, and climbed an oak whose upper branches were laced with wild grapevines. The vines offered a safe aerial passage to any of three adjoining trees. Finding him now was a test for any good hound.
A half hour later, Old Joe was aroused by Duckfoot's thunderous tree bark. The big coon crossed the grapevine to a black cherry, climbed down it, jumped to the top of an immense boulder, ran a hundred yards to a swamp, crossed it, and came to rest in a ledge of rocks. This time Duckfoot needed only nineteen minutes.
Old Joe sighed and went on. The night was nearly spent, he needed safety, and the only safe place was his big sycamore. After the most disgusting night of his life, he reached and climbed it. He hoped that if he managed to get this far, Duckfoot would drown in the slough. But in an hour and sixteen minutes Duckfoot was announcing to the world at large that Old Joe had gone up in his favorite sycamore.
Old Joe sighed again. Then he curled up, but even as he dozed off, he was aware of one thing.
Duckfoot was a hound to reckon with.
His books strapped together with a discarded bridle rein, and dangling over his shoulder, Harky Mundee placed one reluctant foot after the other as he strode down the dirt road.
The events that culminated in this dreadful situation—returning to Miss Cathby's school at the Crossroads—had for the past three days been building up like a thunderstorm, and on the whole, it would have been easier to halt the storm. Every autumn, just after the harvest, Mun acquired firm ideas concerning the value of higher education for Harky. But never before had Mun resorted to such foul tricks or taken such unfair advantage.
Coming to where Tumbling Run foamed beneath a wooden bridge and hurled itself toward Willow Brook, Harky halted and rested both elbows on the bridge railing. He looked glumly into the icy water, along which coons of high and low degree prowled every night, and he wished mightily that he were a coon.
Though even coons had their troubles, Harky had never known of a single one that had been forced to hoe corn, milk cows, feed pigs, pitch hay, dig potatoes, or do any of the other unspeakable tasks that were forever falling to the lot of human beings. But even farm chores were not entirely unbearable. In a final agony of desperation, his cause already lost, Harky had even pointed out to Mun that the fence needed mending and hadn't he better cut the posts?
"Blast it!" Mun roared. "Stop this minute tryin' to make a fool of me, Harky! You know's well as I do that the cows ain't goin' to be out to pasture more'n 'nother three weeks! You need some book lore!"
Harky rubbed the heel of his right shoe against the shin of his left leg and wished again that he were a coon, even a treed coon. Being hound-cornered was surely preferable to becoming the hapless victim of Miss Ophelia Cathby.
Grasping the very end of the bridle rein, Harky whirled the books around his head. But exactly on the point of releasing the strap and reveling in the satisfying distance the books would fly, Harky brought them to a stop and slung them back over his shoulder.
He sighed. Free to walk the two miles to the Crossroads, with Mun not even in attendance, Harky was anything except free to throw his books away and explore Tumbling Run. When he ran away from farm tasks, which he did at every opportunity, the worst he could expect was the flat of Mun's hand.
But if he did not show up at school this morning, and for as many mornings hereafter as Mun thought necessary, he would never see his shotgun again. Harky lived again the inhuman scene wherein he had been subjected to torture more intense than any mortal should ever endure. Mun took the shotgun, locked it in his tool case, pocketed the key and addressed Harky:
"Thar! Now jest peg on to school, an' I aim to see Miss Cathby an' find out if ya did! Hingein' on what she tells me, ya kin have the shotgun back!"
Harky permitted himself a second doleful sigh. A man could take a hiding even if it were laid on with a hickory gad. But a man might better lose life itself rather than the only gun he had or could hope to get, at least in the foreseeable future. Mun was a man of his word. Harky saw himself in a fiendish trap from which there was no faint hope of escape.
He glanced at the sun, and from the length of the shadows it was casting deduced that it still lacked forty-five minutes of nine o'clock, the hour at which Miss Cathby called her classes to order. If he stuck to the road, forty-five minutes was at least thirty-eight more than he needed to cover the less than a mile remaining between himself and the Crossroads. But there were excellent reasons why he could not stick to the road.
