Gray Eagle (Sass collection)/The Cat of God
WHEN Fergus Gilyan came up through the virgin wilderness to the rolling country within sight of the Blue Mountains, he did not place his cabin on any of the wooded knolls that he might have chosen. Instead, he made a small clearing in a dense canebrake bordering a creek and built his little log house there in the heart of the canes.
Some say he did this for safety's sake. The Muskogees were making war talks at the time, and a house on a height would have been a temptation to roving bands raiding the Overhills, as the mountain Cherokees called their high domain of purple peaks and ranges. But there was another reason besides this one.
Gilyan was a born hunter, and the canebrake, extending for miles along the stream, was alive with game. Around his cabin on every side the smooth straight stems towered thirty feet or more, an evergreen jungle walling in his tiny clearing, a jungle so dense that he could penetrate it only by following the winding trails made by the buffalo and the deer. These trails were his highways to the outside world. From his cabin door to the creek he cut a straight wide path through the canes. There was scarcely an hour from dawn to dusk when, sitting in his doorway, he could not see some wild animal moving up or down the creek bed across that path.
One May afternoon, when he was sitting there smoking, he saw a sight more strange. He saw a small Indian boy, a slim naked youngster of perhaps ten years, back slowly down the creek bed and, still walking backward, turn into the path. Gilyan's right hand reached swiftly for the loaded rifle leaning against the wall just inside the door. In the half-light under the over-arching canes there was something deeply uncanny about that backward-walking Indian; but in a moment Gilyan had the answer to the riddle.
A long, gaunt, yellow-brown beast followed the boy; a big she-puma or panther, wild-eyed with hunger. At a glance Gilyan knew all that he needed to know. The puma's lower jaw had been broken. Some strange mischance—probably a blow from a wild horse's hoof—had shattered it and twisted it awry, so that it hung useless and crooked. The beast had starved for days, perhaps for weeks, and now famine had maddened her.
Yet her madness had not wholly conquered her fear of man. Grimly she dogged the boy's footsteps, but because he kept his face turned to her, 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 no phantasm, yet he had never seen such a face before. He searched the sands of the creek margin and found certain tracks there in addition to the tracks of the she-puma which he had killed. He studied them carefully; then, sure of his woodcraft, announced his conclusions in a guttural whisper, talking to himself, as was his habit.
"Ay," he muttered, "a big he-cub, bigger than the old she and not yet full grown; a big he-cub with a white spot on his forehead. Some day I'll stretch his hide."
Then he turned and walked back along the path towards the slender, copper-colored lad awaiting him beside the she-puma's body.
This was the beginning of two things. It was the beginning of Fergus Gilyan's knowledge of Koe Ishto (as he was afterwards known), the puma of Unaka Kanoos; and it was the beginning of the long friendship, if such it could be termed, between Gilyan, the first white man to settle on Gilyan's Creek at the foot of the Blue Mountains, and Corane the Raven, a war captain of the mountain Cherokees.
The Indian boy whose life Gilyan saved was Corane's son. Corane the Raven was no friend of the whites, for long ago, at a time when trouble threatened, they had captured him by trickery and had held him as a hostage until the war drums no longer throbbed in the Overhills. But if the Raven never forgot that injury, neither could he forget what Gilyan had done. Thenceforward he was the white hunter's pledged brother.
There was one other who did not forget.
The big he-cub whose face Gilyan had glimpsed along his rifle barrel that May afternoon in the canebrake learned, that afternoon, a lesson which struck deep. Crouching behind the creek bank where the path came down to the stream, he saw his mother meet her end. He saw, too, in that same moment, a man leap from the doorway of the cabin in the clearing—a tall, stoop-shouldered man clad in buckskin and wearing a coonskin cap. In an instant the cub was gone, a lithe yellow-brown shape speeding in long bounds up the creek bed, hidden from the man's view by the canes.
Thus at the very outset of his independent career—for until then he had hunted with his mother and accepted her guidance—Koe Ishto, the puma of Unaka Kanoos, learned the deadly power of the tall buckskin-clad woodsman with whom, through no desire of his own, he was to wage a long war of craft and cunning. The experience amazed and terrified him. The young puma ran half a mile, a great distance for one of his short-winded race, before he halted; and even then his halt was only temporary. Traveling all the rest of the day and most of the night, he pushed steadily northward through the vast, parklike virgin forest until, almost suddenly, the rolling hills became mountains. The high, humped bulk of Unaka Kanoos stood well behind the first ridges of the mountain bulwark. Not until he was back on the peak where he had been born—the peak which had always been his home until, in an evil moment, his mother had led him down into the foothills—would the big cub feel that he was safe.
