RASTUS EARNS HIS SLEEP 281 
It was well on toward midnight when Wolf 
picked up a trail, which as luck would have it was 
that of Rastus, and started hot foot through the 
woods, then down the mountain, across the 
meadow, toward a tiny pond not more than thirty 
feet across—really a big spring hole—in a 
swampy corner of a hayfield. Rastus hoped to 
make this little pond, which had a sedgy brook 
for an outlet, before Wolf caught up to him, but 
he couldn’t do it. It took every notch of speed 
he had to make the white ash a hundred feet short 
of the pond, and scramble up into the safety of 
its branches. There was no tree adjacent to af- 
ford him an arboreal highway. He would have 
to stay in that tree if Wolf was alone, or jump 
for it if the man creature, who climbed trees and 
shook limbs, came along behind. Wolf was 
sitting on his haunches on the dead leaves below, 
waking the echoes of the still autumn night, when 
Rastus saw the bobbing light of a lantern ap- 
proaching over the field. Presently, as he curled 
his body along the upper side of a limb and peered 
over at the ground, his eyes looked into the dazzle 
of a flashlight beam, and he heard the man’s ex- 