Raw Stanfield, Butt Johnson, Bear Pen Crawford, and Mule Domster all lived upstream from the Mundee farm. Mellie Garson and Pine Heglin lived down. Harky had not hesitated to walk openly past Mellie's farm, for though Mellie had been an enthusiastic sire, he had begat only daughters. They were all pretty enough to be snatched up the moment they came of marriageable age, and the four oldest were happily married. But girls of all ages were forever gadding about doing silly things that interested girls only. Though they probably would think it a modern miracle, Mellie's eight youngest would not consider it necessary to rub salt in Harky's already-raw wounds simply because he was going to school.
Pine Heglin had specialized in sons, of which he had seven. The six eldest were carbon copies of their father. It was said along Willow Brook that if one cared to give Pine or any of his six elder sons a good laugh in January, one had only to tell them a good joke the preceding April.
The youngest Heglin, named Loring and called Dib, had been born on Halloween and showed it. Every witch who walked must have touched Dib Heglin, and among other questionable gifts they'd bestowed a tongue with a hornet's sting.
Dib was three months older than Harky. He did not go to school. He found endless amusement in the fact that Harky did go. Harky had no wish to meet Dib.
A quarter of a mile on the upstream side of the Heglin farm, Harky started into the woods and stopped worrying. Dib was a not-unskilled woodsman. But he'd never studied in the stark school from which Harky had graduated with honors; anyone able to hide from Mun Mundee could elude fifty Dib Heglins.
A sour chuckle escaped Harky. Dib, who knew how to add two and two, would know that the Mundees' harvest was ended. Nobody would have to tell him that this was the logical day for Mun to expose Harky to some more of Miss Cathby's education. No doubt he'd got up a half hour early just so he could wait for Harky and insult him when he appeared.
Presently, as it always did, the magic of the forest overwhelmed less desirable influences. Miss Cathby and her school, while not far enough away to let Harky forget he'd better be there on time, needn't be faced for the immediate present. Harky found himself wondering.
Duckfoot had grown like a weed in the corn patch, and to the casual observer he was not greatly different from other gangling hound puppies. But a careful scrutiny revealed him as a dog of diverse talents. There was the incident of the root cellar.
Because it would not keep long in warm weather, meat was at a premium along Willow Brook during the summer months. When somebody butchered, it was both practical and practice to share with his neighbors.
Mule Domster butchered a hog, and to the Mundees he brought a ham and a loin. Mun stored both in the root cellar, that was closed by a latch. The latch was lifted by a string dangling down the door. While Duckfoot, who to all appearances was interested only in scratching a flea behind his ear, sat sleepily near, Mun removed the ham.
Shortly afterward, returning for the loin and finding an empty space where it had been, Mun went roaring to the house for his rifle. Since no farmer of the Creeping Hills would think of robbing his neighbor's root cellar, obviously an unprincipled and hungry stranger had come up Willow Brook. Finding no tracks, Mun further declared that he was a cunning stranger.
Harky had a feeling. It was based on the fact that Duckfoot, who normally ate like a horse except that he did not chew his food nearly as much, was not at all hungry when his meal was put before him. It meant nothing, asserted Mun, for he had flushed an early flight of teal from Willow Brook and Duckfoot was perturbed by the ducks. Harky watched the root cellar.
Evening shadows were merging into black night when Duckfoot padded to the door, reared, pulled the latch string with his teeth, and entered. Since Mun was sure to take a dim view of such goings on, Harky never betrayed the thief. All he did was break the latch and replace it with an exterior latch that was not string-operated.
That happened shortly before Duckfoot disappeared for a whole week. To be expected, said Mun, for wild ducks were passing daily now and doubtless Duckfoot had gone in search of his father. But Harky had another feeling.
He'd been with Duckfoot along Willow Brook, or near one of the ponds, when wild ducks flushed. Far from betraying his duck blood, Duckfoot had given them not the slightest attention. Could it be, thought Harky, that a coon, maybe Old Joe himself, had come raiding? Had Duckfoot trailed him, treed him, and stayed at the tree until he was just too tired and hungry to stay longer?
