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 body tense, his eyes gleaming. The big bronze bird had but to take one more step forward and he would come within reach of the hidden fox's leap.

That step was never taken. A shrill scream almost directly above the turkey, a wild piercing cry of utter terror, shattered the noonday silence of the woods. The gobbler wheeled in his tracks, crouched for a fraction of a second, then launched himself upward and outward from the steep mountainside. Behind him a long tawny shape bounded over the rock and hurled itself through the air; but the distance was too great and the jaws of the fox snapped together a yard or more behind the tip of the gobbler's tail.

The gobbler never saw Red Rogue, never knew how close he had been to death. Nor did he understand at first the meaning of the mad scream of panic which had startled him into sudden flight in the very nick of time. Yet, as he swept out over the valley on wide, swiftly beating wings, that scream seemed for an instant to pursue him, and he recognized it then as the cry of a frightened logcock. Once more it rang out, this time close above him in the air, and almost at the same moment a feathered projectile shot past him, plunging straight down toward the green roof of the kalmia thicket clothing the slope of the ridge. In an instant it