he nearest running water as fast as he could go; and that was
the place for the trapper to look for him, for, after drinking, the fox
soon expired. It has been argued that poison is more humane than the
steel trap, since it brings a quick death; but both are cruel. There are
also other considerations that weigh against the use of poison; but at
that time there was no law against it.

The furrier who wrote to Willis offered to send him a box of those pills
for seventy-five cents. We talked it over and agreed to try it, and
Addison and I contributed the money.

A few days later Willis received the pills and proceeded to lay them out
after a plan of his own. He cut several tallow candles into pieces about
an inch long, and embedded a pill in each. When he had prepared twenty
or more of those pieces of poisoned tallow, he put them in what he
called a fox bed, of oat chaff, behind that old barn. The bed was about
as large as the floor of a small room. At that time of year farmers were
killing poultry, and Willis collected a basketful of chickens' and
turkeys' heads to put into the bed along with the pieces of tallow. He
thought that the foxes would smell the heads and dig the bed over.

We had said nothing to any one about it. The old Squire was away from
home; but we knew pretty well that he would not approve of that method
of getting foxes. Indeed, he had little sympathy with the use of traps.
Willis was the only one who looked after the bed, or, indeed, who went
up to the clearing at all.

During the next three or four weeks Willis gathered in not less than ten
pelts, I think. They were mostly red foxes, but one was a large "crossed
gray," the skin of which brought twenty-two dollars. After every few
days Willis "doctored" the bed with more pills; he probably used more
than a hundred.

What had happened to the colts was now clear. They had nuzzled that
chaff for the oat grains that were left in it and had picked up some of
those little balls of tallow. We wondered now that we had not at once
guessed the cause of their death, and we wondered, too, that we had not
thought of the fox bed and the danger from it when we first turned the
colts into the pasture. The fact remains, however, that it had never
occurred to us that fox pills would poison colts as well as foxes.

All that day as we worked we brooded over it; and that evening, when we
had done the chores, we stole off to the Murches' and, calling Willis
out, told