Mart Penniman and Abe Selover had started their great "game" on the way home from driving their cows. They had raced him across the pasture and along the fence, into the stone-heap, and then Abe had staid to keep watch while Mart went after Julius Davis's dog. That meant also, of course, as large a crowd of boys as he could pick up in going and coming. It was a sad thing for Julius that his mother had set him at the potato-patch, and that Quib had broken his contract with the bone. Quib was not usually so treacherous, but he happened to be on friendly terms with every boy of that hunting-party. They had all helped him chase woodchucks at one time or another, and he had great confidence in them, but that was nothing at all to their confidence in him. The pasture bars did not stop a single one of the woodchuck-hunters. All the boys went over while Quib was wriggling under, through a hole he knew, and there, almost right before them was the stone-heap. It was quite a large one, and it was thickly overgrown with wild raspberry vines. "Abe--is he there?" "He didn't get away, did he?" "Are you sure he is in there?" "Quib! Quib!" shouted Abe. "Woodchucks! Quib, woodchucks! Right in here. Find 'em!" Quib was dancing around in a quiver of noisy excitement, for he had caught a sniff of something under the first bush he sprang into. How he did bark and yelp and scratch, for about a minute! "Poys! Poys! Vat is all dis? Vat you want vis mein stone-heap, eh?" It was old Hamburger himself climbing the fence, and he looked longer and leaner just then, and had more pipe in his mouth, than the boys thought they had ever seen before. "The finest woodchuck you ever saw, Mr. Hamburger," began Cole Thomas, by way of an apology. "Vootchuck! Dat's it! Ant so you puts a tog into mein stone-heap, and you steps onto mein grass, ant you knock ober all mein beautiful mullein-stalks and mein thistles and mein scoke-veeds!" Puff! puff! came the great clouds of smoke from the grim lips of the old German, but it struck Cole Thomas that Mr. Hamburger himself was on the watch for that woodchuck. Bow-wow-yow-yelp! and Mart shouted: "There he goes!" "Hi! We'll get him!" screamed Abe. "Take him, Quib! Take him!" Quib had started a woodchuck. There was never a stone-heap piled up that had room in it for both a dog and a woodchuck. Mr. Hamburger took the pipe out of his mouth, which was a thing nobody could remember ever having seen him do. "Dose poys! Dat vootchuck! De tog is a goot von. Dey vill preak dare little necks. Joost see how dey run! But de tog is de pest runner of dem poys, egsept de vootchuck." Mr. Hamburger did not run. Nobody had ever seen him do any such thing as that. But he walked on across the pasture-lot, toward the deep ravine that cut through the side of the hill to the valley.