Lonesome (Spears)

by Raymond S. Spears

For works with similar titles, see Lonesome.

 

LONESOME

^by Raymond S. Spears

Author of “The Last Wolf,” “A Man's Best Dog,” etc.

FELIS CONCOLOR, the tranquil, lived at the corner of the Greentimber Range and the Wasting Hills. His den looked into the slopes of Shattered Valley, toward the faraway Mirage Flats. He was a big cat whose need of a wide reach was met by the wilderness about him, where he walked with sleek grace and supple power.

As a cougar, Felis was a success. He was past nine feet long from the crinkling of his sensitive nose to the unresting tip of his tail. From his backbone, buttressed by the rounds of his shoulder-blades, to the pads of his forepaws he gave the effect of a beefy brute, his body was so deep, his legs so large and powerful. His flanks were lean, his hips long, and at intervals he drew back his lips, showing his slender white teeth; at other intervals he drew back the sheaths that covered his claws, and showed those beautifully polished hooks, developed like the eagle's talons for taking hold.

The den was a dark pass of overhanging rock, where a prehistoric spring had dripped for ages in an intruded vein, carrying away raw metals by force of carbonic acid in raindrops, and then washing out the residue of insoluble stone in trickles of sandy water. The spring eventually had found a shorter way into the alkali flats and left the ancient subterranean run as a cavern of several chambers, narrow passages and smooth surfaces, which now became solid comfort and convenience at the service of the lone brute.

Curious marks on the wall, like step-ladders or animals or even stubby little men, indicated former occupation by creatures of a certain intellectual development. Smoke-stains, too, were plainly visible in places; but the bones, the litter, the things dried and crumbling which had accumulated during ages on the floors and in the recesses, would have puzzled a cultured race as reading-matter. With the past perhaps Felis Concolor had no concern whatever, except that he had inherited this splendid retreat.

There were several approaches to the den. Two came from above and down a precipitous slope. One led diagonally up, demanding leaps and sureness of jumping judgments. A fourth, consisting of the most meager of claw-holds, ascended an almost utterly impracticable steep of rock, whose face was merely rough and cracked. This was seldom used by the resident dignitary, though he had not failed to discover it, during hours when he stretched, in warm Autumnal sunshine, on one or another of the several favorable places afforded by stone in its countless manifestations of form and surface.

Concolor purred in his enjoyment of the solid comforts of his wilderness abode. He would bask himself for hours with the sunshine straining through his hairy brows, apparently too lazy to turn his head away, with just the faintest betrayal of his annoyance in the manner in which he twisted his ear-muscles, drew down his eyelids, and waved his long and beautiful mustache.

Yet he would not rise and turn around on his bed of polished, undulating stone, nicely calculating that the exertion required would be greater than the modicum of annoyance which would be abated; and, too, doubtless he figured that if he turned around, something else would bother him in his new position, as for example a blue-bottle fly or a grass-tip which he would have to bite off, or even that a lump in the stone, which he couldn't bite off or abate, would press through his sleek fur and intrude upon his breast-bone or the sensitive bone of his elbow. He was old enough to know that perfect comfort untouched by some slight exasperation does not exist.

His domain was extensive. Toward the sunrise, mountains clambered in ridges and benches, spurs and backs, to blue heights above belts of dark shades of upright timber grown from roots penetrating masses of broken stone. Green timber Range was a lower crest that loomed against the vaster heights which caught the first rays of morning sunshine.

Wasting Hills were rounded knobs that extended toward the Mirage Flats of pale alkali, along the north side of Shattered Valley to the arid lake of chemical concentrates. On the hills the trees grew more scattering, the juniper-trees changed from splotches to spots, and finally at the approach to the flats, even sage-bushes diminished to mere trifles of stunted vegetation amid acreages of color, sunshine and shadows of lumps in a largess of varied expansiveness.

Concolor strolled forth from his grand height of castellated masses of stone, entering the forest of his domain, and raised his nose to catch the odor of what might first tempt his appetite. Gums, woods in all stages from stalwart leafage to dank change of humus, touched the delicately adjusted filaments of his nostrils. He reached to nip a leaf that pampered his nose with an invitation for its attention.

