It was the “yamf” of a fox again. The sun was high now. The brown byroad stretched away like a ribbon between the fringing woods that rose on either side of it, screening the mountain’s grandeur, shadowing the path of the gliding automobile.

“Now where is he—the waif beastie?” said Andrew, peering ahead into the sunlight from his chauffeur’s seat, as, once more, that “yamf” rose, wild and desperate, between a cackle and bark of pain—heard above the purr of the smooth machine.

“It sounds—sounds as if he were near, quite near, oh! just around the bend ahead,” gasped Pemrose, sitting up, a statue, in the tonneau, where, side by side with Una—a rather pale and preoccupied “Jack”—she was fairly cushioned with glee over being off at last; off for a six weeks’ season of grace and growing among the Green Mountains, lying over the line in Vermont.

Andrew had vacation freedom in his veins, too. His employer had gone abroad. For several weeks he would be at nobody’s beck but his wife’s. Transformed into a boy again, by visions of fishing with a “canny” rod in mountain brooks, he had been singing softly to himself, at intervals, and much to the girls’ delight:

For the last speeding quarter of a mile this had given way to a pleasing dirge of:

The last “O” was long-drawn. Across it came the ill-dashed “yamf” of a fox.

“Something wrong with his crying pipes. That’s no barkin’ an’ fleeing sound,” said Andrew, flashing a glance over his shoulder at the girls behind. “Zooks! What a mad yammer he’s makin’ the morn!”

A sad yammer it was, with a note in it of supplication that in turn became a jabber, as of cackling laughter.

“Dear sakes! he’s cacklin’ like a hen—a hen, at a hen-wile.” The chauffeur leaned forward over his steering wheel. “Ah! there he is—the puir beastie. Dog out!” proclaimed the voice which had said the same of the falling aviator. “Ha! Trapped he is! Trapped, by that worming snake-fence! Trapped—an’ by the open roadside!”

Trapped! The girls shrank together, shuddering—young shoulder to shoulder.

“Deil tak’ it now! if this isn’t a sight to comb ’em against the hair—make the whole day seem ill-hued,” ground out Andrew. “Taken in a skunk trap, the bit beastie! This is no season for trappin’ foxes. Taken in a trap that some farmer has set for a skunk that’s been bothering his chickens! Weary fa’ the loon that set it here by the roadside!”

He shot another glance over his shoulder, the fatherly chauffeur, at the two lassies in his charge. Una had covered her ears with her hands. Pemrose was sitting tragically upright. Her face was pale. In her blue eyes was the glint half-baffled, but not routed, which lit her father’s when, driven to the last ditch of inventive ingenuity, he fought Nature for some discovery.

“Noo, what had I better do?” panted the chauffeur to himself. “Knock the puir thing on the head here now, afore the lassies? To drive on and leave him to die by slow inches in that ill-teethed trap—that’s na possible.... Ods! but he looks hangit-like—shamed—shamed o’ being caught—like—this.”

There was moisture in Andrew’s eye now. Automatically, almost—and looking round for a club—he had slowed down.

And from the ditch at the roadside, the wild mountain byroad, the red fox eyed him, groveling in his last ditch.

“All his tricks an’ snecks no use to him now—an’ that’s what he seems to feel, by fegs!”

The mist in the chauffeur’s pitying eye grew more blinding, putting out for him the flame in the fox’s, as the poor maddened waif-beastie dragged the steel trap shamefacedly to and fro by the three-rail fence, curving snake-fence, that bounded the byroad.

Suddenly, thrown into a new panic, new frenzy, by the sight of the halting car—such a juggernaut to his dimming eyes—he turned to that fence for the hundredth time and tried to climb it, dragging the skunk-trap, with him, but was pulled back by the six-foot chain ending in the indomitable clog and bolt that anchored the trap to earth.

“Oo-ooo! Ah-ah-ah-kak!” The last note of earth’s agony was in that gibbering howl which told of a hind-leg almost torn from its socket, as the wild thing fell into the ditch again and helplessly rolled there, biting at his slim, white-stockinged, blood-wet leg—at the trap, at the humbling dust all lashed to lather by his fine red brush and the foam of his dripping mouth.

“Oh! I c-can’t stand it. I can’t stand it. Do something! Do-o something.” Una was standing upright in the car, pale and trembling in the silky, rose-lined, fur coat which Andrew’s wife had tossed into the automobile at the last moment, with a pleading: “Put it on, my lamb, the morn’s chilly an’ ye look ‘blenchit’,” when she had come in, shivering, from the garden—from experimenting with the radio ring.