Mun scoffed at such notions. He pointed out that Duckfoot was still a puppy who, as far as anyone knew, had never been on a coon's trail. So what could he know about running coons, especially Old Joe? Harky was indulging in another pipe dream even to think that a puppy, any puppy, would tree a coon and stay at the tree for a week. Precious Sue herself wouldn't have stayed that long.
Harky knew only that Duckfoot was lean as a blackberry cane when he finally came home and that he kept looking off into the forest. If he hadn't treed a coon, he certainly acted as though he had.
In sudden panic Harky realized that he had a scant four minutes left. He began to run, and he burst into Miss Cathby's school just as the last bell was tolling laggards to their desks.
The school was a one-room affair flanked by a woodshed half as big as the school proper. Inside were the regulation potbellied stove, six rows of five desks each, a desk for Miss Cathby, and a plain wooden bench upon which the various classes seated themselves when called to recite. Behind Miss Cathby's desk was the blackboard. If it was not the ultimate in educational facilities, it was a vast improvement over the no school at all that had been at the Crossroads until three years ago.
When Harky ran in, his fellow pupils were seated.
The first grade, consisting of the younger daughters of Mellie Garson and Raw Stanfield, and the youngest sons of Butt Johnson and Mule Domster, was the largest. Thereafter the grades decreased numerically but with an increasing feminine contingent. Boys old enough to help out at home could hardly be expected to waste time in school. Melinda and Mary Garson were the fifth grade, Harky the sixth, and Mildred and Minnie Garson the seventh and eighth.
Miss Cathby smiled pleasantly when Harky came in.
"Good morning, Harold," she greeted.
"Good morning, ma'am," Harky mumbled.
"Is your father's harvest in, Harold?"
"Yes, ma'am."
Harky, who knew his name was Harold but wished Miss Cathby didn't know, squirmed and longed to drop through the floor. With the only other male who even approached his age being Mule Domster's ten-year-old son, he was indeed surrounded.
Miss Cathby, who knew several things not written in textbooks, understood and let him alone. Harky fixed his eyes on the back of twelve-year-old Melinda Garson's slender neck. He calculated the exact spot where a spitball would have the ultimate effect, then decided that it wasn't worth his while to throw one.
The first grade was called for recitation. Solacing himself with the thought that Mun's enthusiasm for booklore seldom endured more than three weeks, Harky escaped in a dream. He had his shotgun, Duckfoot was hot on a coon's trail, and presently they heard his tree bark. Mun and Harky made their way to the tree.
"Harky," said Mun, "git your light beam on that coon."
Harky made ready to shine the treed coon. The words were repeated and he came rudely awake to discover that Miss Cathby was speaking.
"Harold," she said, "are you dreaming so soon?"
"Yes, ma'am," Harky said meekly.
"Well come down here. The sixth grade is called to recite."
Harky rose and shuffled unhappily to the recitation bench. He slumped down, head bent, shoulders hunched, fists in pockets. Never again, he thought, would he have any part in caging a coon. Not even to train Duckfoot. He knew now what cages are like.
"Have you been keeping up with your studies?" Miss Cathby asked.
"Yes, ma'am," said Harky.
"Which books have you been using?" queried Miss Cathby.
"Same ones I used last year," Harky mumbled.
Miss Cathby frowned prettily. Harky's last year's books were for the fifth grade; Harky had started in the fourth solely because he'd been too old to begin in the first. Miss Cathby's frown deepened.
She knew that, with the best of luck, Harky would be under her influence for a maximum four weeks. But Miss Cathby's fragile body harbored a will of granite. If she combined guile with persistence, four weeks were enough to turn this youngster from the heathenish ways of his ancestors and show him at least a glimmer of the one true light.
"Very well," she said pleasantly. "We'll review your last year's arithmetic. If a farmer harvests thirty tons of hay, sells two thirds and feeds the remainder, how much will he feed?"
Harky shuffled nervous feet and stared past her at the blackboard. "I never could figger that one, Miss Cathby."
Miss Cathby said, "It isn't difficult."
"Parts ain't," Harky admitted. "But parts are. He'll sell twenty tons, always reckoning he can find somebody to buy. The rest just shrivels me up."
