The man took off his old cap, stuck it on the muzzle of his gun, and, raising it cautiously, wagged it from side to side. This move eliciting no demonstration from within the cave, he scratched noisily on the rock. Having repeated this challenge several times without response, he felt sure that both panthers must be away from home.
Nevertheless, he was not going to let himself be over-confident. He was too sagacious and instructed a woodsman to think that the wild creatures would always act the same way under the same circumstances. It was not impossible that the occupant of the cave was just waiting to see. Drawing back some six or eight feet, the man wriggled slantingly up the slope of rock, with the muzzle of his Winchester just ahead of him, till his face came level with the entrance. Every muscle of his body was strung taut for an instantaneous recoil, in case he should see before him two palely flaming eyes, afloat, as it were, upon the darkness of the interior.
But no; at first he could see nothing but the darkness itself. Then, as his eyes adapted themselves to the gloom, he made out the inmost recesses of the cave, and realized that, except for a vague little heap in one corner, the cave was empty. In that case, there was not a single moment to be lost. With one piercing backward glance down the trail, he slipped into the cave, snatched up the two kittens, regardless of their savage spitting and clawing, and thrust them into an empty potato-sack which he had brought with him for the purpose. Hurriedly twisting a cord about the neck of the sack, he wiped his bleeding hands upon his sleeve with a grin, slung the sack over his left shoulder, and hurried away. Having captured the prize, he was quite willing to avoid, if possible, any immediate reckoning with the old panthers.
Till he reached the grass-patch by the stream he took no pains to go silently, but made all possible haste, crashing through the branches and sending a shower of small stones clattering down the ravine. The angry and indomitable kittens in the bag on his back kept growling and spitting, and trying to dig their sharp claws into him, but his buckskin shirt was tough, and he paid no attention to their protest. At the edge of the torrent, however, he adopted new tactics. Leaping to the rock in mid channel, he crossed, and then, with great difficulty, clambered along close by the water’s edge, well within the splash and the spray. When he had made a couple of hundred yards in this way, he came to a small tributary brook, up which he waded for some eighty or a hundred feet. Then, leaving the brook, he crept stealthily up the bank, through the underbrush, and so back to the valley he had just left, at a point some little distance farther downstream. Thence he ran straight on down the valley at a long easy trot, keeping always, as far as possible, under cover, and swerving from time to time this way or that in order to avoid treading on dry underbrush. His progress, however, was quite audible, for at this point in the venture he was sacrificing secrecy to speed. He had fifteen or sixteen miles to go, his cabin being on the farther slope of the great spur called Broken Ridge, and he knew that he could not feel absolutely sure as to the outcome of the enterprise until he should have the little captives secure within his cabin.
As he threaded his way through the heavy timber of the valley bottom, a good six or seven miles from the den in Red Rock, he began to feel more at ease. Here among the great trunks there was less undergrowth to obscure his view, less danger of the panthers being able to steal up upon him and take him unawares. He slackened his pace somewhat, drawing deep breaths into his leathern lungs. But he relaxed no precaution, running noiselessly now over the soft carpet of the forest, and flitting from tree-trunk to tree-trunk as if an enemy were at his very heels. At last, quitting the valley, he started on a long diagonal up the near slope of Broken Ridge Spur.
The face of the country now suddenly changed. Years before, a forest-fire had traversed this slope of the ridge, cutting a clean swathe straight along it.
The man’s ascending trail thus led him across a space of open, a space of undergrowth hardly knee-deep, dotted with a few tall “rampikes,” or fire-stripped tree-trunks, bleached by the rains and inexpressibly desolate. Haying here no cover, the man ran his best, and finally, having crossed the open, he dropped down in a dense thicket to rest, breathing hard from that last spurt.
In the secure concealment of the thicket he laid aside the complaining burden from his back, stood his rifle in a bush, let out his belt a couple of holes, and stooped to stretch himself on the moss for a quick rest. As he did so, he cast a prudent eye along his back trail. Instantly he stiffened, snatched up his gun again, sank on one knee, and insinuated the muzzle carefully between the screening branches. A huge panther had just shown himself, rising into view for an instant, and at once sinking back into the leafage.
At this disappearance the man grew uneasy. Was the beast still trailing him, belly to earth, through the low undergrowth? Or had it swerved aside to try and get ahead of him, to ambuscade him by and by from some rock or low-hung branch. Or, on the other hand, had it given up the pursuit rather than face the perils of the open? The man was annoyed at the uncertainty. Raising himself to his full height in order to command a better view of the trail, but at the same time keeping well hidden, he stood hesitating, doubtful whether to hurry on as fast as possible or to wait a while in this safe ambush in the hope of getting a shot at his pursuer.
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