Tige paused not for reflection. He sprang upon the porch, capering gleefully about, and uttering shrill yelps of discovery with much his triumphant manner in treeing a coon. Leonidas shared the common human weakness of overestimating one’s own size. He thought to hold the booty out of Tige’s reach, and extended his arm at full length, whereupon the dog, with an elastic bound and extreme nicety of aim, caught it and swallowed it at a single gulp. Leonidas winked very fast; then, realizing his bereavement, burst into noisy tears. Tige’s facetiousness had a discordantly sudden contrast in the serious howl he emitted as he was kicked off the porch by the child’s father. This was an unkempt young fellow just emerging from the shed-room. He had a red face and swollen eyes, and there were various drowsy intimations in his manner that he was just roused from sleep. No natural slumber, one might have judged; the odor of whiskey still hung about him, and he walked with an unsteady gait to the end of the porch and sat down on the edge of the floor, his feet dangling over the ground. Tige, who had sought refuge beneath the house, and was giving vent to sundry sobbing wheezes, thrust his head out to lick his master’s boots. Upon this mollifying demonstration, the man looked down with the lenient expression of one who loves dogs. “What ails ye, then,” he reasoned, “ter be sech a fool as ter ’low ye kin be let ter rob a child the size o’ L’onidas thar?” And forthwith the mercurial Tige came out, cheerful as before. In the limited interval when Leonidas—who had been supplied with another piece of meat, but still wept aloud with callow persistence because of the affronts offered by Tige—was fain to pause for breath, and between the alternate creaking of the treadle of the loom and the thumping of the batten, the man’s ear caught that unwonted stir in the air, the sound of consecutive rifle-shots. “Look-a-hyar,” he cried, springing to his feet, “what’s that a-goin’ on down in the cove? Lethe, stop trompin’ on that thar n’isy treadle, so ez I kin listen! Quit yellin’, ye catamount!” with a vengeful glance at the small boy. But the grief of Leonidas was imperative, and he abated nothing. Jacob Jessup stood for an instant baffled. Then suddenly he put both hands to his mouth, and roused all the echoes of Wild-Cat Hollow with a ringing halloo. “Who be ye a-hollerin’ at?” asked his mother from her nook in the chimney corner. “I ’lowed I viewed a man up yander ’mongst them woods,—mought be one o’ the herders.”