Even into that lofty fastness fate followed him swiftly. Within a month after his return to Unaka he heard for the second time in his life the crack of a rifle. He fled from it, yet it seemed to pursue him, for two hours later he heard it again. An hour before sunset he ventured down to the lower slopes in search of game. He was stalking a young buck grazing a little apart from its fellows in a grassy flat under gigantic beech trees when a crashing roar deafened his ears and a fierce burning pain stabbed his right hind leg.
The wound was a slight one. It healed in less than a week. But the terror of that moment was stamped indelibly upon his consciousness; and even in his panic he recognized the man who had wounded him—a tall, stoop-shouldered, buckskin-clad man in a coonskin cap, the man who had leaped from the door of the cabin in the canebrake.
Already in Koe Ishto's brain this man stood for Fear; but it was in the beech wood on the lower slopes of Unaka Kanoos that the long war between Koe Ishto and Fergus Gilyan had its real beginning. Gilyan had come to Unaka in search of deer hides. Corane the Raven, whose village lay close to that mountain, had told him of the droves of whitetails to be found there, and he had come to see for himself. To his astonishment, he had chanced suddenly upon a puma which he recognized at once. It was an easy shot; yet, inexplicably, Gilyan had failed to kill.
The incident provoked him, whetted his determination. Having shot as many deer as he could skin, he spent two days searching for the puma on the rocky upper heights of Unaka, and when, early the following spring, he returned to the mountain for another deer hunt, he searched the upper heights again. His quest was fruitless, but he found puma tracks larger than any that he had ever seen before.
He was satisfied then that the big cub, now grown to adult estate and a veritable giant of his kind, lived always on Unaka Kanoos; and again Gilyan swore—despite certain things that Corane the Raven had made known to him—that soon or late he would stretch the huge cat's hide.
What the Raven had told him was this: that among certain clans or tribes of the red men the puma was held sacred and that this puma of Unaka Kanoos had become to the people of the Raven's clan more sacred than any other of his race. Klandaghi was the Cherokee name for the puma kind, an honorable name, worthy of the big lion-like cats of the forest who were the greatest of all the wild hunters. But to the puma of Unaka Kanoos an even loftier title had been given—Koe Ishto—and to all the warriors and hunters he was known as the Cat of God.
There were several reasons, Corane explained, for the bestowal of this honor. Not only did Koe Ishto make his home on one of the mountains which the Cherokees held in special reverence, that huge, humped, granite peak which was the throne and couch of the Red Spirit whose voice was the thunder. He was, too, in his own might and bulk such a puma as no living hunter of the Overhills had ever seen before.
Nor was this all. There was yet another thing which set him apart. He bore upon his flat forehead just above the eyes a round white spot as big as a wild turkey's egg. Against the dark background of his upper face, this white spot stood out so vividly that it was visible a long bowshot away. Not even the oldest hunter of the Cherokees had seen or heard of another puma bearing a mark like this upon its face. Hence none doubted the conjurers and the shamans when they said that this white spot on Koe Ishto's forehead was the mark of that Red Spirit who ranked first among the tribesmen's gods because he was the most ruthless of them all.
To all this, as Corane the Raven told it, Gilyan listened gravely. Yet there was mockery in his heart and deceit upon his lips. The very things that made Koe Ishto sacred to the Cherokee hunters rendered Gilyan all the more desirous of securing the puma's pelt.
Koe Ishto's great size and the white spot on his forehead, which Gilyan had seen for the first time on that May afternoon in the canebrake, distinguished him from all other pumas or panthers, as the early frontiersmen called the great forest cats, and would greatly enhance the value of his skin.
Moreover, Gilyan shared in full measure the typical frontier hunter's inordinate pride in his own woodcraft; and this pride had been ruffled and pricked. Outwardly he seemed to respect the Raven's wishes; but on each of his deer-hunting trips to Unaka he devoted at least two days to a search for the white-spotted puma and tried diligently to find his lair.
