the
farmers took the precaution of carefully guarding their sheep. On one
night of October they killed three calves in a farmer's field, four
miles from the Frost farm. Several parties set off to hunt them, but
they escaped and lived as outlaws, subsisting from nocturnal forays
until snow came, when they were tracked to a den beneath a high crag,
called the "Overset," up in the great woods.

It was Rufus Frost and Emerson Needham, the former owner of Bender, who
tracked the band to their retreat. Finding it impossible to call or
drive the criminals out, they blocked the entrance of the den with large
stones, and then came home to devise some way of destroying them--since
it is a pretty well-established fact that when once a dog has relapsed
into the savage habits of his wild ancestry he can never be reclaimed.

Someone had suggested suffocating the dogs with brimstone fumes; and so,
early the following morning, Rufus and Emerson, heading a party of
fifteen men and boys, came to the Edwards farm and the Old Squire's to
get brimstone rolls, which we had on account of our bees. Their coming,
on such an errand, carried a wave of excitement with it. Old Hewey
Glinds, the trapper, was sent for and joined the party, in spite of his
rheumatism. Every boy in the neighborhood begged earnestly to go; and
the most of us, on one plea and another, obtained permission to do so.

All told, I believe, there were thirty-one in the party, not counting
dogs. Entering the woods we proceeded first to Stoss Pond, then through
Black Ash Swamp, and thence over a mountainous wooded ridge to Overset
Pond.

In fact we seemed to be going to the remote depths of the wilderness;
and what a savage aspect the snowy evergreen forest wore that morning!
At last, we came out on the pond. Very black it looked, for it was what
is called a "warm pond." Ice had not yet formed over it. The snow-clad
crag where the cave was, on the farther side, loomed up, ghostly white
by contrast.

Rufus and Emerson had gone ahead and were there in advance of us; they
shouted across to us that the dogs had not escaped. We then all hurried
on over snowy stones and logs to reach the place.

It was a gruesome sort of den, back under an overhang of rocks fully
seventy feet high. Near the dark aperture which the boys had blocked,
numbers of freshly gnawed bones lay in the snow, which presented a very
sinister appearance.

Those in advance had already kindled a fire of drif