The words died on the fat boy's lips. His eyes grew wide, the pupils narrowed, the whites giving the appearance of small inverted saucers.
Stacy scarcely breathed.
There, slinking across an open space on the rise, its tail swishing its ears laid flat on its cruel, cat-like head, was a tawny, lithe creature.
Stacy Brown recognized the object at once. It was a mountain lion, a large one. It seemed to Chunky that he never had seen a beast as large in all his life. The lion was alternately listening to the baying of the hounds and peering about for a suitable tree in which to hide itself.
Stacy acted like a man in a trance. Without any clear idea as to what he was doing, he rose slowly to his feet. At that instant the lion discovered him. It crouched down, its eyes like sparks of fire, scintillating and snapping.
All at once Stacy threw his gun to his shoulder and pulled the trigger.
At least he thought he did. But no report came.
A yellow flash, a swish and the beast had leaped clear of the rise and disappeared even more suddenly than he had come.
"Wha—-wha——-" gasped Chunky. Then he made a discovery.
Chunky was holding the rifle by the barrel with the muzzle against his shoulder, having aimed the butt at the crouching lion. Chunky had had a severe attack of "buck fever."
With a wild yell that woke the echoes and sent Jim Nance and Professor Zepplin tearing through the bushes, Stacy dashed down the steep slope, forgetting to take his rifle with him in his hurried descent.