The Danger Mark Part 72

"What! Why not?"

"Because it rather looks as though I'm about to win my bet with you,"

observed Geraldine. "Please show me your boar, Scott." And she threw a cartridge into the magazine and started forward.

"Don't let her!" pleaded Kathleen. "Scott, it's ridiculous to let that child do such silly things----"

"Then stop her if you can," said Scott gloomily, following his sister.

"I don't know anything about wild boar, but I suppose straight shooting will take care of them, and Sis can do that if she keeps her nerve."

Geraldine, hastening ahead, rifle poised, scanned the woods with the palpitating curiosity of an amateur. Eyes and ears alert, she kept mechanically rea.s.suring herself that the thing to do was to shoot straight and keep cool, and to keep on shooting whichever way the boar might take it into his porcine head to run.

Scott hastened forward to her side:

"Here's the place," he said, looking about him. "He's concluded to make off, you see. They usually go off; they only stand when wounded or when they think they can't get away. He's harmless, I suppose--only it made me very tired to have him act that way. I hate to be backed out of my own property."

Geraldine, rather relieved, yet ashamed not to do all she could, began to walk toward a clump of low hemlocks. She had heard that wild boar take that sort of cover. She did not really expect to find anything there, so when a big black streak crashed out ahead of her she stood stock still in frozen astonishment, rifle clutched to her breast.

"Shoot!" shouted her brother.

"Oh, dear, oh, dear," she said helplessly, "he's gone out of sight! And I had such a splendid shot!" She stamped with vexation. "What a goose!"

she repeated. "I had a perfectly splendid shot. And all I did was to jump like a scared cat and stare!"

"Anyway, you didn't run, and that's a point gained," observed her brother. "I had to. And that's one on me."

A moment later he said: "I believe those impudent boar do need a little thinning out. When is Duane coming?"

"In November," said Geraldine, still looking vaguely about for the departed pig.

"Early?"

"I think so, if his father is all right again. I've asked Nada, too.

Rosalie wants to come----"

"Oh, for Heaven's sake, don't," he protested. "All I wanted was a shooting party to do a little scientific thinning out of these boar.

I'll do some myself, too."

Geraldine laughed. "Rosalie is a dead shot at a target, dear. She wrote asking us to invite her to shoot. I don't see how I can very well refuse her. Do you?"

"That means her husband, too," grumbled Scott, "and that entire bunch."

"No; if it's a shooting party, I don't have to ask him."

Her brother said ungraciously: "Well, I don't care who you ask if they'll thin out these cheeky brutes. Fancy that two-year-old pig clattering his tusks at me, planted there in the path with his mane on end!--You know it mortifies me, Kathleen--it certainly does. One of these fine days some facetious pig will send me shinning up a tree!" He grew madder at the speculative indignity. "By ginger! I'm going to have a shooting party before the snow flies," he muttered, walking forward between Kathleen and his sister. "Keep your eyes out ahead; we may jump another at any time, as the wind is all right. And if we do, let him have it, Geraldine!"

It was a beautiful woodland through which they moved.

The late autumn foliage was unusually magnificent, lacking, this year, those garish and discordant hues which Americans think it necessary to admire. Oak brown and elm yellow, deep chrome bronze and sombre crimson the hard woods glowed against backgrounds of pine and hemlock. Larches were mossy cones of feathery gold; birches slim shafts of snowy gray, ochre-crowned; silver and green the balsams' spires pierced the canopy of splendid tapestry upborne by ash and oak and towering pine under a sky of blue so deep and intense that the lakes reflecting it seemed no less vivid.

Already in the brooks they pa.s.sed painted trout hung low over every bed of gravel and white sand; the male trout wore his best scarlet fins, and his sides glowed in alternate patterns, jewelled with ruby and sapphire spots. Already the ruffed grouse thundered up by coveys, though they had not yet packed, for the broods still retained their autonomy.

But somewhere beyond the royal azure of the northern sky, very, very far away, there was cold in the world, for even last week, through the violet and primrose dusk, out of the north, shadowy winged things came speeding, batlike phantoms against the dying light--flight-woodc.o.c.k coming through hill-cleft and valley to the land where summer lingered still.