Season after season Gilyan searched in vain. At last, although he did not abandon his efforts altogether, he forced himself to admit that only by enlisting the Raven's aid could he succeed. This, difficult though it seemed, might not be impossible, for the Raven was bound by the traditions of his tribe to do the will of the man to whom he owed a great debt, the man whom he had made his pledged brother.
Gilyan, confident that his opportunity would come, realized that he must not force the issue. Craftily he bided his time.
Sir Alexander Twining, Special Commissioner of His Majesty King George II to the powerful Cherokee nation whose domain was the Blue Mountains, found much to interest him in Charles Town when he landed there from the high-pooped ship which had brought him from London. Yet to Sir Alexander, a sportsman before he became a diplomat, Charles Town was only a gateway to the mysterious, alluring wilderness which lay beyond.
The preparations for his journey to the Overhills were quickly made. In early spring his caravan set out—himself and his periwigged secretary; four lean, lynx-eyed hunters selected by the Governor of Carolina and headed by Fergus Gilyan of Gilyan's Creek, somewhat the worse for rum now that he was nearing fifty, but still one of the best woodsmen in the province; a half-dozen packhorse men and negro grooms; Conerton, the ex-trader, to act as interpreter; and five tall Cherokee warriors sent down by Moytoy of Tellequo, greatest of the chiefs, to make sure that no war party of the Choctaw or the Muskogee lurked beside the trail. Corane the Raven, one of Moytoy's war captains, commanded the Indian escort.
Of him the King's Commissioner saw but little as the cavalcade rode league after league along the narrow trail winding through the endless primeval forest. The Raven, as always distrustful of the Charles Town English, held himself aloof. As a tule, he rode with two of his braves well in advance of the column, his spear held in his right hand, his long bow slung across his broad, bare shoulders; and from the first Sir Alexander's keen eye marked the careless grace of his horsemanship, the feline litheness and strength of his tall, powerful form.
Twining, for all his airs and frills, a good judge of men, sought closer acquaintance with this war captain of Moytoy, the great chief, whom he was presently to meet in conference, but found the task discouraging. The Raven, always respectful, wrapped himself in frigid dignity which effectually rebuffed the Commissioner's advances and soon strained his good humor to the breaking point. At last, flushed with anger, Sir Alexander reined in his horse.
"Faith, Gilyan!" he exclaimed, as the main body of the caravan came up, "the man's a lump! There's no sense or courtesy in him. You say he understands our English speech, but if so he has forgot how to wag his tongue. I give no thanks to the Cherokee king for sending so unmannerly a minion to escort me to his kingdom!"
Fergus Gilyan, who had watched the play with grim amusement, smiled.
"Corane the Raven is no friend to the English, Sir Alexander," he said slowly. "He is longerheaded than most of his breed and he knows what the coming of the white man means to his people. He does not favor this treaty which you will offer the Cherokee chiefs. If he could have his way, there would be war, not peace."
Twining ripped out an oath.
"I guessed as much," he said. "We had best watch him, then, lest he lead us into some ambush. D'ye think Moytoy plans treachery?"
Gilyan shook his head.
"No fear," he replied. "Gifts and flattery from Charles Town have blinded Moytoy's eyes. He has been won by your plan to make him emperor of all the Cherokee tribes. Corane will obey Moytoy's commands."
Sir Alexander pursed his lips and muttered in his curled and scented brown beard, yet quickly forgot his fears. Soon the sights and sounds of the springtime wilderness drove weightier matters from his mind. To his English eyes this trail through the teeming virgin forest was an avenue of innumerable wonders; and always, as he rode, he carried in his right hand the long rifle which he had procured in Charles Town and with which, thanks to Gilyan's teaching, he was already fairly proficient.
Again and again he tried his marksmanship. Now his target was a platoon of tall gray cranes, standing like soldiers on parade in a flower-sprinkled savannah beside the trail. Now he brought down, amid the plaudits of his comrades, a great wild turkey cock which Gilyan had pointed out to him as it perched in fancied security on a high limb of a giant pine. A half-dozen times he wasted powder and shot on flocks of green and yellow parrakeets which at frequent intervals flew screeching overhead; and once he rode a quarter of a mile along a sun-dappled forest vista towards a herd of twenty whitetails resting under the trees and, starting a small black wolf from its bed in a bunch of broom grass, killed it with a lucky shot as it dashed towards the cover of a wild rose thicket.
