We were within forty yards of the yellow pine, when Bob, after lingering a moment, turned his face toward me and made a motion of caution. I bent my ear to a profound effort. At last I heard it; the unctuous sound of feeding jaws!
The oak bushes grew thick in among the pine trees. It did not seem possible to make out our game on account of this shrub-screen. At this point, instead of going any nearer the yellow pine, Bob bore off to the left. This flank movement not only held our title to the wind, but brought the moon behind us. After each fresh step Bob turned for a further survey of that region at the base of the yellow pine, where our lion, or some one of his relatives, was busy at his new repast.
Then the climax of search arrived. To give myself due credit, I saw the panther as soon as did Bob. A fallen pine tree opened a lane in the bushes. Along this aisle I could dimly make out the body of the beast. His head and shoulders were protected by the trunk of the yellow pine, from the limb of which he had ambuscaded the black-tail. A cat's mouth serves vilely as a knife; the teeth are not arranged to cut well. His inability to sever a morsel left nothing for our lion to do, but gnaw at the carcass much as a dog might at a bone. This managed to keep his head out of harm's way behind the tree.
Nothing better was likely to offer, and I concluded to try what a bullet would bring, on that part of the panther we could see. I found as I raised my Winchester that there was to be a strong element of faith in the shot. It was dim and shadowy in the woods, conditions which appeared to increase the moment you tried to point a gun. The aid my aim received from the gun-sights was of the vaguest. Indeed, for that one occasion they might as well have been left off the rifle. But as I was as familiar with the weapon as with the words I write, and could tell to the breadth of a hair where to lay it against my face to make it point directly at an object, there was nothing to gain by any elaboration of aim. As if to speed my impulse in the matter, a far-off crashing occurred in the bushes to the rear. A word suffices to read the riddle of the interruption. Our ponies, tired of being left to themselves, were coming sapiently forward to join us.
With the first blundering rush of the ponies I unhooked my Winchester. The panther had no chance to take stock of the ponies' careless approach. If they had started five minutes earlier he might have owed them something.
With the crack of the Winchester, the panther gave such a scream as, added to the jar of the gun—I was burning 120 grains of powder—served to make my ears sing. There were fear, amazement and pain all braided together in that yell. The flash of the discharge and the night shadows so blinded me that I did not make a second shot. I pumped in the cartridge with the instinct of precedent, but it was of no use. On the heels of it, our ponies, as if taking the shot to be an urgent invitation to make haste, came up on a canter, tearing through the bushes in a way to lose a stirrup if persisted in.
Bob had run forward. There was blood on the snow to a praiseworthy extent. As we gazed along the wounded animal's line of flight there was more of it.
“He's too hard hit to go far,” said Bob. “We'll find him in the next canyon, or that blood's a joke.” Bob walked along, looking at the blood-stained snow as if it were a lesson. Suddenly he halted, where the moonlight fell across it through the trees.
“You uncoupled him,” he said. “Broke his back plumb in two. See where he dragged his hind legs!”
“He can't run far on those terms,” I suggested.