Miss Cathby sighed. As soon as she proved to her own satisfaction that these backwoods boys were not morons, they proved her wrong. Anyone able correctly to deduce two thirds of thirty should be able to subtract twenty from thirty. A firm adherent of the idea that sugar entices flies where vinegar will not, Miss Cathby applied the sugar.
"Come, Harold," she coaxed. "If you have thirty potatoes and give twenty away, how many will you have left?"
"Ten," Harky said promptly. "But we was talking about tons of hay, not potatoes, and that ain't what crosses me up."
"What is it that you do not understand?" Miss Cathby pursued.
"What kind of critter a remainder is and how much hay does it eat?"
The fifth, seventh, and eighth grades, as represented by the sisters Garson, filled the room with giggles. Miss Cathby rapped for order and evolved a cunning plan to win Harky's interest and favor by discussing something he did know.
"Do you have a good raccoon hound for the coming season, Harold?"
Miss Cathby composed herself to listen while Harky launched an enthusiastic, and minutely detailed, description of the misadventures of Precious Sue and the wiles of Old Joe. He needed eighteen minutes to reach the thrilling climax, the discovery of Duckfoot and,
"His Pa's a duck," he said seriously.
"A duck!" Miss Cathby gasped.
"Not just a barnyard duck and not just a wild duck," Harky explained patiently. "It was some big old duck, maybe older'n Old Joe himself, that's been setting back in the woods just hoping Sue would come along."
Miss Cathby's eyes glowed with a true crusader's zeal. In all the time Harky had spent in school and all the time he would spend there, she could not hope to impart more than the rudiments of an education. But here was a heaven-sent opportunity to strike at the very roots of the ignorance and superstition that barred his march toward a more enlightened life. Miss Cathby saw past the boy to the father who would be. Strike Harky's chains and he would voluntarily free his children.
"That's impossible, Harold," she began.
Warming to her subject, she sketched the Garden of Eden, traced the history of mankind, disposed of witches and witch hunters in a few hundred well-chosen words, explained the laws of genetics, and finished with conclusive proof that a coon hound cannot mate with a duck.
Harky listened, not without interest. When it came to telling stories, he conceded, Miss Cathby was even better than Mun and almost as good as Mellie Garson. Nor was she shooting wholly in the dark; Harky himself did not believe that Duckfoot had been sired by a duck. But there was something wanting.
For a moment he could not define the lack. Then, happily, he thought of another of Pine Heglin's ideas. If apples were stored so they could not roll, Pine decided, there would be fewer bruised apples. Forthwith he constructed some latticeworks of willow withes, arranged them as shelves, and stored his apples on them. But Pine had forgotten that some apples are big and some small. The small ones fell through the lattices and the big ones became jammed in them. All were bruised, and rotted quickly, with the result that Pine had no apples at all.
Miss Cathby's lecture was like that, Harky decided. She would find an exact niche for Old Joe, Duckfoot, Mun, everything in the world, and she'd never stop to think that few things really belonged in exact niches. Her ideas just didn't have room to grow in. Mun's did.
"Can you prove to me, Harold, that there is any such creature as this witch duck?" Miss Cathby finished.
"No ma'am," said Harky, and he forebore to mention that neither could she prove there wasn't.
By some miracle, the endless day ended. The new books that Miss Cathby gave him strapped in the bridle rein and slung over his shoulder, Harky walked straight up the road. He had a feeling that was justified when he saw Dib Heglin waiting.
"Ya been to see Miss Cathby?" Dib squawked in a voice that would have maddened a sheep. "Did Miss Cathby give ya a bathby?"
Harky shifted the bridle rein from his right hand to his left. Effecting a gait that was supposedly a caricature of Miss Cathby's feminine walk, and was remarkably similar to the waddle of a fat goose, Dib came toward him.
"Ya been to see—?" he began.
They were near enough. Harky's right fist flicked out.
"Ya-ooo!" Dib shrieked.
Harky danced happily on. No day was wholly wasted if it left Dib Heglin nursing a bloody nose.
Mellie Garson sat on an overturned pickle keg sourly contemplating the inequity of fate. If he was no better than the next man, he told himself, neither was he worse. So why should some be rewarded with a free buggy ride while others received a kick from the mules pulling the buggy?