Those woods cast countless scents upon the breezes. Among the rest were some that increased his desire to eat. Mice, little birds, squirrels—he turned baleful green eyes and followed the rapid departure of an agile, very much alarmed little beast which had suddenly discovered the approach of the monarch.

Concolor wrinkled his nose. Certainly a squirrel would taste good; but this squirrel was going—gone; and besides, such a trifle would be but a taste.

A rabbit track was more to the point. For the moment, having nothing more in view, the cougar walked along the rabbit runway, his body twisting and his paws feeling as they reached. What his whisker-ends touched his body curved around, passing just clear with a nicety of instinctive calculation; or when twig-ends were too close together to be wholly evaded, he eased among them, so that they dragged noiselessly along his sides and then swung back to their natural hang with the minimum of displacement and disturbance.

His disgust was great when he found that the rabbit had gone into a hole whose bottom he could not reach, and whose wedged stones and caked earth indicated the futility of trying to dig down to the warm and palpitating morsel his nose could smell, his ears hear, but his claws could not unearth. He crouched on the earth as if to wait for the animal to emerge, but thought better of it.

A furry thing darted past him, and he snapped with incredible quickness as he saw it. He felt something between his lips and tongue, in his teeth. Carefully he put it on the ground and planted a paw on one tiny end. He looked at it, smelled it, then licked it up with his tongue again.

He looked around with his head just a little lower than usual. Perhaps he was a trifle ashamed of himself, nine feet of pliant cat engaging in the capture of two inches, not counting the tail, of a dark-brown woods mouse.

He strode along more rapidly, going up the wind. He climbed to a ridge back, stepped into an ancient deer runway and followed it with noiseless care. He found day-old trails, which promised little sustenance. He turned down to where there was a spring of water. Here he drank moderately. He followed along the streamlet, came to a marshy swamp of small size, walked around the edge, taking precious care to keep his paws dry, and approached the beaver dam which created a pond there. He found where trees had been recently cut; but the beaver were in mid-pond, where cougars do not attack them. It is a messy job anyhow to catch beavers unless they are away from the water. Concolor hunted on, leaving the disgusting muck, to search drier heights.

Luck was with him. A mountain hare came bounding down the slope with noisy thumps. Felis heard him a long way off and dropped to the ground with ears twitching, eyes searching, nose wrinkling, lips drawing back from teeth and claws emerging from their sheaths. All tense, patient and ready, Concolor lurked between a log and a boulder. The hare stopped to look back, waited a few seconds and then came bounding again. It came within fifteen feet of the lurking cougar, which gave a light bound and crushed the victim under both forepaws. Standing on the luckless victim, the cougar raised his head and looked to right and left. Then he sank softly, and munched his capture with much contentment.

Later as he strolled along he saw a bird on a low branch; but when he sprang to seize it, missed by a yard, for it was a night-flier, an owl whose work was even quieter, even more stealthy than the big cat's finest efforts. The pique of disappointment turned the hunter down the grade toward the Wasting Hills. Night had fallen. He could emerge from the thick timber into the scattering of cedars without feeling that he was exposing his nakedness in the starlight.

Big game was to be had down in those scatterings of gloom and open spaces. He hesitated as he approached the feeble brutes whose soft meat was amply satisfying.

He knew the consequences of attacking them, however. If he killed a big calf or a heifer, there was sure to be an uproar around the corner of the Greentimber Range and the Wasting Hills. Humans would come with a pack of dogs, and they would scramble and rattle the wilderness and make a grand old hullabaloo—and if there was anything the cougar despised, it was tumult, agitation, confusion and noise. He hated above all things the scandalous dogs, brothers of the wolf-packs—and wolves!

The cougar sniffed, lowered his head and looked about uneasily. He didn't really have to be afraid of dogs, nor yet even of wolves, but they were exceedingly annoying. They came bounding, yelping, yapping at his heels, and they would nip him, which was insulting—but Felis Concolor was hungry.