Simultaneously with her cry the red fox, in his new terra-cotta coat—poor little skinny ten-pound victim—ceased beating the earth with his bushy tail, that had a creamy powder puff at the tip, sat up on his haunches, ruff bristling, mouth stretching in a tortured grin over the bared, white fangs, chest heavily panting—and looked at them.

“Gosh! he’s all in. He—he looks as if he was making sifflication to us.”

The cry was wrenched from Andrew; his answer to that dumb supplication was to throw the throttle open and shoot the big car forward.

But, like a flash, Pemrose was upon him from behind.

“Oh! he is begging us. He is begging us,” she cried, clutching throttle and wheel herself, so that the big car rocked in groaning indecision. “We—we just can’t go on and leave him—leave him to die—slowly.”

“Who’s about doin’ it?” growled Andrew. “Sit down, lassie. Don’t tak’ the fling-strings or ye’ll hae us in the ditch. I’m just for driving on to the top o’ yon hill, there; then I’ll come back an’ free him—I’ll come back an’ win’-free him.”

The girl half loosed her hold, but a glance at the chauffeur’s leaking eye-corners and she was upon him fiercely again.

“You mean—you mean you’ll come back and kill him—knock him on the head with an iron ‘jack’ or a club. Oh! I won’t have it. I won’t have it,” she raved. “’Tisn’t the time for killing foxes, any way. We m-must, we can, we may free him now, somehow—somehow.”

She was jabbering like the wild thing, herself, all the while that something was struggling to the fore in her—hereditary resourcefulness—the inventor’s ingenuity.

Revelation came, as it always does, in a staggering flash.

She whipped round upon her girl companion, so white-cheeked and whimpering.

“Your c-coat, Una!” She seized upon the fine beaver, which had, presumably, been stripped from some trapped animal, too—but that did not at the moment matter. “Your fur coat! We could throw it over him, hold him down, while—while Andrew springs the trap.”

“Do ye think I’m a madded fool?” came angrily from the chauffeur.

“Oh! we don’t. We know you’re a brick. We know you’ll help us. Oh! don’t you—don’t you see how this would spoil all the trip?”

She shivered—and in the paling forgetmenot blue of the eyes near his own Andrew saw the blight that would fall over the hiking start, at least, and cursed his luck that they should meet up with the “black cow”—misfortune—this early in the day.

The fox still sat, making “sifflication.”

“But—but you must help, too, Una.” Pem was plucking the smart little costly coat from her friend’s shoulders, as she spoke. “You—you’ll have to help hold him down.”

“Oh! I daren’t. He might—bite.” Great, glassy tears rolled over Una’s eyelids, down her cheeks.

Did—did one of those passive tears, as it fell upon her bare hand, suddenly become a detector, a crystal detector, through which she picked up something from the air, by eye not by ear now, the memory, the ghost of a faint claim, it seemed, wafted from somewhere, made upon somebody—through a radio ring.

“Yes, I-I’ll help! Oh-h! it must be awful to be trapped.” She stumbled from the car.

“Warry—warry now!” Andrew was springing, at the same time, from his seat, drawing on thick gloves. “Hoot! I suppose a mon has got to make the ill-best of a bad job—but he’ll be an ill one to tackle, all tooth an’ claw.”

Already Pemrose, with the glossy huddle of soft beaver in her arms, was stealing towards the tortured thing that groveled and cackled again upon three legs—the fourth stuck out straight.

“Now, Unie, now quick—jump in—hold it down over him, tight,” she gasped “Over his head!”

And while girlish pluck pinned the coat—and the stifled form under it—to earth, Andrew’s quick hand found the spring of the steel trap, shaped like a bear’s jaws, and pressed it.

A convulsion under the smothering coat! A scraping—tearing and ripping!

They jumped all three.

All four! The fox jumped, too.

He had a free try at the fence now. But he was weak. He fell back—licked his leg passionately and tried again.

He was over. Looking neither to the right hand nor to the left, he was limping between waving grasses across the strip of rank meadow that separated the snake-fence from the woods.

“Fair gude day to ye!” grunted Andrew. “But ye might say: ‘Bethankit’!”

The wild thing reached the wood-line, brush waving.

Suddenly, before the trees swallowed him—and the undergrowth—he half-halted, half-turned—shot a backward glance.

“He’s a gentleman,” cried Pemrose. “That did mean, ‘Thank you’!”

“He’s left me to mend a big tear in the lining of my coat,” said Una. “But, oh! how awful to be trapped.”