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I’m not sure what a racing mind would catch up with, but the point is that I needed a moment to absorb all this.
    I tried to think and pull together bits of evidence and testimony and clues that I had gathered over the past several days. Chicken house. Broken eggs. J. T. Cluck’s bizarre story about hearing fiddle music in the night. Drover’s unbelievable tale about a fox playing a fiddle, which he himself had dismissed as nothing but a dream.
    But perhaps Drover had been mistaken. Per­haps he had misled me, thrown me off the trail, just as he had done so many times over the years. For you see, it was beginning to appear that the fox playing fiddle was NOT a dream at all, but an actual reality.
    And the most astounding thing of all was that I had suspected it all along.
    Yes, it was all coming back now and the pieces of the puzzle began falling into place. I took a deep breath and turned my eyes back to the chicken house, ready now to resume my observation.
    It was a fox, all right. In his original testimony, Drover had noted, and this is a direct quote, “We don’t have foxes around here.” Almost true but not quite. We don’t have red foxes or gray foxes or your other varieties of northern foxes, but we do have a few kit foxes.
    Your kit fox is about half the size of a coyote, don’t you see, which makes him a fairly small animal. He has a long pointed nose, beady little eyes, a light red coat, and a bushy tail. He lives in holes and eats such items as mice, grasshoppers, and rabbits.

    Or, when he can get them, he loves to eat anything he might find in a chicken house.
    They’re bad about thieving, them foxes, but very few of them play fiddles. This one was a little out of the ordinary in that respect.
    So what we had going on at that moment was a kit fox, walking slowly towards the chicken house and playing a tune on a fiddle, which pretty muchly fit into the pattern I had worked up earlier that day.
    The question now was, should I come out of hiding and use the Riot Axe on this little villain, or should I remain hidden and see what he would do?
    Since I didn’t actually have an airtight case against him, I decided to go with Opinion Two. I would remain hidden in the weeds, observe his every movement and gesture, and then, if he made one false move, I would spring my deadly trap on him.
    And I really had suspected a fox all along.
    Honest.

Chapter Seven: Fiddle Hypnosis, and How I Managed to Resist It

    O kay. So there I was, and here’s what I saw.
    This fox came strolling down the gravel drive, the one that lays between the machine shed and the chicken house. The moon was bright enough so that I got a good look at him.
    I’ve already given a partial description, but I’ll do it again: kind of small and wiry, light red coat of hair, sharp pointed nose, cunning little eyes, long bushy tail with a splash of white on the tip end.
    He had that fiddle tucked under his chin and he was playing this tune and kind of singing along with it: “Dee dee dee-dum, dee dee dee dum-dee-dum dee dee, dee dee dee dee dee dum, dum dee dum dee dee dee dee.”
    And smiling. Did I mention that? Yes sir, had his eyes closed and he was smiling to himself, just as though he didn’t have a care in the world and was doing exactly what he ought to be doing.
    Now, I have to admit that after I’d watched and listened for a minute or two, the hair on my back began to lay down and the cold chills stopped skating down my spine. After I got over the initial shock of seeing a fox playing a fiddle in the dead of night, I sort of settled back and, well, enjoyed the music, you might say.
    It wasn’t half bad. In fact, it was pretty good. That little fox had obviously taken a lesson or two on the fiddle, and he was making some derned fine music—and I consider myself a pretty severe critic of such things.
    And the longer I watched and listened, the more I found myself hoping that he