Sure enough, the breeze brought him the warm scent of large meat. He crept from shade to shade among the junipers. He circled down-wind and worked up the slight breeze, saw dark shapes which moved clumsily about grazing on little tufts of bunch brass; and, having found one of the animals at a-distance from the others, he walked in upon the stupid brute, bided his time and then with two light springs and a jump, landed on the back of the victim before it threw up its head.

With his right forepaw Concolor caught the heifer over the head, hooking in its eyes with his claws, and, kinking the neck, snapped the bones out of joint; and his meal fell quivering, dead instantly beneath him. The cougar snuffed and snarled hungrily into the dripping throat and fed to surfeit. He was always eating either too little or too much. Now he ate till his flanks swelled out taut and round. He ate himself sleepy.

At last, unable to eat any more, he dragged what remained a little way, to some dead cedar, covered it over with the sticks, and then heavily, languidly, retreated through the openings into the greentimber belt, where he curled down on the side-hill to go to sleep, stupefied by his gorge.

He slept the sun around. He awakened at last, stretched and yawned. He remembered his meat, cached out in the scattering of cedars. It was a good night to go walking, and he strolled down to his kill, the smell of which was in his nostrils long before he reached it. There was another odor, how ever, which he did not like. Some human had come that way, tainting the air. Concolor, however, was hungry enough to approach his cache, despite the disturbance.

Suddenly beneath his forepaw the earth opened up and jaws closed on his toes. He sprang, jerked, tumbled about and threw, with two claws in it, the trap that had been unskilfully placed. By failure to put a trip-stick for the paw to step over to insure its landing squarely on the trap pan, the man had lost his chance to stretch the hide of old Felis Concolor.

One fair swing of the cougar's paw had thrown the trap forty feet, drags and all, with two curved claws in it for mementoes. Concolor, in panic fright, now fled wildly up the steeps, up the forested slope, through the talus heaps of broken rock and shivered in the cavern of his farthest retreat. There, licking his injured paw, most sensitive of members, he growled, whined, snarled by turns. He was hurt-sick, nerve-sick, and after a time hunger-sick too.

When he went forth again he kept himself hidden in the timber depths and hunted tiny mice morsels by the hour, feeling happy when he caught a rabbit; but he was so sore that he seemed unequal to the task of killing a deer; yet, having fed on the wilderness trifles, he ran at last upon a deer and killed it with less difficulty than catching an agile rabbit, for the young victim was neither cautious nor fortunate in discovering the approach of the slinking shadow of hunger in the feline figure.

He ate what he could and dragged the remnants of his victim to a fallen tree-top, where he buried it under brush. There he turned his back on his cache, returned into his den and sulked there, kept awake for hours by the ache of his hurt paw. When hunger assailed him, he resolutely went hunting again, keeping away from the kill which he had made. The trap had taught him a lesson which he did not need to learn twice.

THUS he lived, perhaps the loneliest of beasts. His meat-hunting required but little time. For the rest, he slept off his gorges, and he idled day after day, basking in the nearly constant sunshine, retreating from the cool night winds or frosts into his cavern. His shadow as he walked, his best-natured of purrs, startled and sent all manner of life, from tiny mice to the great deer, in abject flight, panic-stricken by the sleek efficiency of so huge and terrible a brute.

The time came when Concolor discovered his own misery. His hunger satisfied, he would walk in the forest aimlessly. By day his natural caution would make him stealthy and silent; in the night when coyote of the desert, owls of the forest canopy and elk of the peaks and points gave voice to their feelings, the cougar would raise his head, open wide his jaws and scream to such effect that where wilderness creatures had been noisy in their gossip silence fell; there was no answer when that long, ascending, throbbing screech and wail called to the tall timber, along the peaked rocks and down the gorges into the open valleys. Instead of answering, all manner of creatures shuddered where they listened; wolves drew away whimpering, deer bounded away in terror, birds on their roost trees shivered with helpless dread.

