ate clashing of fang against fang kept the attacker off her throat.
It could not last.

Then it was, at that moment, that a sharp little, gray little,
dark-spotted, clean-cut, close-cropped, intelligent head, on a snaky,
long neck, peeped out of the shadows, and peered about, as if to see what
in whiskers all the pother was about. The head might have been there by
chance, but it wasn't. Its owner had been running her trail for hours,
and looking for it for days, and didn't mean to let her go, now that he
had finally come up with her, polecats or no polecats, smells or not.
But he was not a fool. He knew the game, the bitter, cruel game of
death, as it is played throughout the wild. With man the inexorable law
is, "Get on or get out." In the wild they phrase it another way: "Kill
or be killed." Man puts it more politely, perhaps, but it's all the same
old natural law, I guess.

The head and snaky neck developed a long, creamy, tawny-spotted body, and
the body a long, banded, tapering tail--all set on legs so short, they
scarcely kept the owner off the ground; and the name of that beast was
genet. The same are a sort of distant relation of the cats, a fourth
cousin once removed; but it is necessary to tell you, because you might
think they were beautiful weasels, otherwise. _And she was a genet_,
too--the murderess that might have been.

Then the new-comer moved. Then he began to move, and--here! It was just
like the buzzing of a fly in a tumbler. Certainly you could say that he
was still there, but you could not swear that you actually saw him.

The first that the polecat knew of him was that red-hot fork-like feeling
that means fangs in the back of your neck. The polecat spun on herself,
and bit, quick as an electric needle, at the spotted thing, that promptly
ceased to be there, and, to use the professional term, she "made the
stink" for all she was worth. She forgot all about the long female
would-be slayer of her children, and the genet was mightily thankful to
drag herself clear, but she would not have been she if she had failed to
get her fangs home, as a parting shot, before she went.

Then, I fancy, she was ill; and, upon my soul, I don't wonder. It was
enough to asphyxiate a whale-factory hand. But the male genet was not
ill, or, if he was, he was moving from place to place too quickly to give
the fact away; and by the time he shot up a tree, like a long, rippling,
cream and tawny-dappled, ban