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But the taint of blood on the floor of the chamber told her only too well that henceforth her mothering care would be needed solely by the young mouse that she had rescued in her flight. The day passed uneventfully; the weasels did not repeat their visit. At nightfall the mother mouse, stealing into the wood, found both her enemies caught in rabbit-traps set beside the "runs" among the hawthorns.
I was always fond of shirking away from my duties, and going into the woods to set rabbit-traps; and, remembering how I made them of wood, I easily contrived a stone one of the same pattern, and it was found afterwards to answer perfectly; for when there were no longer eggs and ducks for them to eat, the foxes went into our traps, which we baited with flesh from the dead narwhal.
They couldn't keep a top or a ball or marble or any plaything to save their lives. Annie would cry for 'em jest for pure meanness, and whatever it was that Annie cried for they had to give it up or git a whippin'. She'd break up their rabbit-traps and their bird-cages and the little wheelbarrers and wagons they'd make, and they didn't have any peace at home, pore little motherless things.
The rabbits had committed great depredations in the garden, and the gardener had procured two rabbit-traps. One had been set at a considerable distance from the house, and fixed securely in the ground. One morning the nurse heard a plaintive mewing at the window of the day-nursery on the ground-floor.
"Yes, I thought you'd do some mischief," had commented the landlady, wearily. It seemed typical. A jerry-built world, apparently. With the best intentions it seemed impossible to move in it without doing more harm than good to it, bringing things down about one that one had not intended. She wanted to abolish steel rabbit-traps. She had heard the little beggars cry.
It had struck her as such a harmless reform. But they told her there were worthy people in the neighbourhood of Wolverhampton quite a number of them who made their living by the manufacture of steel rabbit-traps. If, thinking only of the rabbits, you prohibited steel rabbit-traps, then you condemned all these worthy people to slow starvation. The local Mayor himself wrote in answer to her article.
Eager to gain the favour of his master by providing him good sport in the coming autumn, the new keeper ranged the woods from dawn till dusk, setting pole-traps in the trees, or baiting rabbit-traps in the "creeps" of stoat or weasel, and destroying nests, as well as shooting any furred or feathered creature of questionable character.
"I never liked that man on Darvell's farm," said the archdeacon. "Nor I either," said Flurry. "No farmer ought to be on that land who don't have a horse of his own. And if I war Squire Thorne, I wouldn't have no farmer there who didn't keep no horse. When a farmer has a horse of his own, and follies the hounds, there ain't no rabbit-traps; never. How does that come about, Mr Henry? Rabbits!
That was right: hadn't they always been together since they were boys and set rabbit-traps on the South-Branch Mountain? But there was a strange look in the old man's eyes Bone did not recognize, a new and awful thought. Now and then the sharp crack of the musketry jarred him. "Tink dem Yankees is gettin' de Debbil in de Gap," Bone said, consolingly.
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