For all the small creatures Felis Concolor had only indifference or contempt. For the deer he had only an appetite. Bears he disliked for their burly swaggering strength and courage. Elk he longed to eat, but feared their horns and hoofs. A lone wolf did not matter to him; but when a pack came, barking, yapping, howling and snapping at his heels, Concolor snarled and fled to safety amid the dignity of tree-branches. He hated wolves, for they disturbed his self-respect.

Stricken by the, longing that was worse than hunger, Concolor took to wandering far and swing wide from his den at the corner of Greentimber Range and the Wasting Hills. He climbed till he was above the timber-line; he descended till he was in the midst of scattered sage, where the alkali salts were irritating to his paws and made him thirst—and the water he found did not quench the thirst.

Thus he discovered a runway where men-folk traveled. He walked beside it in the quiet of night. He had walked in deer-trails, over passes where footpaths of many kinds of creatures converged into one, and he knew cattle tracks, cut deep and wide by heavy hoofs. The reeking man-tracks bespoke of dangerous, but interesting, creatures.

It was night. He was a lucky cougar. He heard a man coming. The man was in a lonely mood, too. At least he was making loud sounds. His voice rose and fell hoarsely, like the voice of a strong human.

The cougar dropped amid a tangle of sage, and with his lower jaw on his forelegs waited patiently. He was rewarded. The human was riding a horse, as humans do. He was swaying from side to side. He was whooping, wailing, shouting, yelling, all with a vehemence and energy that excited the admiration of old Concolor.

Oblivious to the audience, the man lounged by, his horse shacking along with head bobbing up and down. Suddenly the horse stiffened, bucked tentatively, and then surged ahead.

“Who-a-a-a!” the man yelled, swaying and jerking about violently; but the horse did not seem to mind.

The man accepted the situation, whooped with new energy, and with waving hat in the starlight, yelling and shouting, he rode away, rather pleased by the sudden accession of nerve and energy in his weary mount. The cougar rose on his forelegs to sit on his haunches, watching the rapid, dusty departure. He was puzzled, not realizing that he had stopped upwind from the trail, and that the horse doubtless had caught his scent, warm from his sleek body—something to startle even the wakeful dreams of a desert mount with a drunken rider.

Concolor circled wide, killed a calf and, having gorged, went into strange country to sleep it off. When he returned to his den he was glad to be home again. He had met no friends. He had passed the time of day with no chance acquaintance. Yet he had found a kind of solace for his loneliness, which was worse than hunger.

By and by he returned again to the trail. Man tracks possessed a kind of fascination for him. The cries of mankind fell like pleasant music on the huge feline's ears. He recalled his sensations with a wish to enjoy them again. Accordingly he returned to the lonely mountain pass and lurked along it, being so eager that he did not wait for night, but with infinite caution and slowest of creepings ventured near the dangerously fascinating runway.

He was disappointed. He saw no one. He grew stomach-hungry, waiting for an other human to ride by on horseback, singing in the broad day. None, came, even in the dark. Felis Concolor drew back and returned into the land of his huntings, where he caught rabbits, birds and other creatures till he was satisfied. Then he returned to the runway, patiently resuming his vigil.

He wanted friendship, or at least contact with creatures of his own size. Toward humans he felt a feeling of respect, sympathy, friendship even. He had no illusions regarding the danger of such a whim, but he took the chance because he was alone in those vast spaces, and if he called across them there was no voice to make answer.

Luck was with him after a time. He saw a fire in the midst of a valley. He approached it in the gloom. Juniper-trees were scattered on the back of a neighboring ridge. Stalking through these, Concolor arrived within listening distance of the fire.

He saw humans gathered around it, sitting down. It was a cedar limb-and-root fire. Within the circle of the fight was a strange hulky thing which smelled variously—a chariot of the roads, which made much noise and traveled at bird-wing speed. These were tourists from afar.

Felis Concolor uttered a tentative cry. His voice floated into the wide, shallow basin. He saw every figure around the fire instantly straighten up and begin to act like a man.

