“They all bark alike after a coon.”  John York was as excited as anybody.  “Git the guns laid out to hand, boys; I told you we’d ought to follow!” he commanded.  “If it’s the old fellow that belongs here, he may put in any minute.”  But there was again a long silence and state of suspense; the chase had turned another way.  There were faint distant yaps.  The fire burned low and fell together with a shower of sparks.  The smaller boys began to grow chilly and sleepy, when there was a thud and rustle and snapping of twigs close at hand, then the gasp of a breathless dog.  Two dim shapes rushed by; a shower of bark fell, and a dog began to sing at the foot of the great twisted pine not fifty feet away.

“Hooray for Tiger!” yelled the boys; but the dog’s voice filled all the woods.  It might have echoed to the mountain-tops.  There was the old coon; they could all see him half-way up the tree, flat to the great limb.  They heaped the fire with dry branches till it flared high.  Now they lost him in a shadow as he twisted about the tree.  John York fired, and Isaac Brown fired, and the boys took a turn at the guns, while John Henry started to climb a neighboring oak; but at last it was Isaac who brought the coon to ground with a lucky shot, and the dog stopped his deafening bark and frantic leaping in the underbrush, and after an astonishing moment of silence crept out, a proud victor, to his prouder master’s feet.

“Goodness alive, who’s this?  Good for you, old handsome!  Why, I’ll be hanged if it ain’t old Rover, boys; it’s old Rover!” But Isaac could not speak another word.  They all crowded round the wistful, clumsy old dog, whose eyes shone bright, though his breath was all gone.  Each man patted him, and praised him and said they ought to have mistrusted all the time that it could be nobody but he.  It was some minutes before Isaac Brown could trust himself to do anything but pat the sleek old head that was always ready to his hand.

“He must have overheard us talkin’; I guess he’d have come if he’d dropped dead half-way,” proclaimed John Henry, like a prince of the reigning house; and Rover wagged his tail as if in honest assent, as he lay at his master’s side.  They sat together, while the fire was brightened again to make a good light for the coon-hunt supper; and Rover had a good half of everything that found its way into his master’s hand.  It was toward midnight when the triumphal procession set forth toward home, with the two lanterns, across the fields.

V

The next morning was bright and warm after the hard frost of the night before.  Old Rover was asleep on the doorstep in the sun, and his master stood in the yard, and saw neighbor Price come along the road in her best array, with a gay holiday air.

“Well, now,” she said eagerly, “you wa’n’t out very late last night, was you?  I got up myself to let Tiger in.  He come home, all beat out, about a quarter past nine.  I expect you hadn’t no kind o’ trouble gittin’ the coon.  The boys was tellin’ me he weighed ’most thirty pounds.”