A wound-burnt, sinister shape, half naked. The revengeful way-path rocks had bitten into his inflamed knees. The vicious thorns had torn and stabbed maledictions into his hands. The clawing underbrush had stripped his clothing away, and the poison ivy and skunk-viper had sprung upon and spat their gangrene acid against his nakedness. There was misery in each lift of knees and hands, as though weighted with ball and chain. In his zigzag wake there was a lesion of nauseous mocking horror. This thing panted like a spent buffalo, as with popped, blood-rimmed eyes it stared at the church.
It was the revenuer come back in the hour of his extremity.
With wabbling head, he focused his blighted face upon the church—a shrine all in white beckoning to him, insistently. Foot by foot he forged his tortuous way across the open and onward. His corporal being, ruined, ravished and wrecked, his derelict spirit was blindly upstanding. Excruciatingly and piteously he moved across the sea of wild honey clover and foxtail with the slowness of a shore-viewed water craft, stationary only while the eye held it, but with a trick to move when the gaze is lifted.
When this odious, strange apparition had gained a point midway to the church, then it was that a lithe, agile, uncertain shape, a spawn from the matrix of the shadowless gulch below, slid up out of the dark, halted on the verge of the shades and then as lightly as air sprung its haunches upward to a great spruce stump. It was the male panther who owned a mate and cubs, and who patrolled the darkling hours with a dare-all note in his minor night-squall; who dominated the animal kingdom and held in subservient fear all the lesser pantomimic pirates of the forest.
At first his eyes widened curiously as they settled upon the audacious trespasser in the clearing. Had this thing under his quizzical gaze walked upright, he could have understood and would have skulked hastily away, but now a quick challenge crowded into his feline breast, as he realized that an alien, hairy creature, that stalked on four legs, had dared to invade the night that belonged to him and the province that was his.
Straightway a keen and malignant resentment seized and traversed his bristling spine, and his long tail began to lash the ground menacingly. It wagged him into a great fury. As noiselessly as a moccasin slides into the water, he dropped from the dark spruce stump into the velvet mullein leaves, and skirted the whiteness of the moon. He leaped lightly through the space and landed in the shade of the church. With a sudden wary flash, he darted forward. Then, boldly and ready, he turned sharply and advanced in the forefront of this new enemy that now was his prey. Stealth was in his padded paws as he lowered his ermine belly to the ground and crept sneakingly to meet the newcomer.
When a mere six feet separated the two, the panther's hairy, spotted lips parted thirstily. He choked back the growl of savage exultation that welled up in his chest, his yellow eyes all afire with lust. He gathered his steel-like thews under him with a mighty tenseness to spring. His wagging tail stopped and stiffened. As he made to leave the ground, the thing before him jerked its gory head suddenly upward, looked, and thrust a laugh in the brute's face.
Such a laugh! The splintering, squawking reiterations of petered-out echoes, bubbling up into a mundane night from the precincts of the eternally damned. That laugh splashed upon the serene night like the plunge of a boulder into a placid pool. It drove the pith out of the panther's militant cat-heart. It curdled the will to kill that had blazed from the beast's agate eyes. Instantly the brute, dazed with terror, wrenched his round head askew, to shut from his tan eyes and black ears the sight and the sound of this monstrous, unknown antagonist.
The brute's tail went limp as he hurtled obliquely through the air, landed in the bull-grass, plunged into the inky shadows and fled away from this moonlit spot with its hideous blot of terror, and hurried toward the pitchy brakes that hemmed the river, with panic curdling his jungle blood.
The maimed, bedraggled hulk careened; then at the end of a panting struggle fell over the door block and tumbled heavily against the church portal. The dilapidated, weather-scarred door gave way unresistingly to him and his bedlam cry as though it had boded this unholy visitation. He stopped on the threshold, sprawling half in, half without. The uncouth noise of his breathing hissing through a ragged ruin of teeth, cut the sepulchral stillness of the church room with the portent of some awful prediction. His haggled, bleeding hand stamped its red curse upon the door panel. Then, with a mad, mighty will, he lashed his flagging spirit to another effort and broke into a pitiable, wabbling, four-legged trot.