Jim looked at the pathetic little figure on the burro, and his conscience smote him. “That’s right, boy,” he replied very kindly. “I was only joking—ought not to be any ill feeling between friends over a joke, you know. Now, you sing ahead all you plenty please.”
“Don’t say nuttin’ more about it,” replied Ches. “It’s all square.”
A little farther on Jim noticed a piece of quartz outcrop with a metal stain on it. Now, a miner can no more pass such a thing than some others could refuse to pick up the pin shining at their feet, so he took a stone and hammered off a specimen for future reference. In the meantime Ches, on the burro, got around the turn of the trail.
Suddenly the boy set up a shout of excitement. “Oh, Mister!” he yelled, with a string of profanity, his promise forgotten in his heat. “Come quick, an’ look at der cat! Come quick, quick, quick! What a cat! You never see sich a cat!”
Jim dashed forward. “Well, I should say cat!” he remarked, as he took in the situation. On a ledge about fifty feet above the road crouched a full-grown mountain lion, ears back, eyes furtively glimpsing every avenue of escape, yaggering at the intruders savagely.
The small boy in Jim Felton rose on the instant. “Pelt him, Ches! Pelt him!” he cried, and let fly the rock in his hand by way of illustration. A wild animal seems to have little idea of a missile.
The lion held his ground and let the stone strike him in the side. Then, with a screech like the vital principle of forty thousand tom-cat fights—a screech that left a sediment in the ear-drums of the listeners for the balance of the morning—he fairly flew up the straight side of the cliff, followed by a rain of projectiles.
“Ches, we oughtn’t to have done that,” said Jim soberly. “If that fellow had been of another mind, he’d have made this the warmest day of our lives.”
“W’y! Will dey fight?” asked Ches, his eyes wide open.
“They will that, son, sometimes,” replied Jim. Then he launched into the tales of wild beast hunts, drifted from that to the romance of the gold field, the riches coming in a day—the whole glamour of it.