Reno whined, and looked from side to side, sniffing the keen, still air. It seemed as though he scented danger, but did not know for sure from which direction it was coming.
"You're scaring me, acting so, Reno!" exclaimed Ruth. "I wish you wouldn't. I can't help feeling that the panther is right behind me somewhere. Oh!"
The end of her soliloquy was a shriek. Something flashed through the brush clump on her left hand. Reno broke into a savage barking and sprang toward the bank. But Ruth did not lose her grip on his collar, and her hand restrained him.
"Oh, Tom! Tom!" the girl cried.
There was another movement in the bushes. It was between Ruth and the way to the camp, had she been so foolish as to try to reach the house directly through the woods. But she did face up stream again, and had Reno been willing to accompany her she would have run as hard as ever she could in that direction.
"Come, Reno! Come, good dog!" she gasped, tugging at his collar.
"Let it alone—we must go back——"
Reno uttered another savage growl and sprang upon the bank. The hard packed snow crunched under him. There sounded a scream from the brush —a sound that Ruth knew well. The catamount was really at hand—there could be no mistaking that awful cry, once having heard it.
The dog burst through the bushes with such a savage clamor that Ruth was indeed terrified. She sprang after him, however, hoping to drag him back from any affray with the panther. What would Tom Cameron say if anything happened to his brave and beautiful Reno?
It was past the girl's power, however, to stay the mastiff. With angry barks he broke through the barrier and entered a small glade not a stone's throw from the bank of the stream. Before Ruth reached this cleared place she saw the tracks of the beast which had so startled her. There could be no mistaking the round impressions of the great, padded paws. Unlike the print of the bear, or the dog, that of the cat shows no marks of claws unless it be springing at its prey.
And now, when Reno burst into the open, the panther uttered another fierce and blood-chilling scream. Ruth noted the flash of the great, lithe body as the beast sprang into the air. Startled for the moment by the on-rush and savage baying of the dog, the panther had leaped into a low-branching cedar. The tree shook to its very tip, and to the ends of its great limbs. There the panther crouched upon a limb, its eyes balefully glaring down upon the leaping, growling mastiff.