Out across the plain, down wind from Nu, another silent figure moved stealthily toward the ranch. It was a huge, maned lion. Every now and then he would halt and lift his sniffing nose to the gentle breeze, and his lips would lift baring the mighty fangs beneath, but no sound came from his deep throat, for he was old, and his wisdom was as the wisdom of the fox.
Once upon a time he would have coughed and moaned and roared after the manner of his hungry brethren, but much experience with men-people and their deafening thunder sticks had taught him that he hunted longest who hunted in silence.
VI
NU AND THE LION
Victoria Custer had gone to her room much earlier in the evening than was her custom, but not to sleep. She did not even disrobe, but sat instead in the darkness beside her window looking out toward the black and mysterious jungle in the distance, and the shadowy outlines of the southern hills.
She was trying to fight down forever the foolish obsession that had been growing upon her slowly and insidiously for years. Since the first awakening of developing womanhood within her she had been subject to the strange dream that was now becoming an almost nightly occurrence. At first she had thought nothing of it, other than it was odd that she should continue to dream the same thing so many times; but of late these nightly visions had seemed to hold more of reality than formerly, and to presage some eventful happening in her career—some crisis that was to alter the course of her life. Even by day she could not rid herself of the vision of the black-haired young giant, and tonight the culmination had come when she had heard his voice calling her from the rose thicket. She knew that he was but a creature of her dreams, and it was this knowledge which frightened her so—for it meant but one thing; her mind was tottering beneath the burden of the nervous strain these hallucinations had imposed upon it.
She must gather all the resources of her nervous energy and throw off this terrible obsession forever. She must! She must! Rising, the girl paced back and forth the length of her room. She felt stifled and confined within its narrow limits. Outside, beneath the open sky, with no boundaries save the distant horizon was the place best fitted for such a battle as was raging within her. Snatching up a silken scarf she threw it about her shoulders—a concession to habit, for the night was hot—and stepping through her window to the porch that encircled the bungalow she passed on into the garden.
Just around the nearest angle of the house her brother and Billy Curtiss sat smoking before the window of their bed room, clad in pajamas and slippers. Curtiss was cleaning the rifle he had used that day—the same that he had carried into the rose garden earlier in the evening. Neither heard the girl's light footsteps upon the sward, and the corner of the building hid her from their view.
In the open moonlight beside the rose thicket Victoria Custer paced back and forth. A dozen times she reached a determination to seek the first opportunity upon the morrow to give Billy Curtiss an affirmative answer to the question he had asked her the night before—the night of the earthquake; but each time that she thought she had disposed of the matter definitely she found herself involuntarily comparing him with the heroic figure of her dream-man, and again she must need rewage her battle.
As she walked in the moonlight two pair of eyes watched her every movement—one pair, clear, black eyes, from the rose thicket—the other flaming yellow-green orbs hidden in a little clump of bushes at the point where she turned in her passing to retrace her steps—at the point farthest from the watcher among the roses.