he says you b'long to us! He says he come down an' hunt wif me
an' you an' Popper! He says he give--give me a dun!"

In his ecstasy he grabbed the dog round the neck.

"Ol' F'ank! Ol' F'ank! I love ol' F'ank!"

Then in a voice he was training for future fox hunts Tommy Earle yelled,
and the woods and the house and the barn between them tossed back and
forth the thin echoes.

II

PARADISE REGAINED

Little Tommy Earle stood on tiptoe in the rear of the capacious hall of
his father's barn, and glanced excitedly along the nickel-plated barrel
of his air rifle, which he had poked through a knot hole. Out there on
the ground between the barn and the corn field he had sprinkled some
crumbs of bread. When sparrows came to pick up those crumbs--well,
thought Tommy, it would be hard on the sparrows.

Behind him in the straw that carpeted the barn lay old Frank, Irish
setter, taking his ease. Except during hunting season, wherever you
found the boy you found old Frank. Now and then, at some slight movement
of the boy, he pricked his ears in the direction of this miniature
stalker of game. The rest of the time he either dozed off, or, suddenly
aroused, snapped at a fly with that fierce look in his eyes with which
dogs and fly-swatting women view these buzzing pests.

Cathedral-high above them towered the overflowing hay loft. Through the
wide-open doors behind them the barn lot blazed in the afternoon sun.
The somnolence of a farmyard mid-afternoon brooded over the scene. Only
the boy, peering through the knothole, was tense and vibrant.

For him this was a serious occasion. He had owned the air gun two weeks
now, and he hadn't killed a thing. True, he had hit an upstairs window
pane, but he hadn't intended to do that. He had merely shot at a raucous
jaybird in a tree, and the upstairs window pane, the innocent bystander,
as it were, had fallen inward with a sharp tinkle of broken glass. The
mishap had brought down on him the warning from his father that if it,
or any similar exploit, were repeated, the air gun would be confiscated.

"But I didn't mean to, Papa!" he had cried.

"That doesn't make any difference, old man," Steve Earle had said; "the
window is broken all the same."

The boy had walked away from the interview, sobered. Sprung from the
loins of generations of hunters, the love of a gun was in his blood, and
this air rifle was his first love. Since the warning he had used the
horizon as a backstop