Mellie shifted his right foot, his newest reason for eating bitter bread, and glared at the crutches without which he was helpless. It was indeed a bitter blow, but it seemed to Mellie as he sat there that his entire life had been one blow after another.
Though he was the father of children, the very fact that there was no son among them was a desperate situation. How did one hand a coon hound, not to mention the mass of coon lore that Mellie had acquired during his sixty-seven years on earth, down to a girl child?
The lusty wail of a baby floated out of the house. Mellie shuddered, and only by exercising a heroic effort could he refrain from putting his hands over his ears. It was not that he didn't love his daughters and do for them as a proper father should. But did his thirteenth child, now yelling away in her crib, have to be a girl, too?
Mellie ran down the list of his offspring: Marilyn, Maxine, Martha, Minerva, Margaret, Mildred, Minnie, Melinda, Mary, Maud, Marcy, Marcella, and finally, Michelle. There'd been some hope they'd run out of Ms, but he'd hoped that clear back when Mary arrived and now hope was dead. He couldn't have thought of Michelle. But his daughters could and that, he supposed, was no more than he deserved for exposing them to Miss Cathby's school.
Mellie often wondered if he'd been born in the wrong time of the moon. Maybe he'd even been born in a caul, but he'd never know whence came his talent for fathering girls, because by the time he started wondering his parents had gone to their eternal reward and it was too late to ask them.
He sighed. Thirteen girl children were thirteen facts of life that nobody could change. There were rare intervals, when they didn't all start talking at once, that it was even pleasant to have them around. But how explain the rest of his misfortunes?
Mellie retraced the chain of events that had culminated in this stark tragedy.
Morning Glory, his pup out of Raw Stanfield's Queenie by Butt Johnson's Thunder, showed every indication of becoming a rare coon hound indeed. Though Mellie would have been satisfied had she inherited the talent of either parent, there were reasons to believe that she combined the best of both.
However, Glory must have some education and tonight, this matchless autumn night, Raw Stanfield with Queenie and Butt Johnson with Thunder were meeting at Mun Mundee's house. Had they planned a coon hunt, and that only, Mellie would have contented himself with just being heart-broken. But Mun and Harky Mundee were going along with Duckfoot and Mellie had been invited to bring Glory. So—
Yesterday he'd been mule-kicked!
Mellie groaned his misery. Glory and Duckfoot had an opportunity to learn their trade under masters such as Queenie and Thunder. Now Glory couldn't go, and what had Mellie ever done to merit such catastrophe?
No doubt Duckfoot would be there, and thinking of Duckfoot, Mellie wondered why a little of the Mundee luck couldn't rub off on Mellie Garson. It had been a terrible blow to lose Precious Sue. But to stumble on Sue's pup, even if he was half duck, and to find that he probably would be as good as Sue ever was. How come the Mundees were so favored?
Mellie glanced bitterly around as a mule-drawn wagon came from behind the barn. Morning Glory wagged contentedly behind it and four of Mellie's daughters comprised the crew that was bringing in another load of corn. Mellie fixed his eyes on Melinda.
Twelve years old, limber as a willow withe and pretty as a week-old colt, she was driving the self-same mules that had kicked Mellie right out of a coon hunt. Furthermore, she was driving them more skillfully than her father ever had. Mellie permitted himself a troubled frown.
Certain Melinda would be a boy, and a firm exponent of starting the worthwhile things of life as early as possible, Mellie had even dickered for a hound pup so the two babies might grow up together. Somebody had crossed him up, or sneaked up on him, but Melinda should have been a boy.
She could throw a rock straighter than Harky Mundee; catch bass when Mellie himself couldn't lure them; handle in perfect safety mules that could kick flies off each other's ears and were anxious to kick anything else; she could do everything most boys could and do it better. If more was needed, Glory adored her with a passion few hounds bestow on any human.
Melinda backed the wagon into the barn, and as her three sisters started to unload the corn, she unhitched the mules and drove them to their stable. A fiendish plan formed in Mellie's brain. Girls were about as welcome on a coon hunt as bees at a sewing circle, but why should Mellie do all the suffering? Melinda came out of the stable and floated toward the house. Mellie came to a decision and called,
"Melinda."
