What that gentleman thought of it all nobody can say. Whether he resented the fact that his coat was considered too good for him, and just good enough for a cap for somebody else; or whether he felt complimented that he was esteemed so game that it was accounted a pleasure to see him fight, singly, a score of savage dogs, and die in the jaws of the enemies he crippled, nobody will ever know. The only certain thing is that he carried his fat and his fur, and his palpitating identity inside of them, as fast and as far as he could. And then in desperation he swiftly climbed a tree, and sat there panting, looking down with eyes whose dilated pupils defied the night, to mark how the fierce rout came at full cry over the rise. The boys knew what he had done, notwithstanding the dark forests that intervened, for the dogs announced in loud and joyful barks that the coon was treed as they besieged the oak, springing as high as they could about its trunk. There was a chorus, “Oh, Mister Coon!” from the hunters as they came pelting over the hill, almost dead beat with the run. For the coon had footed it bravely, and treeing him was long delayed. The torches, skimming swiftly about under the oak, which was close upon a precipice, flared in the darkness far along the slopes, and the coon hunt glimpsed from the distant cove was like an errant constellation, run away from the skies. Nearer, flame and smoke flaunted back in the wind, showing the colors of a limited section of the autumn woods close about, and thus conjuring an oasis of gorgeous brilliance in that desert of gloom. In the radiance of the fringed flaring lights might be distinguished, in high relief against the dusky background, Ike’s eager face, and Skimpy’s hatchet-like features,—as he bent to beseech Bose to calm himself instead of bounding futilely about the tree which he could not climb like the dream-dog,—and the muscular poses of Obadiah Sawyer, who wielded the axe about the trunk of the tree. How the echoes answered! How the rocks rang with the stalwart strokes! The chips flew with every cleavage. The dogs leaped, and barked on every shrill key of impatience. The coon, barely visible, crouched in the darkness, growled, and looked down on his boisterous enemies. “Keep out’n the way o’ this axe, I tell ye,” Obadiah Sawyer would cry as the backward motion would threaten one of the boys or their four-footed comrades, who pressed so close about the tree as to lose all sense of safety. Suddenly, without any warning, the trunk of the tree not half severed, the coon ran down almost over Obadiah into the midst of the dogs. There was a frantic plunge amongst them; a fierce growling and yelping and snapping; a crunching of teeth; and now and then as one suffered the sharp fangs of the coon, a hideous clamor that seemed to pierce the sky.