He screamed again. He heard them utter exclamations, cries and whisperings. He wished they would make sounds like the rider who had passed that way on his horse some time since. Still, these sounds were a kind of response.

He called again. He saw the whole crowd scramble into the chariot, and a moment later he heard them shooting, spitting fire and throwing hissing things through the air. He knew the sound. Regretfully he withdrew, calling and crying as he retreated. He listened for tangible answer, but there was no welcome for him.

He returned into the mountains and walked in the green timber again. He was not disappointed, though he was far from satisfied. He had come down to humans, where they had their fire. The jeopardy had been considerable, and he accepted the rebuff. His loneliness was in a measure overcome by his dread of the stinging and deadly machinations with which humans destroyed whatever came within sight of them.

Wonderful killers, these humans! Felis Concolor had followed their tracks to many a sprawling victim. They killed prairie-dogs, hawks, rabbits and left them where they fell. They wounded deer which ran, dripping blood. Around their fireplaces it was commonplace to find scorched bones. Apparently they killed much, but used little.

Their sprawled victims were deadly, for around them the humans placed murdering traps that even wolves could not always avoid. And like wolves, humans often killed merely for fun.

Nevertheless the cougar returned to the runway of men where it led winding over the timbered pass down through the juniper belt in the direction of the bare, lower levels where they had their own den. Felis stalked along the trail, drawn irresistibly by the mystery of these careless, stalwart beings. Perhaps he even admired them.

He heard footsteps, and showed his teeth appreciatively. Humans didn't care who heard them! He saw the walker, a woman. She was up the slope from the trail, picking juniper berries in a clangorous tin pail.

She was Rose Stanley, from down at the dusty spaces of the Edem ranch. It had been her good fortune to escape alone to the junipers, which Toyab Edem would have objected to, had he known. Toyab could not understand why or how a young woman could prefer the timber-line without him, rather than with him hanging around. She had run away to avoid him.

Now, perfectly content, humming a low tune under her breath, she was joyou in the height and breadth of a vast and beautiful land. What lovelier place was there in the world than this, with its colors, its spaciousness, the glory of its sky, its mountains and its sweep of valley?

Then she met Felis Concolor, who issued forth noiselessly with cool, feline insolence and gazed at her reflectively only a jump distant, magnificently calm. Frozen by a presence so questionable, she stared at him gaze for gaze. She felt her lips parting as if to scream; but on the instant she realized that this in that land of vacancies would be in vain. She confronted him with utter courage.

His ears twitched; his tail curved and waved; his whiskers spread out almost comically; his eyes searched her; and when she looked fairly into their moon-green depths, she felt their inscrutable chill.

“What shall I do! What shall I do!” she whispered.

Then she heard the tawny brute purring, his lips parted, and something—an expression—in his face reassured her. His was not a vicious mood, nor was his attitude that of attack; no hunger was revealed in his well-filled lines; his mere presence was a bid for her most earnest attention; she began to edge and back away, and he knew the expression of her figure, the meaning of the lines of her gestures, which indicated that she was alarmed. Deer, rabbits, and other menaced creatures displayed the same timidity, the same urgent, shrinking departure.

His own doubts were dispelled, so that he felt more at ease. He walked with her at a harmless distance, yet nearly beside her. He suited his soft, gliding gait to her noisy foot-pattering.

For a time she scurried, but he was not to be outrun; she walked, and he kept pace; she sauntered, and he strolled with her; she stopped, and he posed like a beautiful statue. She stared at him, and he displayed his magnificent pride, gratified by her understanding.

“Kitty! Kitty!” she exclaimed, and then laughed aloud at her own absurdity—a kitten two hundred pounds in weight!

He purred louder than ever, for there was assurance and pleasure in that light staccato cry. There was greeting in her voice, and knowledge in her tone. She knew, now, his own feeling. He crinkled his nostrils, he lifted the corners of his lips, and he chortled his contentment, as his longing was assuaged by this meeting and companionship.

