“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.”