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Paulette stopped plaiting her hair in a thick rope. "Say that again," she ordered curiously. "What Skunk's Misery?" But suddenly I understood, and used that word I had never said aloud before: "Darling darling, Skunk's Misery is our only chance. Get up and come on!" But she answered without moving. "Want to tell you something first. The tunnel falling in wasn't all the reason I ran after you.
I would have forgotten the thing in the morning, only that when I got up all my Skunk's Misery clothes had disappeared, and Charliet had not taken them, because I asked him. I did not mention last night's wolf to him, because I was in a hurry to catch Dudley and tell him I meant to leave La Chance.
Naturally, I knew it could not be Macartney, because he could not have got there, even if he had not had other fish to fry at home. But one of his gang might have been left at Skunk's Misery and could have the life choked out of him. There was no way leading underground directly from the lean-to, or I would have been caught the night I slept there and believed real voices were a dream.
It was a wonder I had not, for I had spent most of last month fussing over some bad places on the road, by the turn where I had found my boy from Skunk's Misery, and I ought to have seen Thompson go by. But the solution was simple. There was one Monday and Tuesday I had my road gang off in the bush, on the opposite side from the Skunk's Misery valley, getting stuff to finish a bit of corduroy.
For some occult reason they are provided with a gland charged with a malodorous secretion; and out of this mysterious liquor Nature has elaborated the skunk's inglorious weapon. The skunk alone when attacked makes no attempt to escape or to defend itself by biting; but, thrown by its agitation into a violent convulsion, involuntarily discharges its foetid liquor into the face of an opponent.
Detached rocks, few but practicable stepping-stones, lifted their bare bulk out of it, between us and the spruce bush we had to strike through to avoid the Halfway and Macartney's picket. Some kind of a trail we must leave to Skunk's Misery, but it need not begin here, in the first place Macartney would look, if he were alive to look anywhere.
It came from the doorway of that old house. He knew, too, whose voice it was. It was Jimmy Skunk's voice. "I know where you are, Peter Rabbit," said the voice. "And I know why you are hiding down there. I know, too, how it happened that I was rolled down hill in that barrel. I'm just giving you a little warning, Peter.
From the look of him I guessed he had got hurt cutting down a tree and not getting out of the way in time, though he was past telling me that or anything else. But I had also guessed where he lived, by the dirt on him, and was ass enough to carry him home to the squalid, half-French, half-Indian village the Caraquet people called Skunk's Misery.
Tooth and claw and deadly grip the old Cat raged and tore, the black fur flew in every direction, and the Skunk for once lost her head and fired random shots of choking spray that drenched herself as well as the Cat. The Skunk's head and neck were terribly torn. The air was suffocating with the poisonous musk. The Skunk was desperately wounded and threw herself backward into the water.
Even in the freezing evening air the smell that came from that smashed bottle was beyond anything on earth or purgatory, excepting the stuff I had spilt over myself at Skunk's Misery. "What on earth," I began stupidly. "Why, that's that Skunk's Misery filth again!" Paulette's hand came down on my arm with a grip that could not have been wilder if she had thought the awful smell meant our deaths.
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