"What say you now, Gilyan?" he cried in high elation as he galloped back to his companions. "What say you now to my skill? Am I good enough yet, d'ye think, to hunt your great tawny cat of the sacred mountain—that Koe Ishto of the white spotted face whose hide you have promised me when we reach the Overhills?"
It was the time of the midday halt for rest and food. Most of the party had dismounted and were standing around the fire, where the turkey cock which Sir Alexander had killed was roasting, together with several haunches of venison brought in by Gilyan's hunters. Corane the Raven still sat his wiry Chicasaw pony a little apart from the others, but he was near enough to hear Sir Alexander's words.
For a fraction of a second his brows contracted; and Gilyan, watching the Indian keenly, saw that fleeting shadow of a frown. The white hunter laughed carelessly as he answered Sir Alexander's question.
"Koe Ishto is wise," he said, "the greatest and wisest of his kind. I have promised you that we shall hunt him when we camp under the Blue Mountains because you wish a panther skin for your lady. But as for promising you his hide, there is only one man here present who could make you that promise."
King George's Commissioner had dismounted while Gilyan was speaking. He turned towards the hunter, his silver snuff box delicately balanced in his left hand.
"And that man?" he asked eagerly.
Gilyan nodded towards the tall Indian sitting erect and impassive on his claybank pony.
"Corane's town lies in the valley in the shadow of Koe Ishto's mountain. Corane knows Koe Ishto's ways and can lead us to his lair. Corane the Raven must hunt with us or we shall fail."
For a moment Twining hesitated. Then, swallowing his pride, he turned with an engaging smile to Moytoy's war captain.
"What say you, my brother?" he asked suavely. "Wilt lead us to the den of the great cat of the mountain—this Koe Ishto of the spotted face, concerning whom Gilyan has told me many tales?"
For a long half-minute Corane the Raven, gazing straight ahead of him, his clear cut countenance as stern as that of a bronze image, remained silent. Twining's brows drew together in a frown; the blood mounted to his pale, handsome face. At last the Indian turned his head slowly and looked at Gilyan—a look which seemed at once to convey a challenge and ask a question.
The white hunter nodded; then, frowning slightly, lowered his eyes. The Raven, addressing himself to Twining, spoke gravely in his own tongue.
"Corane will lead you to Koe Ishto's cave," he said.
While Conerton, the interpreter, was whispering to Sir Alexander the meaning of the words, the Indian wheeled his horse and rode slowly forward along the trail.
A Cherokee woman, pounding corn beside the shallow rock-strewn river which flowed through the Raven's village, glanced up at the huge humped mountain towering above the Indian town.
"See," she said to the little naked girl squatting beside her, "the Thunder God sleeps. He has drawn his robe over him so that the noonday sun will not shine on his face."
A fleecy cloud hid the upper half of Unaka Kanoos. Only the heavily wooded lower slopes of the mountain were visible, their deep, lustrous green appearing almost black in contrast with the brilliant whiteness of the cloud-curtain veiling the rocky crest. Three miles to the eastward, on a ridge across the valley, Corane the Raven noted with troubled eyes the blanket of dense vapor hiding the summit and half the bulk of Unaka. To him also this meant that the Spirit was at home on his chosen mountain and was taking his ease there, having first thrown a coverlet of cloud over his couch so that he might not be seen by mortal eyes.
Yet the Raven spoke no word, did not slacken his pace. Fergus Gilyan, spare, wiry, endowed with sinews of steel, strode briskly close behind the tall Indian. But King George's Commissioner, puffing and blowing as the slope grew steeper, prayed silently for a halt, yet was too plucky to confess his plight.
It was already mid-afternoon. Sir Alexander's caravan had encamped in the foothills the evening before. After a long ride over the first rampart of the Blue Ridge, with but one halt by the high falls of the Whitewater, the Raven and his two companions had left their ponies at the foot of Unaka Kanoos and had at once begun the ascent.
Gilyan noted with silent approval the Raven's plans for the hunt. He knew that, unlike most pumas, Koe Ishto helped his mate kill meat for her little ones and kept watch over the cave which was their home. Evidently the Raven would waste no time seeking his quarry along the runways of the deer or in the bushy meadows where the whitetails grazed. Instead, he would go straight to the cave where the puma had his lair, the cave for which Gilyan had so often searched in vain. The white hunter smiled with satisfaction and his lean brown fingers tightened their grip on the butt of the long rifle cocked across his shoulder.
