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[Illustration: “The gray fox was leading bravely.” Frontispiece. See page 16]
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BY EDWIN CARLILE LITSEY AUTHOR OF “THE LOVE STORY OF ABNER STONE”
Illustrated from Drawings by CHARLES LIVINGSTON BULL
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Copyright, 1903, 1904, BY FRANK LESLIE PUBLISHING HOUSE.
Copyright, 1904, BY FIELD AND STREAM, INC.
Copyright, 1905, BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
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The author wishes to make public acknowledgment to _Leslie’s Monthly Magazine_ for permission to use in this volume “The Race of the Swift,” “The King of the Northern Slope,” and “The Ghost Coon.” Thanks are also due _Field and Stream_ for their courtesy in allowing the use of “The Fight on the Tree-Bridge.” The other stories presented here have never appeared in print before.
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS From drawings by Charles Livingston Bull
“The gray fox was leading bravely.” _Frontispiece_
“Zigzagging nimbly, he strove to elude 41 his pursuer”
“The King stopped long enough to throw 143 back his head and give one terrifying scream of victory”
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A HALVED moon was shedding a faint glow over the rugged knob country. The twisted, broken, distorted ground, with its spasmodic growth of blackberry, sassafras, and juniper bushes, seemed the center of desolation. But something was living, moving, in the midst of this loneliness. Creeping along a ragged fence line at the base of a knob went a stealthy figure. Sharp-muzzled, keen-eyed, lean of body and wiry of limb, the object moved forward at a swift trot. The night was young. Scarcely had the salmon tints which the sun had left in the west disappeared. Through the pure, lambent air the rolling tones of the farmer could be heard as he called his pigs home. Above the high hills gleamed the timid tapers of the early stars. A low breeze was chanting a gentle vesper among the pines and oaks upon the knob-side. A blundering rabbit butted blindly through the weeds on the creek bank; a bullfrog, fat and inert, bellowed forth his thunderous note; a muskrat splashed softly from a half-sunken log and spread his flat paddles to propel him to his hidden home. A whip-poor-will’s heart-broken tones came from a point further down the hollow. Nature was saying that the day was gone.