For an instant the Black Panther recoiled at the noise, and in that instant Sid’s .30 whipped out its sharp report. High in the air leaped the great cat. All that had gone before was nothing to the feats of strength and agility he displayed now. He was hit,—he was enraged,—he was frantic with fury! In one terrific leap he cleared half the distance between himself and Sid; in the next he was pawing and striking around Sid’s gun muzzle, stuck into his face as the boy retreated, prodding at him and trying to reload. Scotty had picked up his .405 and was frantically yanking on its lever. Then past him leaped a brown shape, bellowing attack. Ruler it was—in the nick of time to save Sid! He had done the incredible thing, the impossible thing, of climbing along the cougar’s cliff route through the spruces! At the hound’s raging bark, the Black Panther whirled about from Sid and his back and tail went up until he seemed ten feet tall. Ruler was a third his size, but the instinct to hump up at the sight of a dog seems ineradicable in all the cat tribe.
The next instant he had leaped up on the cliff wall, above its hollowed-out arch, so as to get a high place from which to spring. “Shoot, Scotty!—Shoot quick!” yelled Sid, for his own rifle had jammed, with one cartridge in the chamber and another in the carrier, in the excitement of trying to reload with the panther pawing at him. The heavy .405 roared out, filling the whole arch with smoke. Down through it fell the Black Panther, paralyzed for the moment. He struck on his back, and the rafters of the ancient cliff-dwelling roof crackled under him. Toward Sid he floundered, his claws scratching the ’dobe. Blood spurted in a stream from his side and he was dying, but there was murder in his eyes, hate, fury, the yearning desire to kill in the last second of life left to him. Rapidly he crawled toward Sid, purposeful, determined not to die without his jaws clenched in at least one adversary. Ruler bit and worried and dragged back on him from behind, but the Black Panther ignored him completely. He had Sid cornered, in the angle between the side and end wall of the pueblo, and he knew it.
Scotty hesitated, with wabbling rifle, for a tense moment. If he fired he would certainly hit Sid, for the two were in line with him and the heavy bullet would crash clean through the Black Panther from behind. If he moved to another position he would be too late.
And, during that instant of hesitation, shot after shot rang out up in the canyon. Bullets came in a leaden hail—from somewhere—as the cougar flinched and his head was struck from side to side as if lashed with an invisible whip. It seemed impossible that a man could shoot so fast and so true as those bullets came that were crashing into the Black Panther’s skull. Then Scotty’s .405 went off, close at hand, with a stunning report, and everything was obliterated in a cloud of smoke. The cougar shuddered, in a last terrible convulsion which shook the pueblo walls, and then, with a crack of breaking poles, the roof gave way beneath him and the Black Panther sank from sight.
A thin haze of smoke drifted out from the spruces on the cliff wall, between the pueblo and Fat Man’s Misery, as the boys looked around to see where those finishing shots had come from. Then Big John’s voice rang out from the green depths.
“Say,—that was the devil’s own climb, boys! I ain’t so leetle but what I got a number ten foot and a number two haid, an’ that lariat looked like a pack cord to me! How d’ye git down out’n hyar?—she’s all slide rock!”
Whoopee!—Big John! The boys howled at each other happily at the sound of his familiar tones. Then Sid shouted him directions, and after a time he himself appeared over the ladder head on the pueblo wall.
“Wa’n’t invited to the party but I got hyar, allee-samee pronto!” grinned Big John, as he mounted to the roof. “You boys’ll break this ole hoss-wrangler’s neck yit! Right sociable time ye was havin’ with the trick cougar, eh,—Siddy boy!” he chuckled, winking at Scotty. “I seen him, flewin’ round, soon’s I clumb through the cliff, so I wraps myself around a tree, up thar, an’ draws cyards to set in the game, too.”
“Came in mighty handy, John—my next would have been a jump over that wall into kingdom come, if you hadn’t opened up!” laughed Sid, still fussing with the jammed army cartridge. “Darn a rimless shell, anyhow, I’ll say!”
Ruler was having a wonderful time, all by himself, worrying at the carcass below, so they all dropped down to examine the great, glossy prize.