“Come hyer, boy,” the old man ordered when Bayard appeared. “Hyer, Rafe, git me that ’ere bait line.” Rafe went out, returning presently with a bit of pork rind on the end of a string. The old man took it and hauled the puppies ungently into the light, where they crouched abjectly—as strange a litter as Bayard had ever seen.
No two of them looked alike, and none of them looked like any other living creature—neither fox nor hound, partaking of both, yet neither; and despite their soft infancy there was about them something monstrous and contradictory and obscene, here a fox’s keen, cruel muzzle between the melting, sad eyes of a hound and its mild ears, there limp ears tried valiantly to stand erect and failed ignobly in flapping points; and limp, brief tails brushed over with a faint golden fuzz like the insides of chestnut burrs.
As regards color, they ranged from reddish brown through an indiscriminate brindle to pure ticked beneath a faint dun cast, and one of them had, feature for feature, old General’s face in comical miniature, even to his expression of sad and dignified disillusion. “Watch ’em now,” the old man directed.
He got them all facing forward; then he dangled the meat directly behind them. Not one became aware of its presence; he swept it back and forth just above their heads; not one looked up. Then he swung it directly before their eyes; still they crouched diffidently on their young, unsteady legs and gazed at the meat with curiosity but without any personal interest whatever, and fell again to moiling soundlessly among themselves.
“You can’t tell nothin’ about dawgs—” Jackson began. His father interrupted him.
“Now, watch.” He held the puppies with one hand and with the other he forced the meat into their mouths. Immediately they surged clumsily and eagerly over his hand, but he moved the meat away and at the length of the string he dragged it along the floor just ahead of them until they had attained a sort of scrambling lope.
Then in midfloor he flicked the meat slightly aside, but without swerving the puppies blundered on and into a shadowy corner, where the wall stopped them and from which there rose presently the patient, voiceless confusion of them. Jackson crossed the floor and picked them up and brought them back to the fire.
“Now, what do you think of them, fer a pack of huntin’ dawgs?” the old man demanded. “Can’t smell, can’t bark, and damn ef I believe they kin see.”
“You can’t tell nothin’ about a dawg—” Jackson essayed patiently.
“Gen’ral kin,” his father interrupted. “Hyer, Rafe, call Gen’ral in hyer.”
Rafe went to the door and called, and presently General entered, his claws hissing a little on the bare floor and his ticked coat beaded with rain, and he stood and looked into the old man’s face with grave inquiry.
“Come hyer,” Mr. MacCallum said, and the dog moved again, with slow dignity. At that moment he saw the puppies beneath Jackson’s chair. He paused in mid stride and for a moment he stood looking at them with fascination and bafflement and a sort of grave horror; then he gave his master one hurt, reproachful look and turned and departed, his tail between his legs. Mr. MacCallum sat down and rumbled heavily within himself.
“You can’t tell about dawgs—” Jackson repeated. He stooped and gathered up his charges, and rose.
Mr. MacCallum continued to rumble and shake. “Well, I don’t blame the old feller,” he said. “Ef I had to look around on a passel of chaps like them and say to myself, ‘Them’s my boys’—” But Jackson was gone. The old man sat and rumbled again, with heavy enjoyment. “Yes, suh, I reckon I’d feel ’bout as proud as Gen’ral does. Rafe, han’ me down my pipe.”
All that day it rained, and the following day and the one after that. The dogs lurked about the house all morning, underfoot, or made brief excursions into the weather, returning to sprawl before the fire drowsing and malodorous and steaming until Henry came along and drove them out; twice from the door Bayard saw the fox, Ellen, fading with brisk diffidence across the yard.
With the exception of Henry and Jackson, who had a touch of rheumatism, the others were somewhere out in the rain most of the day. But at mealtime they gathered again, shucking their wet outer garments on the porch and stamping in to thrust their muddy, smoking boots to the fire while Henry fetched the kettle and the jug. And last of all, Buddy, soaking wet.
Buddy had a way of getting his lean length up from his niche beside the chimney at any hour of the day and departing without a word, to return in two hours or six or twelve or forty-eight, during which periods and despite the presence of Jackson and Henry and usually Lee, the place had a vague air of desertion, until Bayard realized that the majority of the dogs were absent also. Hunting, they told him, when Buddy had been missing since breakfast.
