"Oh, if that's the kind of customer, I'm on to try," said Missy. She raised her gun there and then, pressed it to her shoulder, and took aim at the black notch against the silver disc of the moon. The moonlight licked the barrels from sight to sight, getting into Missy's eyes, but there were barely a dozen feet between muzzle and mark. The report was quickly followed by a lifeless thud upon the ground; and when the smoke cleared, that notch was gone from the bough. Then one of the men struck a match to show Missy what she had done; and she had done it so effectually as to give herself a sensation which she concealed with difficulty. It was not pity; there was no pitying a spotted little horror with so sharp a snout and such devilish fangs: but whatever it was, that sensation kept Missy modest in her success, so that she refused the next shot point-blank. John William took it, with the only possible result.
"A bushy." someone said, turning over the dead bush-tailed opossum with his foot It looked very big and soft and gray, lying dead in the moonlight. Missy found it in her heart to pity an opossum.
"Don't you skin them?" she asked at a respectful range. "Do you make no use of them after all?"
"It's so hard not to spoil them," John William said as he slipped another cartridge into the breech. He would have shown her how this particular skin had been ruined by the shot, but Missy said she quite understood.
He was beginning to think her squeamish. He asked her whether she had not had enough. She would not admit it, and took another shot to prove her spirit. This time she failed, and bore her failure with an equanimity which (in Missy) amounted almost to apathy. That she was neither squeamish nor apathetic, however, was demonstrated very suddenly while the night was still young.
A ring-tailed opossum had been brought to earth by a charge from the muzzle-loader of that stunted young colonial whose eyes were as sharp as his voice--he who had "mooned" the native cat. The others called him Geordie. The three of them were kneeling over the dead "ringy," and Missy was taking no more notice of them than she could help; only Geordie's was a voice that made itself heard. Missy had taken little stock of what the kneeling men were doing or saying until suddenly she heard: