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 him about it and asked him what he thought we had better do. At first he was incredulous, then thoroughly alarmed. It was not so much the thought of having to settle for the loss of the horses that terrified him as it was the dread that he might be imprisoned for exposing poison to domestic animals. "Don't say a word!" he exclaimed. "Nobody knows about that fox bed. If we keep still, it will never come out." Addison and I both felt that such secrecy would leave us with a mighty mean feeling in our hearts; but Willis begged us never to say a word about it to any one. He was as penitent as we were, I think; but the thought that he might have to go to jail filled him with panic. We went home in a very uncomfortable frame of mind, without having reached any decision. "We've got to square this somehow," Addison said. "If I had the money, I'd settle for the colts and say nothing more to Willis about it." "Money wouldn't make Mrs. Kennard feel much better," I said.