The black-and-gray pup snarled furiously, and the vixen leaped backward on the instant. Reflection made her scornfully ashamed of this movement, and she stepped delicately forward again. The smaller pup whimpered fearfully, and that was the poor thing's death-knell. The vixen promptly broke its neck with one snap of her powerful jaws and dragged the little creature out into the sunshine. All this time Master Black-and-Gray had been growling fiercely--his entire small body quivering under the strain of producing this martial sound. His fat back was pressed hard against the rear wall of the cave--partly, perhaps, to give him courage, and partly, no doubt, by way of getting a better purchase, so to say, for the task of growling, which really required all his small stock of strength. Outside the cave, in the sunshine, the vixen was sniffing and nosing at the body of the puppy she had killed. She presented her flank to Black-and-Gray's view, and, for herself, could see nothing inside the cave now. Black-and-Gray had seen his sister slain. The blood of great aristocrats and heroes was in his veins. His wrath was tremendous, overwhelming, in fact, and, but for the support of the cave's wall, would certainly have been too much for his still uncertain sense of balance. Suddenly now his ancestry spoke in this undeveloped creature. Determination took and shook him, and spurred him forward. With a sort of miniature roar--the merest little mixture of breathless growl, snarl, and embryonic bark--he blundered forth from his dark corner, hurtling over the cave's floor at a gait partaking of roll, crawl, and gallop, and flung himself straight at the well-furred throat of the unsuspecting vixen. Even as an accomplished swordsman may be wounded by the unexpectedness of the onslaught of some ignorant youngster who hardly knows a sword's pommel from its point, so this murderously inclined vixen was bowled over by the astounding attack of Master Black-and-Gray. The slope was very steep and the pup's spring a bolt from the blue. The vixen slipped, lost her footing, and went slithering down the dry grass from the ledge, snapping at the air as she slid, with bites, any one of which would easily have closed Black-and-Gray's career if they had reached him. But the puppy was quite powerless to put on the brake, so to say, and his progress down the slope was therefore far more rapid than that of the vixen. The breath was entirely knocked out of Black-and-Gray when he finally was brought up, all standing, by a sharp little rise of ground alongside the gap past which one saw across the Sussex weald from Desdemona's cave. Here it seemed he must pay the ultimate penalty of his unheard-of temerity, and be despatched by the now thoroughly angered vixen at her leisure.