of him. He fired, then cursed himself not only for missing the lynx but for firing at all. The empty cartridge jammed in the breech of his single-barreled gun, and before he could pry it out the buck which his dogs had been trailing walked across the road with a nonchalance and deliberateness which would have sealed his doom had the old hunter been ready for him.
Sandy Jim did not know it, but he had not missed altogether. One buckshot had plowed a furrow across Byng's back just above the haunches. The wound was nothing. It healed within a week. But for months afterwards Byng's hair bristled whenever his thoughts went back to that experience.
The big lynx did not need this lesson to teach him the fear of man. That fear he already had, by inheritance, and it was implanted deep in his being. But his encounter with Sandy Jim sharpened and intensified his dread of the whole human species and helped to repress and nullify the strange promptings which came to him always when his path happened to cross that of the boy.
At that first meeting in the glade he had recognized the latter instantly, and a flood of memories had swept into his brain as the boy lay down in front of him and called to him in the old unforgotten way. For a few moments conflicting forces in his nature had struggled for the mastery; but the
