When 'Bear Cat' Went Dry

by Charles Neville Buck

The scudding raggedness of the clouds had been swept into wider tatters now and the moon was steadier though still not brightly clear. Bear Cat stooped, like a crouching panther, just outside the elbow of the rock wall, holding his coat as a matador holds the flag in the course of a charging bull. Then a bulky figure emerged and there followed a sweep of heavy cloth; an attempted outcry which ended in a stifled gurgle, and Carmichael went down, borne under the impact of an unexpected onslaught, with his breath smothered in an enmeshing tangle.

For a moment Bear Cat knelt on the prostrate figure which had been stunned by its heavy fall, twisting the coat about the face and throat; then, experimentally, he eased the suffocation—and there was no hint of attempted outcry.

A few minutes later Black Tom opened his eyes and peered through the darkness. To his dizzy eyes matters seemed confused. His mouth was securely gagged and, at his back, his wrists were so stiffly pinioned that when he struggled to free them he felt the nasty bite of metal—evidently a buckle.

Above him he made out a pair of eyes that glittered down on him with an unpleasant truculence.

"Git up an' come on," ordered a voice. "Ye'll hev ter excuse me fer takin' yore rifle-gun an' pistol."

Slowly Tom rose and went, prodded into amenability by the muzzle of a rifle in the small of his back. When he had been thus goaded to the point where his horse was hitched his captor stripped saddle, bridle and halter of their straps and ropes, and set the beast free. Some of the commandeered tethers he employed to truss his prisoner up in a manner that left him as helplessly immovable as a mummy.

"Now I reckon ye'll hev ter wait fer me a leetle," said Bear Cat with brutal shortness. "Thar's still one more back thar ter attend ter."

Carrying with him bridle-reins and stirrup-straps, he disappeared again into the defile. Creeping for the second time with the best of his Indian-like stealth to the edge of the fire-lighted clearing, he saw Jake Kinnard standing, with his eyes on the embers, ten feet away from the rifle that was propped against a tree.

With a leap that sounded crashingly in the dead bushes Turner catapulted himself into the lighted area, and as the moonshiner wheeled, his hand going instinctively out toward his weapon, he found himself covered from a distance of two yards.

"Hands overhead!—an' no noise," came the sharp warning, and had he been inclined to disobey the words there was an avid glitter in the eyes of the sudden visitor discouraging to argument.