She danced to him on feet that never seemed to touch the ground. "Yes, Pa?"
"Raw Stanfield an' Butt Johnson'll be at Mun Mundee's come evenin'. They're goin' to take Duckfoot on a coon hunt. How'd you like to go with Glory?"
"Pa! You mean it?"
"Sure I mean it, honey."
She stooped and kissed him, and suddenly Mellie felt sorry for unfortunate fathers who do not have at least thirteen daughters.
Making himself as small as possible, Harky Mundee kept his fingers crossed and hoped Mun had forgotten he was alive. Everything had worked out so much better than he'd dared hope that surely there must be some mistake.
After eleven days at Miss Cathby's school, he was ready and unwilling to begin the twelfth when he happened to glance toward the pasture. He himself, after helping milk them at half past five, had turned the cows out. But though he'd turned all six out, only five remained. Old Brindle, Mun's ornery cow, had decided to take herself for a walk. It was nothing that could be ignored. Old Brindle was fast as a deer and if she decided she'd had enough of human society, she'd be as hard to catch.
"You'd best help me get her," Mun said.
"Yes, Pa."
They'd scarcely left the house, when, apparently having decided that the free life is for those who want it, Old Brindle jumped back into the pasture she'd just jumped out of. But instead of turning on Harky and roaring for him to be off to school, Mun said nothing at all.
It had been easy as that, which is why Harky worried. Though it was hard even to imagine Mun's having thoughts to spare for Miss Cathby and her school with a coon hunt coming up, dismal experience had taught Harky that it was easier to forecast the next skip of a sand flea than to anticipate Mun.
Until he knew exactly how the wind was blowing, Harky thought, silence was not only golden but silver, gold and diamonds. If Mun was thinking about sending him back to school, to school he would go. If he was not, an incautious word might start him thinking.
Harky watched furtively as Mun put on his coon-hunting pants, boots, and curled the brim of his coon-hunting hat. Then he went to the tool box for his coon-hunting axe.
"Harky!" he roared. "What's your shotgun doin' in my toolbox?"
"Why," Harky hoped he appeared innocent, "is it in there, Pa?"
"Git it out!"
Harky drew his first easy breath since Old Brindle's escape. If Mun had forgotten why he'd confiscated Harky's shotgun, he'd forgotten about school. The ordeal was over, at least for this year, and Harky was free to concentrate on important matters. For the immediate future, the only matter of importance consisted of wishing it was night so they could go coon hunting.
Evening finally arrived, and, with Queenie and Thunder at their respective heels, Raw Stanfield and Butt Johnson arrived with it. The older hounds sneered in their own fashion at Duckfoot, who enthusiastically sneered right back, and curled up on the porch.
None of the men, as yet, knew that Mellie was sending his daughter to substitute for him. When Queenie, Thunder, and Duckfoot set up a desultory baying, all thought that Mellie would join them shortly. To do so he would follow prescribed etiquette of the Creeping Hills, which involved opening the door and walking in.
When Mellie did not enter, but someone knocked, the four hunters first looked astounded. Then they looked at each other. It was Harky who decided that one way to find out who was knocking would be to go open the door. His astounded bellow made Queenie cringe and sent Thunder slinking from the porch.
"What in tunket do you want?"
"Hello, Harold," Melinda trilled.
She was dressed in the boy's trousers she always wore except when she went to school, a boy's shirt which immediately gave the lie to the theory that girls can't wear boys' clothing and look like girls, and a denim jacket. Her feet were encased in an old pair of shoes, and a boy's hat was pushed back on her saucy black curls. Without a second glance for Harky, she walked past him into the kitchen.
"Pa's been mule-kicked and can't come," she announced. "I brought Glory."
"Right kind of ya," said Mun. "We'll take good care of her an' see that she gits back."
"Oh, I'll take her back myself," Melinda said. "Pa will expect it."
"Nice of ya to offer," said Mun. "But Harky an' me, we sort of batch it here. The house ain't rightly fixed fer a girl to stay in an' we may be gone all night."
"Don't you worry about that, Mr. Mundee," Melinda reassured him. "I'm going hunting with you."
Harky gagged. Melinda turned to face him.
