Williams news., 1921-07-29
CHAPTER IV-Continued.

the shotgun that still stood where he had placed 1t in the corner of the room. and hastened to the corral. The mare whickered plaintively when he took her from her food.
 When Snowbird first heard the step in the thickets beside her, she halted bravely and held her lantern high. She understood at last. The very extremity of the beams found reflection in two very curious circles of greenish fire: fire that was old upon the world be- fore man ever rubbed two sticks to- gether to strike a flame. Of course the dim rays had simply been reflect ed on the eyes of some great beast of prey.
 She identified it at once. Only the eyes of the felfnes, with vertical pu- pills, have this identical greenfsh glare. The eyes of the wolves glow in the darkness, but the circles are usually bright points. Of course it was a cOu- gars
 She didn't cry out again. Realizing at Hast the reality of her peril her long training in the mountains came to her aid. That did not mean she was not truly and terribly afraid. The beast was hunting her. She couldn't doubt this fact. Curiosity might make a lion follow her, but it would never beget such wild light of madness in his eyes as this she had just seen. She simply clamped down all her moral strength on her rising hysterfa and looked her situation in the face. Her hand flew fnstfnctive1y to her side, and the pistol leaped in the lantern light.
 But the eyes had already blinked
 
 She shot twice. The echoes roared back. unbelievably loud in the silence, and then abruptly died; and the only sound was a ruStling of leaves as the cougar crouched. She sobbed once, then hurried on.
 She was afraid to listen at first. She wanted to believe that her pistol fire would frighten the animal from her trail. She knew, under ordinary con- ditions, that 1t would. If he still fol- lowed, 1t could mean but one thing that some unheard-of incident had oc- cured to destroy his fear of men. It would mean that he had knowingly set upon her trail and was hunting her with all the age-old remorselessness that is the code of the mountains.
 For a little while all was silence. 1 Then out of the hush the thfckets sud | site side of the trail. She fired blind 1y into the thicket. Then she caught | herself with a sob. But two shells remained in her pistol, and they must | be saved for the test.
 Whfsperfoot the cougar, remember l ing the lessons of his youth, turned | from the trail when he had first heard | Snowbfrd's step. He had crouched | and let her pass. She was walking | into the wind; and as she was at the | closest point a message had blown back to him.
 The hair went straight on his shoul- ders: and along his spine. His blood, | running cold an instant before from fear, made a great leap in his veins. A picture came in his dark mind: the chase for a deer when the moon had set, the stir of living thing that broke twigs in the thfckets, and the leap he had made. There had been blood, that nighttime wfldness and the madness and the exultation of the kill. Of course there had been terror first, but the terror had soon departed and left something lying warm and still in the thickets. It was the same game that walked his trail in front-game that died easily and yet, in a vague way he did not understand the hoblest game of al1- It was living fesh, to tear with talon and fang.
 All his training, all the instincts i'm bued in him by a thousand generations of cougars who knew this greatest | tear, were simply ob1iterated by the sudden violence of his hunting-mad- hess He had tasted this blood once and 1t could never be forgotten. The flame leaped in his eyes. And then he began the stalk.
 A cougar, trying to creep silently on It's game, does not move quickly. It simply steals, as a serpent steals through the grass. Whisperfoot stalked for a period of five minutes, to learn that the prey was farther away from him at every step.
 He trotted forward until he came close, and again he staIked. Again he found, after a few minutes of silent creeping through the thickets, that he had lost distance. Evidently this game did not feed slowly, like the deer It was to be a chase, then. | Again he trotted within one hundred | feet of the girl.
 Three times more he tried to stalk | before he finally gave 1t up altogether. This game was like the porcupine- simply to be chased down and taken And fin the case of all animals that | hunt their game by overtaking 1t, there was no longer any occasion for going silently. The thing to do was to fbo |