None of the three, not even Corane the Raven, knew that as they skirted a rhododendron thicket fringing a precipitous brook, pale yellow eyes surmounted by a round white spot as big as a wild turkey's egg had gazed upon them coldly from the thicket's recesses. None of them knew that when they had passed on up the slope, a long, sinuous, tawny shape emerged from the rhododendrons and followed in their footsteps, gliding as silently as a ghost amid the massive gray trunks of the burly oaks and the towering tulip trees.
The fear in those pale eyes was stronger than the anger which was in them also. Koe Ishto had learned long since that the Raven was not his foe. But now the Raven was not alone. With him marched two white hunters; and in one of these two Koe Ishto recognized at once his most implacable enemy, the tall, stoop-shouldered, buckskin-clad white man who had wounded him long ago and who camped from time to time on the lower slopes of Unaka Kanoos and ranged widely over the rocky heights as well as the timbered valleys. The big—puma feared the tall woodsman in the buckskin shirt and coonskin cap wherever he found him; but when Gilyan ranged high on Unaka or followed some trail which would take him to the mountain's summit, the fear in Koe Ishto's eyes became an agony of terror.
This terror clutched him now. Never before had the thing which he dreaded most seemed so imminent. Early that spring torrential rains had drenched Unaka Kanoos. Through some obscure cranny water had found its way into the high cave which Koe Ishto and his mate had used for years. Hating moisture, like all the cat tribe, the mother puma had removed the cubs to another cave, dryer but in other respects much less secure, a cave situated some distance farther down the mountain.
The move had scarcely been made when disaster befell, a mischance so strange as to be almost incredible. Salali the Squirrel, the chief conjurer of the Raven's town, had climbed to the top of Unaka Kanoos to gather certain roots and herbs which grew above the clouds. At the edge of the huge precipice near the mountain's summit the conjurer stood in rapture, shaking like a man with fever, chanting the praises of the Thunder God. Then, when the frenzy had passed, an idle impulse moved him to pick up a heavy rounded stone, as big as a man's head, and hurl it into the abyss.
The stone fell into the tree-tops far below and bounded on and on down the steep slope. No trunk of oak or poplar arrested its progress. Instead, it crashed like a cannon ball into the ribs of Koe Ishto's mate lying asleep in a shady spot near the cave where soft, fernlike mosses covered the ground. Ten minutes later the life passed out of her, and Koe Ishto, returning to the cave towards evening, found her lying bloody and stiff upon the moss.
The cubs no longer needed their mother's milk. They were old enough now to subsist entirely upon meat, and Koe Ishto easily supplied their wants. He had been hunting deer for them in the deep woods of the lower slopes when he chanced upon the Raven and his companions making their way along a trail leading to the summit, a trail which passed within a hundred yards of the cubs' new home. At once he had forgotten the deer and had shadowed the hunters as they pushed upward through the forest; and now, when the cubs' den lay not half a mile distant, the fear which had gripped him the moment he recognized Fergus Gilyan had mounted and sharpened and swelled until he was conscious of nothing else.
Sir Alexander Twining was a proud man and sound of wind and limb. But he had never before climbed mountains and at last his extremity got the better of his pride. He whispered to Gilyan that he could go no farther, and when Gilyan had informed the Raven of the fact the tall Indian stood for a moment in thought. Koe Ishto's lair, he told the white hunter presently, still lay far ahead and above, near the summit of Unaka; but there was a spot near at hand where they might rest and spend the night in comfort, then push on towards their goal before dawn.
King George's Commissioner, flat on his back in the shade, gave a great sigh of relief when this news was imparted to him. He was too weary to move, and his heart was pounding like a hammer. They would remain where they were, he proposed, until the sun sank lower, then seek their sleeping place. The view from the spot where he lay entranced him; and the crimson and gold of a mountain sunset, painting the billowy clouds and bathing all the wooded peaks and valleys in magic light, held him there until dusk had fallen. Hence it was black night when the Raven, turning aside from the trail, led the way through the deep woods around a shoulder of the mountain to the place where they would find shelter.
