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 sences, and once he stayed in the woods all night. The next afternoon, an hour before sunset, the boy, feeling rather sad about it, prepared to make an end.

This time he went with the lynx far into the deep woods, three miles or more from the plantation house, at the edge of a great swamp; and this time he took his gun with him.

He walked, with his velvet-footed companion at his heels, along the margin of a reed-grown lagoon until a short-eared, short-legged marsh rabbit, slow and clumsy compared with a cottontail, jumped up in front of him, and the long-limbed, lanky wildcat went bounding away, gaining upon the fugitive at every leap. The boy waited a half minute, raised his gun and fired first one barrel, then the other. Reloading hurriedly, he fired two more shots, conscious of a certain pang as he recalled the frantic terror with which the discharge of a gun always inspired the lynx.

"Good-by, Byng," he said, with a touch of sentimentality by no means foreign to his nature. "If I ever see you again I'll know you. But I guess it's good-by forever."

But the woods gods ruled otherwise. After more than two years they had brought the boy and Byng together again. There was no doubt in the boy's