she had not yet leaped upon him. Plainly, however, she had now nerved herself for the onset. Gilyan knew that in another instant she would hurl herself upon her victim.
Gilyan did not rise from his stool. He flung the long heavy rifle to his shoulder, glanced for a fraction of a second along its steady barrel. The bullet passed not six inches from the young Indian and struck the puma midway between the eyes.
Gilyan was on his feet before she had struck ground. At top speed he raced down the path past the Indian boy and the dead puma to the point where the path met the creek. There he halted and gazed eagerly up and down the sandy bed of the stream hedged in by the tall, dense canes.
He saw nothing, but he knew that his eyes had not tricked him. He knew that at the moment when he had pulled trigger he had glimpsed along his rifle barrel another face besides the one at which he aimed—a wide, flat, tawny face in the midst of which gleamed a round white spot like a gigantic eye. For an instant this face had glared at him from the end of the path close beside the creek. Then, at the crack of the rifle, the face had vanished.
Gilyan was a clean man in those days. The raw poisonous taffai rum of the traders had not blurred his eye or his brain. The face that he had seen was