“Why didn’t he let me know?” Bayard demanded.
“Maybe he thought you wouldn’t keer to be out in the weather,” Jackson suggested.
“Buddy don’t mind weather,” Henry explained. “One day’s like another to him.”
“Nothin’ ain’t anything to Buddy,” Lee said, in his bitter, passionate voice. He sat brooding over the fire, his womanish hands moving restlessly on his knees. “He’d spend his whole life in that ’ere river bottom, with a hunk of cold cawn bread to eat and a passel of dawgs fer comp’ny.”
He rose abrubtly and quitted the room. Lee was in the late thirties. As a child he had been sickly. He had a good tenor voice and was much in demand at Sunday singings. He was supposed to be keeping company with a young woman living in the hamlet of Mount Vernon, six miles away. He spent much of his time tramping moodily and alone about the countryside.
Henry spat into the fire and jerked his head after the departing brother. “He been to Vernon lately?”
“Him and Rate was there two days ago,” Jackson answered.
Bayard said “Well, I won’t melt. I wonder if I could catch up with him now?”
They pondered tor a while, spitting gravely into the fire. “I misdoubt it,” Jackson said at last. “Buddy’s liable to be ten mile away by now. You ketch ’im next time befo’ he starts out.”
After that Bayard did so, and he and Buddy tried for birds in the skeletoned fields in the rain in which the guns made a flat, mournful sound that lingered in the streaming air like a spreading stain, or tried the stagnant backwaters along the river channel for duck and geese; or, accompanied now and then by Rate, hunted ’coon and wildcat in the bottom.
At times and far away, they would hear the shrill yapping of the young dogs in mad career. “There goes Ellen,” Buddy would remark. Then toward the end of the week the weather cleared, and in a twilight imminent with frost and while the scent lay well on the wet earth, old General started the red fox that had baffled him so many times.
All through the night the ringing, bell-like tones quavered and swelled and echoed among the hills, and all of them save Henry followed on horseback, guided by the cries of the hounds but mostly by the old man’s and Buddy’s uncanny and seemingly clairvoyant skill in anticipating the course of the race.
Occasionally they stopped while Buddy and his father wrangled about where the quarry would head next, but usually they agreed, apparently anticipating the animal’s movements before it knew them itself; and once and again they halted their mounts on a hill and sat in the frosty starlight until the dogs’ voices welled out of the darkness mournful and chiming, swelled louder and nearer and swept invisibly past, not halt a mile away; faded diminishing and with a falling suspense, as of bells, into the silence again.
“Thar, now!” the old man exclaimed, shapeless in his overcoat, on his white horse. “Ain’t that music fer a man, now?”
“I hope they git ’im this time,” Jackson said. “Hit hurts Gen’ral’s conceit so much ever’ time he fools ’im.”
“They won’t git ’im,” Buddy said. “Soon’s he gits tired, he’ll hole up in them rocks.”
“I reckon we’ll have to wait till them pups of Jackson’s gits big enough,” the old man agreed, “unless they’ll refuse to run they own granddaddy. They done refused ever’thing else except vittles.”
“You jest wait,” Jackson repeated, indefatigable. “When them puppies gits old enough to—”
“Listen.”
The talking ceased. Again across the night the dogs’ voices rang among the hills, long, ringing cries fading, falling with a quavering suspense, like touched bells or strings, repeated and sustained; by bell-like echoes repeated and dying among the dark hills beneath the stars, lingering yet in the ears crystal-clear, mournful and valiant and a little sad.
“Too bad Johnny ain’t here,” Stuart said quietly. “He’d enjoy this race.”
“He was a feller fer huntin’, now,” Jackson agreed. “He’d keep up with Buddy, even.”
“John was a fine boy,” the old man said.
“Yes, suh,” Jackson repeated, “a right warm-hearted boy. Henry says he never come out hyer withouten he brung Mandy and the boys a little sto’-bought somethin’.”
“He never sulled on a hunt,” Stuart said. “No matter how cold and wet it was,
