CHAPTER XIX
WHEN LAND CRUMBLED
For a moment Hal Dane’s heart seemed to cease beating.
The huge panther was the largest of its kind he had ever seen. In his scouting above the flood country, he had now and again glimpsed a few of these great tawny creatures of the cat tribe that the waters had driven from their forest haunts. Out in the open these others had merely slunk off, hiding from even the shadow of the airplane that passed over them.
But cornered, the panther was a different beast. He was ferocious, and fought to kill.
This one, sides sunken with hunger, flat ugly head weaving back and forth, jaws snarling open, crouched tense in its corner.
A sudden ague shook Hal’s hand till the spotlight wavered up and down the walls. The next instant he controlled himself, held the torch glow again on the beast before him. In the space of that instant, the panther had glided out from his corner. The light flung into his fiery eyes sent him motionless again—but how long would the spell-binding of the torchlight last?
Hal Dane moistened dry lips, shaped his mouth to whistle, and at last forced out a shrill sound. He had seen steady whistling charm small animals like rabbits and foxes into a momentary “freeze”. He prayed, that it would work now. Dry-mouthed or not, he must keep up this shrilling ten seconds, twenty seconds—till his hand could lift his revolver from its hip holster, till he could take aim.
It was a six-shooter, but he remembered, with a chilling to his very marrow, that there was only one shot left. He had used the other five picking off rattlesnakes that had seemed determined to move into the dry haunts of the human refugees.
A sudden switching of tail tip, a lower crouching of the powerful tawny body, told that the spring was imminent.
Steady! Because the head hung low, he must aim at the brain through the eye.