She leaned against a tree and talked to him, her voice pleasant. He saw her grow calm. He saw her draw a third eye from her belt, and as she leveled it at him he froze doubtfully. At the click and a flutter in that pale eye extended toward him, he sprang away in a start. The opacity of the third eye which she carried in her hands was different from her own bright blue eyes, whose shining and handsome depths were where they ought to be—in a human creature's head.

He walked with her for miles. They strolled among the junipers. They went down to the edge of the juniper belt, where the sage was alone amid the crumbling talus-slope débris.

There, at the open, the cougar hesitated. He stopped as the den of humans showed plain far down. He glanced at the horses and cattle scattered far and wide. She spoke to him, urged him, and then approached him. He purred, but retreated.

“Good kitty!” she said to him with her voice still pleasant; but he turned and made three magnificent, incredible, boastful bounds from the rock on which he had paused to look down upon that domain of humanity. He stopped among the cedars, looking back over his shoulders; and then, leaping, he retreated from her view heading away toward the higher mountains in the heavy timber.

He returned to the fastnesses of his den-land. He was no longer hungry in his soul. He had walked with a human, one that understood. To his purring a pleasant voice had responded. Never had the grandeur of the wilderness been more soothing, more splendid, as with his heart's longing appeased he cantered back to his den.

That night he called into the spaces of the hills, where his voice surged and echoed in tall timber, along the precipices of stone and down the gulches and cañons. The shivering silences were the only reply to his wild cries. He did not feel rebuked by the quiet, for had he not walked with a human?

FELIS CONCOLOR basked the next evening in the setting sun. He had been at a high pitch of nervous expectancy, for those who approach men takes chances and carry their lives as offerings. As he was weary after eating much good veal or venison, so now he was surfeit with satisfaction of his lonesomeness by much friendly companionship.

He saw the white sun turn yellow and then orange; he saw the valley colored blue, with great, shapely, purple shadows; he saw the sky bright with many hues, while dust of air turned to color of gold and pearl. The sunlight gone and a chill breath from mountain-peaks coming down, he retreated into his cave, where he slept till the moon was shining and hunger bade him awaken, for it was time to hunt.

In two or three days he was lonesome again. He crossed the range, edged down into the junipers below the timber, and near the human runway he found that human again. She was not afraid this time. Instead she laughed when she saw him and called him “Kitty.” He dropped to the ground, stretched his neck upon his forelegs and gazed at her.

She sat on a low boulder, looking at him. She told him things she had never told any one in her life before. She spoke in sibilant whispers, she sang in a low voice, and she made the most casual remarks.

When she walked along the mountain he walked with her, never very far from her, never within three steps of her. When she would have made bold to pat his head he drew away doubtfully, his ears lying back, and his purring was broken, even ceased. Then she must needs beg his pardon in a most caressing voice. Not for worlds would she abuse his confidence!

She told him that she was his friend. She explained how she was lonely on the ranch, that she detested Toyab Edem, favorite son of Grizzly Edem, because Toyab was a youth after Grizzly's own heart.

“I'm just sort of a distant relative!” she said. “And Toyab takes it for. granted I—that I admire his shooting and slaying heartlessness. I don't— Oh, I hate him! But—but——”

Her voice trailed away in helpless resignation.

“All Toyab lives for is to be like old Grizzly,” she went on. “He wants to be like his father. They laugh at me because I love the sunrise and the Leopard Ridge, which is spotted on its cream-colored clay with junipers. I love jackrabbits with their absurd legs and ears—but Toyab just loves to kill them. And I hate venison, because living deer are so beautiful! You understand, don't you, cougar?”

Felis Concolor blinked. Probably if he had understood he would most assuredly have grinned widely. As it was, he purred a bit louder to show his general appreciation. No guilt was in his conscience, despite the good feed he had had the previous evening when a yearling deer fell to his right paw's deadly crash.

Rose Stanley had found companionship and appreciation. The cougar was comforted in his own loneliness. Certainly there was mutual understanding between the human and the cougar who was moved to go walking with a human.

