unheard-of temerity, and be despatched by the now thoroughly angered
vixen at her leisure.

But in that same moment a number of other things happened. In the first
place, having reached it from the far side of the ridge, Desdemona
appeared beside the mouth of her cave, dangling a young rabbit from her
jaws. In the second place, Finn appeared, climbing from the landward
side, in the gap beside which the puppy came to the end of its long
tumbling flight. Midway between the gap and the cave, the startled vixen
crouched on the slope, turning her head from the terrible vision of
Finn, upward to the scarcely less alarming vision of Desdemona, now
sniffing in the fact of her little daughter's murder.

The position was a parlous one for the vixen, and as she pulled herself
together for flight along the side of the slope she doubtless regretted
bitterly the curiosity which had impelled her to visit the den of her
departed relative.

The vixen leaped warily and doubled with real agility. But Finn was
easily her master in the arts of the chase, and his strength was ten
times greater than that of any fox in Sussex. The vixen was still well
within sight from Desdemona's cave when her time came. She leaped and
snapped, and faced overwhelming odds without wavering, but her race was
run when the wolfhound's great weight bore her to the earth and his
massive jaw closed about her ruff as a vise grips wood.

And in the moment of the vixen's death, just as Master Black-and-Gray so
far recovered his breath and his senses as to sit up and take stock of
himself; a pony's nose appeared in the gap alongside him and introduced
another new experience into this adventurous puppy's life. The pony must