“You bet,” Tom whispered back. “The little old electric lights in Southmead Main Street are some way off!”
They drew near the wood where the yard was, and crept stealthily into the dark shadows of the pines. The dead deer lay in a tiny opening, five black objects on the moonlit snow. The boys, still keeping down wind, each picked out a tree, and with their rifles carefully locked, climbed up through the scratching, snowy branches till they could work into some kind of a seat, and get their guns pointed out, with an opening along the barrel to sight.
“Say, I hope the old lion don’t take too long,” Tom whispered. “My seat’s about two inches wide, and sharp on top.”
“Gosh, I’d sit on a needle all night to save those other deer,” Joe answered. “But don’t talk. He may be coming any minute.”
In cold and silence, they waited. There wasn’t a sound, except now and then a muffled groan or creak of a tree limb, as one or the other of the boys had to shift his position. It grew later and later. Joe’s eyes ached with watching the five black objects on the snow, and the patch of white moonlight around them. They ached, and would close. He was bitterly cold, too. He did not know whether he would be able to pull the trigger if the lion came, or pry his lids wide enough apart to see the sights. Every time he tried to sight the gun now, it was just a blur of shining blackness. And he knew Tom must be feeling the same way. Mills certainly had not fired at anything—they could have heard a rifle shot for ten miles in that deadly still Arctic hush.
Then, so suddenly it almost made him fall off his branch, something dark and long and lean came sneaking into the patch of moonlight. It was the lion, its paws sinking down, its body crouched over them, till it seemed to creep like a snake. In this ghostly light, it looked about ten feet long, and Joe suddenly felt hot blood go through his half-frozen veins.
The lion gave a low, angry snarl, and stopped dead about three feet from the body of a deer, raising its head a little. Evidently it had heard Joe or Tom moving his rifle barrel to sight. But he had no time to retreat. Almost as one shot, the two guns blazed, with two flashes of red out of the evergreens, and a report that seemed to shatter the cold night silence.
The dark form of the lion gave a leap into the air, and landed kicking in the snow.
At the same instant two figures literally fell out of the trees, and rushed toward it, going in up to their waists, for neither waited to put on his snow-shoes again.
Tom was the first near it.