"You sound as though you've been eating green apples, Harold," she said sweetly. "Have you?"
"Why'n'choo go home?"
"Harky!" Mun roared, but not very loudly, "mind your tongue!"
"Thank you, Mr. Mundee," Melinda said, with the barest hint of a sob in her young voice. "You do want me along, don't you?"
"Well uh—" Mun stammered and appealed to Raw Stanfield. "We do want her along, don't we?"
"Well uh—" Raw aped Mun and looked at Butt Johnson.
Butt stuttered, "Why—why—why—" and fixed his gaze on Harky.
"There!" Melinda said triumphantly. "The other three want me! Now what do you say?"
"Hope ya fall in the mud!"
"Harold!" Melinda wrinkled her distinctly fetching nose. "How terrible!"
"Hope ya fall in the mud, an' I'll stomp on your head if ya do!" Harky said.
"Harky!" This time Mun voiced a full-throated roar. "Mind your tongue!"
"Le's get coon huntin'," Raw Stanfield choked. "Le's do anything long's we git out of here!"
Raw Stanfield with the lantern, Butt Johnson with a torch for shining treed coons and a .22 rifle for plinking them out of the trees, Mun with his coon-hunting axe, Melinda with serene self-assurance, and Harky with a miserable feeling that it couldn't be very long now before the whole world went to pot, they set off through the night.
Misery was Harky's only feeling. If he had another, he told himself sourly, he wouldn't dare put stock in it. When girls horned in on coon hunts anything could happen and it probably would.
Harky comforted himself with thoughts of what can happen on coon hunts. He had a soul-satisfying vision of a cold, wet, mud-spattered, and hungry Melinda wandering through the night pleading for Harky to come to her succor. Harky heard, but he let her wander until the last possible second. Then, just as she was about to sink into mud from which she would never rise had it not been for valiant Harky, he lifted her to her feet, took her home, and scuffed scornful feet on Mellie Garson's threshold.
"There!" he heard himself saying. "Let that teach you that girls ought never horn in on coon hunts!"
Harky breathed a doleful sigh. Delightful as this mental image was, in no way did it erase the fact that a girl had horned in on a coon hunt. Harky sought solace by tearing his thoughts away from Melinda and fastening them on something pleasant. He considered the four hounds.
Queenie was a slow and methodical worker who'd never been known to lose a trail she started. Of course they did not get every coon Queenie started; some went to earth in rock-bound burrows and some escaped by devious means. Queenie, who tongued on a trail, was one of the few hounds who'd followed Old Joe to his magic sycamore.
Glory, as yet untried, might and might not adopt her mother's hunting style. Duckfoot—neither Harky nor anyone else had any reason to believe that he'd already tracked Old Joe to his sycamore—was another unknown quantity insofar as his own special way of hunting was concerned. But Harky had no doubt that, after adequate training, Duckfoot would shine, and Glory would do well enough.
Thunder, next to Precious Sue the best coon hound ever to run the Creeping Hills, couldn't be doubted. Big, long-legged, and powerful, Thunder was another hound who'd distinguished himself by tracking Old Joe to the big sycamore. A silent trailer but a tree barker who did credit to his name, Thunder was so fast that he often caught coons on the ground. With six years of hunting experience behind him, he was probably the best of the four hounds on this current hunt.
They were, Harky thought, a pack fit to run in any company. With Thunder to run ahead and jump the coon, Queenie to work out the trail at her own pace and at regular intervals to announce the direction Thunder had gone, and quality pups like Duckfoot and Glory, any coon they struck tonight, with the probable exception of Old Joe, would find his stretched pelt on the barn door tomorrow. Maybe even Old Joe would have a hard time with this pack.
Thinking of coons, Harky was pleasantly diverted for a few minutes more.
Creatures of the season, coons availed themselves of the most of the best of whatever was handy. When they emerged from their dens at winter's end, they liked to fill empty stomachs with buds and tender grass and flower shoots. As the season advanced, coons conformed. They never spurned vegetation if it was to their liking, but as soon as the spring freshet subsided, they did a great deal of fishing and frog, crawfish, and mussel hunting. When gardens started to bear, the coons varied their diet with green vegetables. As they ripened, both wild and domestic fruits received the attention of properly brought up coons. They were always ready to raid poultry.
