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 been trying to get the big red fox for my Christmas present. Well, listen. I don't want him, and what is more, if you ever trap him, or shoot at him, or so much as harm a hair of his coat, I will never have anything to do with you again. I mean it too, Bud."

"Well, I'll be blest," ejaculated Bud as he hung up the receiver. "If girls aren't the limit. One day they want a thing, the next day they don't."

There was an unwritten law in foxdom that the foxes on the east side of the river should not venture across to the meadows on the west side unless the ice on the river was strong enough to bear them. The foxes on the west side might hunt mice in their own meadow because when they were started by the hounds they could flee to their own mountains to the westward, but these same meadows were a death trap to the foxes from the east. This tradition had perhaps come naturally to Redcoat but it had also been dinned into him by several close calls he had experienced on the west side of the river.