It was quite dark before they were fairly started. The shadows gloomed thick about them. The stars were in the sky. The sound of the boyish voices whooping and calling, and singing snatches of the coon-song, echoed far and wide among the solemn woods and the listening rocks. The dogs answered to the eager urgency of their masters by wheezing and snuffing about the ground as they ran with their muzzles down, but the best among them, even the preëminent Bose, could conjure no coon where no coon was. “What ails ’em ter take ter sech a piece o’ briars,” Skimpy cried out suddenly with an accompaniment of a ripping sound. “Ef I tear up these hyar clothes o’ mine enny mo’ I’ll hev some rents ter mend in my skin, fur my mother hev sot it down ef I gin her so many repairs ter make she’ll gin me some.” This terrifying prospect did not unduly alarm Skimpy nor hinder his joyous pursuit of the coon. He was the first fellow to fall into the briars and to flounder into the branch. His nimble feet followed more closely than any others their canine precursors. It was he who cried out and encouraged the dogs and kept them together, and even the self-sufficient and experienced Bose hearkened to his counsel and lent himself to guidance. Skimpy was close upon the docked tail of this animal when suddenly the wheezing Bose emitted a short sharp cry and sprang off in the darkness with all the dogs after him. VII. The moon was just beginning to rise. A vague red glow suffused the summit of the eastern mountains. It hardly revealed, but in some sort it suggested, the presence of the vast forests of the Cove, that still stood dusky and gloomily mysterious. The solemn silence, native to the solitudes, was for the nonce annihilated. The whole night seemed to ring with the shouting triumph of the boys. The cry of the dogs was unintermittent. Naught impeded the wild chase, save that now and then a projecting root caught an unwary foot, and a boy would go crashing to the ground, his companions jumping over his prostrate form, or perhaps falling upon him, then scrambling up together and away again hilariously. Sometimes a horn would sound, and if one had cared to listen he might have wondered to hear the countless blasts that the echoes wound, or laughed to fancy how that mimic chase in the air did fare. Sometimes, too, a voice would call out from the van of the line, “Oh, Mister Coon!” And anon Keedon Bluffs repeated the words in a solemn staccato, as if they were some uncomprehended incantation. “Oh, Mister Coon!”