And there in mid-forest, right in the tall timber, Scott, advancing, flushed a woodc.o.c.k, which darted up, filling the forest with twittering music--the truest music of our eastern autumn, clear, bewildering, charming in its evanescent sweetness which leaves in its wake a startling silence.

Ahead, lining both sides of a gully deep with last year's leaves, was an oak grove in mid-forest. Here the brown earth was usually furrowed by the black snouts of wild boar, for mast lay thick here in autumn and tender roots invited investigation.

"Get down flat and crawl," whispered Scott; "there may be a boar or two on the grounds."

Kathleen, in her pretty white gown of lace and some sheer stuff, looked at him piteously; but when he and Geraldine dropped flat and wriggled forward into the wind, misgiving of what might prowl behind seized her, and she tucked up her skirts and gave herself to the brown earth with a tremor of indignation and despair.

Nearer and nearer they crept, making very little sound; but they made enough to rouse a young boar, who jerked his head into the air, where he stood among the acorns, big, furry ears high and wide, nose working nervously.

"He's only a yearling," breathed Scott in his sister's ear. "There are traces of stripes, if you look hard. Wait for a better one."

They lay silent, all three peering down at the yearling, who stood motionless, nosing for tainted air, listening, peering about with dull, near-sighted eyes.

And, after a long time, as they made no sound, the brute wheeled suddenly, made a complete circle at a nervous trout, uttered a series of short, staccato sounds that, when he became older, would become deeper, more of an ominous roar than a hoa.r.s.e and irritated grunt.

Two deer, a doe and a fawn, came picking their way cautiously along the edge of the gully, sometimes flattening their ears, sometimes necks outstretched, ears forward, peering ahead at the young and bad-tempered pig.

The latter saw them, turned in fury and charged with swiftness incredible, and the deer stampeded headlong through the forest.

"What a fierce, little brute!" whispered Kathleen, appalled. "Scott, if he comes any nearer, I'm going to get into a tree."

"If he sees us or winds us he'll run. Don't move; there may be a good boar in presently. I've thought two or three times that I heard something on that hemlock ridge."

They listened, holding their breath. Crack! went a distant stick.

Silence; nothing stirred except the yearling who had returned to the mast and was eagerly nosing among the acorns. They could hear him crunching the husks, see the gleam of long white teeth which one day would grow outside that furry muzzle and curve up and backward like ivory sabres.

Geraldine whispered: "There's a huge black thing moving in the hemlock scrub. I can see its feet against the sky-line, and sometimes part of its bulk----"

"Oh, heavens," breathed Kathleen, "what is that?"

Out of the scrub trotted a huge, s.h.a.ggy, black thing, all head and shoulders, with body slanting back abruptly to a pair of weak hindquarters. Down the slope it ran in quick, noiseless, jerky steps; the yearling turned his head, still munching, ears c.o.c.ked forward. And suddenly the monster rushed at him with a squeal, and the yearling shrieked and fled, chased clear up the slope.

"It's a sow; don't shoot," whispered Scott. "Look, Sis, you can't see a sign of tusks. Good heavens, what a huge creature she is!"

Fierce, formidable, the great beast halted; three striped, partly grown pigs came rushing and frisking down the gully to join her, filling the forest with their clumsy clatter and baby squealing. From the ridge the two deer, who had sneaked back, regarded the scene with terrified fascination.

Presently the yearling rushed them out again, then sidled down, venturing to the edge of the feeding-ground, where he began to crunch acorns again with a cautious eye on the sow and her noisy brood.

Here and there a brilliant blue-jay floated down, seized an acorn, and winged hastily to some near tree where presently he filled the woods with the noise he made in hammering the acorn into some cleft in the bark.

Gradually the sunlight on the leaves reddened; long, luminous shadows lengthened eastward. Kathleen, lying at full length, her pretty face between her hands, suddenly sneezed.

The next moment the feeding-ground was deserted; only a distant crashing betrayed the line of flight where the great fierce sow and her young were rushing upward toward the rocks of the Gilded Dome.

"I'm so sorry," faltered Kathleen, very pink and embarra.s.sed.