just opposite from the Holcome farm, was the Mason farm. This would not have been important in this story had it not been the home of pretty Kitty Mason, who lived with her parents and her small brother on the farm.
It was two miles as the crow flies across the mountain from one farm to the other. That was the way Bud usually took, but around the west end of the mountain, by the meadow road, it was four miles.
It was Kitty Mason's good fortune one day in August when she was picking blueberries in her father's pasture, on the south slope of the mountain, to make the acquaintance of Redcoat. She never knew where he came from, or what he wanted, if anything. But the first she knew of his whereabouts, he was standing not thirty feet away, looking intently at her. The wind was blowing her scent away from the fox, and so he was not at first fully aware of the dangerous man scent.
Most wild animals have a strange animal psychology which tells them which things
