such a wonderful
pose, still as a statue, frozen like a hiding partridge, unbudging as a
lone kid Antelope in May. And Josh raised--yes, he had come for that--he
raised that fatal gun. The lantern blazed in the Fox's face at twenty
yards; the light was flung back doubled by its shining eyes; it looked
perfectly clear. Josh lined the gun, but, strange to tell, the sights so
plain were lost at once, and the gun was shaking like a sorghum stalk
while the Gopher gnaws its root.

[Illustration]

He laid the weapon down with a groan, cursed his own poor trembling
hand, and in an instant the wonder Fox was gone.

Poor Josh! He wasn't bad-tongued, but now he used all the evil words he
had ever heard, and he was Western bred. Then he reacted on himself.
"The Fox might come back!" Suddenly he remembered something. He got out
a common sulphur match. He wet it on his lips and rubbed it on the
muzzle sight: Then on each side of the notch on the breech sight. He
lined it for a tree. Yes! surely! What had been a blur of blackness had
now a visible form.

A faint bark on a far hillside might mean a coming or a going Fox. Josh
waited five minutes, then again he squeaked on his bare hand. The effect
was a surprise when from the shelter of the stable wall ten feet below
there leaped the great dark Fox. At fifteen feet it paused. Those yellow
orbs were fiery in the light and the rifle sights with the specks of
fire were lined. There was a sharp report and the black-robed fur was
still and limp in the snow.

Who can tell the crack of a small rifle among the louder cracks of green
logs splitting with the fierce frost of a Yellowstone winter's night?
Why should travel-worn, storm-worn travellers wake at each slight,
usual sound? Who knows? Who cares?

* * * * *

And afar in Livingston what did the fur dealer care? It was a great
prize--or the banker? he got his five hundred, and mother found it easy
to accept the Indians' creed: "Who owns wild beasts? The man who kills
them."

"I did not know how it would come," she said; "I only knew it would
come, for I prayed and believed."

We know that it came when it meant the most. The house was saved. It was
the turn in their fortune's tide, and the crucial moment of the change
was when those three bright sulphur spots were lined with the living
lamps in the head of the Silver Fox. Yes! Josh was a poacher. Just once.

[Illustration]

THE VILLAIN IN VELV