that he had better move along. Plainly, conditions were not favorable just then for another attack on Chad's big white hens.
Ringtail paused long enough to scratch one blacktipped, rusty-red ear with a hind foot. Then he turned and trotted silently away through the cassena thickets. Before long, his thoughts occupied with other matters of more immediate interest, the fox had forgotten the young hunter roaming somewhere in the woods with his gun.
The boy moved softly, slowly, all his senses alert. In that place and at that hour anything might happen. As yet the morning light had barely begun to filter down through the dense evergreen foliage of the pines; but scattered through the pine wood were other trees—oaks and maples and sweet gums—already almost bare of leaves; and wherever one of these trees stood amid the pines, light was let in to illumine the dim interior of the forest. Chad was grateful for this light, yet found it baffling. Three times he halted suddenly, convinced that he had seen some living thing move on the carpet of brown pinestraw far away amid the trees; and three times he owned that his keen, practiced eyes had been deceived.
The thing that he hoped to see was a wild turkey. A visitor, a friend of his father's, was expected at