At this time of year, with frogs already gone into hibernation, fish inclined to linger in deep pools where even Old Joe couldn't catch them, the crawfish and mussel crop well picked over, and vegetation withered, coons concentrated on fields of shocked corn, such fruit as might cling to branches, and beech and oak groves, where they foraged for fallen beechnuts and acorns.
It was to a beech grove that Raw Stanfield led them.
The black thunderheads that had been surging through Harky's brain changed suddenly to a sky of dazzling blue. Rubber boots were not unknown among coon hunters of the Creeping Hills, but except by a few eccentrics, they were unused. A man trying to make time to a tree-barking hound did not care to be slowed by boots.
Harky licked his lips. God tempered the wind to the shorn lamb, but ice water felt like ice water even to a coon hunter and the grove toward which Raw headed was on the far side of Willow Brook. The water was autumn-low with plenty of exposed stones, but jumping them by daylight and jumping them under lantern light were different matters. Harky wasn't sure that even he could cross at night without getting wet.
It looked as though ladies' night at coon hunts would terminate abruptly and soon. Harky hoped so, and it would be a nice touch indeed if Melinda scraped her shins when she fell in.
Willow Brook glinted in the light as Raw Stanfield held his lantern high to see whether they were approaching a pool or riffle. It was a riffle that purled lazily, and coldly, around exposed stones. Harky grinned in the darkness. Itlookedeasy, but there was a trick to it.
Once you started jumping there was no turning back and the stones were unevenly spaced. You had to adjust your jumps accordingly, so that it took a really experienced stone jumper to cross in reasonably dry condition.
Contemplating the joys of watching Melinda come reasonably near drowning, Harky made a shocking discovery.
Thunder, Queenie, and Glory still trailed at the heels of the hunters, but Duckfoot was no longer present. Harky gulped, then used the thumb of his left hand to trace a circle on the palm of his right. Less than half a shake ago, Duckfoot had pushed his cold nose into that dangling palm and the circle Harky made there would certainly close him in and bring him back from wherever he had gone. At any rate, it should.
It didn't. Chills never born of the frosty night chased each other up and down Harky's spine. Mun claimed Duckfoot was half duck, Miss Cathby said that couldn't be, and Harky wavered between the two. He looked again, but only three hounds waded into the riffle to join the hunters gathering on the other side. Harky jumped.
If he had his mind on his work, he'd have crossed in perfect safety. But just as he made ready to strike a humpbacked boulder with the sole of his left foot, he miscalculated and struck with the heel. That broke his stride to such an extent that the next jump was six inches short, and instead of landing on a flat-topped rock where he could have balanced, he came down in ten inches of ice water.
Only vast experience as a rock jumper prevented an allover bath; Harky threw himself forward to support his upper body on the flat rock. Then, since it was impossible to get his feet any wetter than they were, he waded the remaining distance.
"Really, Harold," said Melinda, who was dry as a shingle under the July sun, "you did that rather clumsily."
Harky made a mental note. It was easy to work the pith out of an elderberry stick. Small stones were plentiful. One of the latter, placed in the mouth and blown through the former, was never forgotten by anyone with whom it collided. The next time Harky attended Miss Cathby's school, Melinda was in for an unforgettable experience.
For the moment, since he could do nothing else about her, he could imagine she wasn't along. Harky turned his back on Melinda and addressed Mun:
"Duckfoot's gone."
"Danged if he ain't," said Mun, who noticed for the first time that they had only three of the four hounds with which they'd started. "When'd you note it?"
"Other side of the brook," Harky said in a hushed voice. "One minute his nose was in my hand, the next it wasn't. Do you figure he took wings and flew off?"
"It could," Mun began, but his about-to-be-expressed opinion that such a premise was wholly reasonable was interrupted by Melinda's, "Nonsense!"
Harky blazed, forgetting his sensible plan to ignore her. "Watta you know about it?"
"Now don't lose your temper, Harold," Melinda chided. "It's silly to suppose Duckfoot's half duck."
Harky drew his arm back. "Silly, huh? I've a good mind to—"
"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.