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Phyl did not know that girls of Frances' type dread red haired girls, if they are pretty, as rabbits dread stoats, but she did know in some uncanny way that Frances Rhett considered Richard Pinckney as her own property to be protected against all comers. All at once and new born, the woman awoke in her instinctive, mistrustful and armed.
Now it was simply a large patch of green in the middle of a somewhat naked county, for Hengishire is not remarkable for woodlands. There were rabbits and birds, badgers, stoats, and such-like wild things in it still, but the deer which the abbots had hunted were conspicuous by their absence.
With the dogs and ponies, the pheasants and rabbits, the weasels and the stoats, and the ferrets in their hutches, the place seemed really to belong more to the animals than to the tenant. The forest strayed indoors.
"A nice, dry, cheerful sort of place to meet your cousin in, too; uncommon lively; hope it'll raise his spirits to see all his cousins a-grinning there; his spirits don't seem much in sorts now," continued the ruthless inquisitor, with a glance at the "keeper's tree" by which they stood, in the middle of dank undergrowth, whose branches were adorned with dead cats, curs, owls, kestrels, stoats, weasels, and martens.
Wherefore did this innocent and guileless old bird affect not to see the stoats, but made out that he was feeding his way along, quite and absolutely intent upon that yellow devil of a weed whose other name is charlock. He did not even hurry, and each deliberate step was taken with almost a proud daintiness. The only thing was, he never lifted his head; he was almost too obviously unwary for him.
It was one of three the road, the air, or death where he was. He chose the road, and crossed, like a hunted cat crossing a back-yard. His feet seemed scarcely to touch the dust as he negotiated the open, yet he had time to take in a fact or two. One was that the stoats had stopped a little bunch of peering heads on a group of craning necks on the edge of the ditch behind him.
They were just about to sit down when the Mole clambered in through the window, chuckling, with an armful of rifles. 'It's all over, he reported. 'From what I can make out, as soon as the stoats, who were very nervous and jumpy already, heard the shrieks and the yells and the uproar inside the hall, some of them threw down their rifles and fled.
We are going to have tea," came Evelyn's gentle voice from the lawn; and Ralph and the terrier Vic retired to hang the body of the slain upon a fir-tree on the back premises, the recognized long home of stoats and weasels at Atherstone. Molly, in the presence of Lady Mary and the stick with the silver crook, was always more or less depressed and shy.
From these circumstances, and from the timidity and anxious desire to escape observation, I could only conclude that it was a white stoat. Stoats, as remarked previously, are numerous in these hedges, and it was quite possible for a white one to be among them. The white stoat may be said to exactly resemble the ermine.
The others stood fast for a bit, but when the weasels came rushing out upon them they thought they were betrayed; and the stoats grappled with the weasels, and the weasels fought to get away, and they wrestled and wriggled and punched each other, and rolled over and over, till most of 'em rolled into the river! They've all disappeared by now, one way or another; and I've got their rifles.
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