Now a good windfall has come to him. A rural mail-carrier brought word of a silver fox which had been trapped on a farm fifteen miles out in the country. Jerome only waited to telegraph to a big fur dealer for whom he works, who has lately established a fox farm, and started off at once. He found even better than he had hoped. The fox was a perfect young male, coal black, and hardly scratched by the trap.
In the recent craze over fox-raising, as much as ten thousand dollars has been paid, in our State, for a first-rate black fox. Of course Jerome would only get a commission, but this was the first big chance that had come to him and he was beside himself with anxiety lest it miscarry. It was a sharp February night, but he slept in the barn beside his prize, and the next morning drove home, dreading every drift and thank-you-ma’am, for fear they might upset, and the slight crate that held the fox might break.
That night he slept on the floor of his shop, wrapping himself in the sleigh robes. The fox ate the meat given him with a good appetite, and curled up contentedly enough to sleep; but as the first grayness began to show before dawn, he stood up, bristling a little, and barked, a far-away, lonely sound, Jerome said. The next day he was forwarded to the dealer in safety.
My father has shot and hunted all about this region, going on snow-shoes after foxes and hares in winter, with one of the forest farmers—generally one of the Huntingtons—as guide or companion; coming into the warm dark farm kitchen for a warm-up before the long ride or drive home. The Huntingtons always had good dogs. Bugle, a fox-hound famous through the countryside, belonged to them.
John Huntington is the man whom neither bee nor wasp will sting. He is sent for all about to take away troublesome hornets’ nests, which he simply tears down and pulls to pieces with his bare hands. Some hornets built a huge nest over the door of the stable at the Homestead not long ago, just where the men come and go for milking. One of the farm men wanted to take a torch and smoke it out, but Thomas Burnham, the farmer in charge, sent all the way over to Tresumpscott for John Huntington. He came, a silent, dark, shambling man; looked at the nest, nodded, asked for a ladder, climbed up, and unconcernedly pulled the whole thing down, while the furious hornets swarmed over his uncovered face and hands. He reached a finger down his neck, first on one side, then the other, and took out handfuls of them, and scraped them off where they had crawled up his sleeves. He tore the nest up, threw it on the ground, and stamped on it, and with few words went back to his farm.