But Toyab Edem was coming down off the mountain range on horseback one day after sunset, feeling cheated because his hunting had been so steady that he had killed or driven away all the game within easy range of the ranch. As he left the thick timber and worked his way down through the junipers he discovered Rose on her way home. At the same time he saw in the sand wash of a dry run a track that brought him up short.

“Huh!” he exclaimed. “Cougar—an' fresh!”

In five minutes he read the trails. The huge cat had been following Rose Stanley. Toyab was slow of wit. He figured, as he would have said, right smart.

For a long time he had found that young woman a problem. She wouldn't accept his least clumsy attempts to be sociable; she wouldn't permit him to fetch and carry for her; in vain he had sought for some sure means of making her obligated to him. Now, he surmised, fortune had at last rewarded his patience and his terrific skill.

“I'll keep dead quiet,” he told himself cunningly. “I ain't goin'' to have no slipup; I ain't no one to brag 'fore I've made good!”

Toyab slipped away an hour before false dawn on the following morning. None knew that he was going, or whither he was going. He went up the mountains. He had his suspicions. His instinct helped; his knowledge, too, garnered at the expense of a thousand raids in that glorious land of beauty and hardship.

He found the forest silent, and to his liking. With what he knew he had much to work through. He followed the crest of the Green timber Range; he found a track there, the pad of the cougar; he ransacked the gloom of the mountain-side; for once he saw deer that he did not slay, though he itched.

He worked his way on moccasins to the corner of the Wasting Hills. His dull, opaque, fishy eyes noted sign, traces and careless cougar footsteps. He found shed hair of the “varmint.” He was amazed and delighted. Since when had any one found a cougar lair in this land? He read the tracks with greedy hope. Somewhere about was the scoundrel's den.

“Huh!” Toyab grinned. “Follerin' Rose Stanley, eh? Huh!”

Through his cold veins he felt warm the flood of his avarice for her with the certainty that now he'd show her how he'd been watching out, taking care of her. He held his 30-30 carbine gripped ready in his hands as with clandestine approach he made his way in and out among the massy broken rock and through the tall spruce stand.

He peered, glanced, looked and studied with thorough caution and unlimited patience. He saw jays, and froze till they had passed on without discovering him, for they are the tell-tales of the wilderness.

He saw mice, a marmot, a rabbit. Few things were missed by his searching look. He came to the edge of a landslide. Across the open he saw something. He grew rigid.

On the brink and edge of things, where a stony bench was at the mouth of a cavern in the side of the steep mountain, he saw a huge brute lying stretched at ease, licking one paw and basking in the sunshine, which was welcome there some nine thousand feet above the level of the sea.

“Huh!” breathed Toyab Edems. “Gormity, w'at a size! He c'uld kill a bull!”

The carbine came swiftly up, and in two seconds the tragedy was enacted. A long, slim projectile struck the back of the head of Felis Concolor in the broad, sleek space just behind the ears so that he did not know he was struck. His light went out—all that deep, beautiful valley, all the crystalline blue of the cloudless sky, the purple shadows and the brilliant sunshine itself.

“Hawh!” Toyab Edem chortled, twisting his lower jaw as he bounded down to his victim to kick and maul it in the exuberance of his noble deed.

He drew his dark-bladed, gleaming, edged knife, exclaiming:

“I bet, by gabby, 't Rose'll go plumb wild, seein's I vengified her fer bein' tracked aroun' by this ol' scoundrel painter! Hawh! I bet she will!”

He carried the great pelt proudly home, where he tossed it down at the feet of the girl who had from mere alarm grown to admire and understand that lonely big cat of the Greentimber Range who had walked with a human.

She looked at the tattered, loppy trophy, with its ghastly, blood-stained head. She gave a horrified glance at the unspeakable pride of Toyab Edem, and then she dropped on her knees by that pitiful remnant and burst into tears.

Toyab gaped in indignant amazement. Just at the moment of his great glory, when reward should have been his, the bestower laid the wreath of her tears on the grisly proof of his own prowess.

Old Grizzly gulped uneasily and with a shake of his head exclaimed—

“Women ain't what they used to be!”