w that to shoot to kill was necessary, for the beast was
about to force a fight in which the hunter himself would be put upon
the defensive.

"I won't shoot you through the head, my beauty," he said, softly, "nor
will I puncture your beautiful coat with this load of mine, but I'll
kill you in a new way."

With this he pulled the trigger. The powder exploded, the string
binding the long black spring into a coil broke, and immediately the
strip of steel shot forth into the air, made directly toward the neck
of the rushing moose, and coiling its whole sinuous length tightly
about the doomed creature's throat strangled him to death.

As the Twins' father said, a feat of that kind entitled the Baron to a
high place in fiction at least, if not in history itself. The Twins
were very much wrought up over the incident, particularly, when one
too-smart small imp who was spending the summer at the same hotel
where they were said that he didn't believe it,--but he was an imp who
had never seen a cheap watch, so how should he know anything about
what could be done with a spring that cannot be wound up by a great
strong man in less than ten minutes?

As for the Baron he was very modest about the achievement, for when he
first appeared at the Twins' home after their return he had actually
forgotten all about it, and, in fact, could not recall the incident at
all, until Diavolo brought him his own letter, when, of course, the
whole matter came back to him.

"It wasn't so very wonderful, anyhow," said the Baron. "I should not
think, for instance, of bragging about any such thing as that. It was
a simple affair all through."

"And what did you do with the moose's antlers?" asked Angelica. "I
hope you brought 'em home with you, because I'd like to see 'em."

"I wanted to," said the Baron, stroking the Twins' soft brown locks
affectionately. "I wanted to bring them home for your father to use as
a hat rack, dear, but they were too large. When I had removed them
from the dead animal, I found them so large that I could not get them
out of the forest, they got so tangled up in the trees. I should have
had to clear a path twenty feet wide and seven miles long to get them
even as far as my friend's hut, and after that they would have had to
be carried thirty miles through the woods to the express office."

"I guess it's just as well after all," said Diavolo. "If they were as
big as all that, Papa would have had to build a new house to