e cave's floor at a gait partaking of roll, crawl, and gallop,
and flung himself straight at the well-furred throat of the unsuspecting
vixen.

Even as an accomplished swordsman may be wounded by the unexpectedness
of the onslaught of some ignorant youngster who hardly knows a sword's
pommel from its point, so this murderously inclined vixen was bowled
over by the astounding attack of Master Black-and-Gray. The slope was
very steep and the pup's spring a bolt from the blue. The vixen slipped,
lost her footing, and went slithering down the dry grass from the ledge,
snapping at the air as she slid, with bites, any one of which would
easily have closed Black-and-Gray's career if they had reached him. But
the puppy was quite powerless to put on the brake, so to say, and his
progress down the slope was therefore far more rapid than that of the
vixen. The breath was entirely knocked out of Black-and-Gray when he
finally was brought up, all standing, by a sharp little rise of ground
alongside the gap past which one saw across the Sussex weald from
Desdemona's cave. Here it seemed he must pay the ultimate penalty of his
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 bor