This suggestion settled it. Starrie Chase, otherwise Leon, might let his boyish energy leak off as waste steam in planting another thorn in the side of the hard-worked doctor who bore the burdens of half the community, and in persecuting lonely old women, but--he was supposed to know the way to Varney's Paintpot!
And the three started along the road to find him.
The quest did not lead them far. Rounding a bend in the highroad, they came abruptly upon Leon Starr Chase, familiarly called Starrie, almost a fifteen-year-old boy, of Nixon's age.
He was leaning against a low fence above the marshes, holding a dead bird high above the head of a very lively fox-terrier whose tan ears gesticulated like tiny signal flags as he jumped into the air to capture it, with a short one-syllabled bark.
"Ha! _you_ can't catch it, Blink--and you shan't have it till you do," teased his master, lowering its limp yellow legs a little.
The dog's nose touched them. The next instant he had the bird in his mouth.
With equal swiftness he dropped it on the sidewalk, growling and gagging at the warm feathers which almost choked him. "Ugh-r-r!" He spurned it with his black nose along the ground, the tiny yellow claws raking up minute spirals of dust.
"There! I knew you wouldn't eat it," remarked his master indifferently. "You're a spoiled pup!" Simultaneously Leon caught sight of the three boys making toward him and burst into a complacent shout of recognition.
"Hullo, Colin! Hullo, Coombsie!" he cried. "See what I've got! Six _yellow-legs_! I fired into a flock; the first I've seen this year. They were going from me and I dropped half a dozen of them together, with this old 'fuzzee'!" He touched an ancient shotgun propped beside him. "I've shot quite a number one at a time this week."
His left hand went out to a huddle of still quivering feathers on top of the fence in which five pairs of yellow spindle-legs were tangled like slim twigs.
Colin, as was expected of him, burst into an exclamation of wonder at this destructive skill. Coombsie's admiration was more forced.
Blink, the terrier, scornfully rolled over the feathered thing in the dust. He snapped angrily at the stranger, Nixon Warren, who tried to pick it up and examine it.