"Knock him over the head!" shouted Donald. "Hit it in the head with a stone," looking about for a weapon.
"Look out!" called Rand, "give me a chance at it!" drawing back his bow and letting fly an arrow which pierced the animal's body and knocked it sprawling, when Gerald added a blow from a well-directed stone. With a wild scream the cat bounded into the air and fell motionless to the ground.
"Look out, Rand!" cautioned Dick, creeping back from the bushes into which he had fled as soon as he had gained his feet, as Rand went up to where the cat was lying. "Take care it don't spring on you!"
"No danger," replied Rand: "it's dead."
"Faith, thin, Oi w'udn't trust it, dead or alive," said Gerald.
"That was a good shot, Rand," commended the colonel, "and just in time. A full-grown wild cat is an enemy not to be despised."
"I should say not," agreed Dick. "Ugh! I feel as if I had been scraped with a curry-comb. I wonder," with a look at his clothes, "if I couldn't get a job somewhere as a scarecrow?"
"But what has become of Pepper?" asked Don.
"That is the puzzle that we have got to solve," replied the colonel. "For the present the only thing we can do is to go back to Creston and see if we can't pick up some new clues."
The boys, with Colonel Snow, slowly made their way back to the town, carrying with them the body of the cat, the skin of which Rand proposed to have tanned for a trophy for the club room.