A narrow ledge traversed the face of a great rockmass at the head of a small ravine. Presently the ledge widened, forming a broad, level shelf; and behind this shelf a long, horizontal cleft, ten feet high at the entrance, struck deep into the rock. Kindling a fire, they roasted two ruffed grouse which the Raven had brought down with light cane arrows on the way up the mountain. Then the King's Commissioner lay down on a bed of odorous hemlock boughs.
Already the night chill had descended. Sir Alexander placed his couch well within the cave where he would escape the dew. Geilyan chose to sleep in the open on the broad shelf directly in front of the cave's entrance, where the branches of a great chestnut oak, springing from the base of the rock, spread themselves ten feet above him like a canopy. Long before the fire flickered out these two were sleeping soundly.
Corane the Raven, stretched at full length on the bare rock five yards to Gilyan's left, knew that for him there would be no sleep that night. For an hour or more he lay motionless, his eyes closed; but all that while his brain was in turmoil—a turmoil of anger, none the less deep because it was sternly repressed, and sorrow and foreboding.
He was grateful for the respite which Sir Alexander's fatigue had brought. But for Twining's temporary collapse, they would have reached that afternoon the high cave which had been Koe Ishto's den for years. He had planned to station Twining and Gilyan in an ambush near the path which the parent pumas used in passing to and from the den; and probably before nightfall a rifle would have cracked and Koe Ishto's life would have ended. But the respite, after all, meant little. It merely post poned for a short time the sacrilege for which the Red Spirit of Unaka Kanoos would assuredly seek vengeance.
What would that vengeance be? What punishment would be visited upon him because through his connivance the Cat of God had been killed? The Raven did not know. But he was very sure that punishment would come, that it was unescapable. He had no choice, it seemed, save to do what he was doing, for such was the law—the inviolable law which commanded loyalty to a pledged brother. But his heart blazed with hatred of the man who, taking advantage of that law, had forced this course upon him. And presently, little by little, like a specter dreadful yet somehow welcome, a grim question pushed its way to the threshold of his brain.
Was there a way out, after all, a way which the gods might approve or at least excuse? It was true that on that May afternoon long ago in the canebrake in the foothills he had given to Gilyan the pledge of lifelong brotherhood. It was true that his debt to the man who had saved his son's life was a debt so deep that it could never be forgotten. But it was true also that Gilyan had proved himself an enemy to the people of the Overhills, the people of Corane's race.
The white traders, coming up from Charles Town, brought rum to the Blue Mountains, that strong maddening drink known as taffai, which already had all but ruined the tribes of the lower country. From his cabin in the foothills Gilyan had introduced rum to the Cherokees. For a keg of taffai many deerskins might be had. Stealing away the red hunters' brains with his liquor, Gilyan year after year had robbed them of their pelts. Nor was this the worst. In his long pursuit of Koe Ishto, the puma of Unaka Kanoos, Gilyan had flouted the Cherokees' beliefs and had insulted their gods; and now, to curry favor with this powerful white chief who had come from beyond the Great Water, he was making the Raven himself a traitor to his own faith and exposing him to the Red God's wrath.
Suddenly there leaped full-formed into the Raven's brain a new thought. What if the vengeance which would surely come were visited not upon him alone but upon all his people? What if the Red Spirit who dwelt upon Unaka Kanoos should punish Corane's nation for Corane's crime?
The question was no sooner framed in his mind than it was answered. In a flash he knew that he had made the wrong decision, that of two evils he had chosen not the lesser but the greater. Upon him alone would rest the responsibility if he broke that law which commanded loyalty to a pledged brother, that law which required him to do as Gilyan asked. But not to him alone would punishment be meted out if, through his treachery, Koe Ishto of Unaka Kanoos were killed. Always the shamans and the conjurers had pictured the Red Master of the Thunders as that most ruthless and most potent god who held all the people of the Overhills in the hollow of his hand, and who, if he were offended, might in an instant destroy them all.
Into the Raven's heart swept such fear as he had never known before: such fear as a man must feel who opens his eyes suddenly to find himself standing on the brink of a bottomless pit into which he had been about to plunge unawares. And after the fear followed horror of the thing that must now be done; and after the horror came something that was like a terrible, fierce joy.
He had loved Gilyan. Many times in years gone by they had roamed the woods together. But those years had passed, and long ago his love for Gilyan had died. Since then there was a heavy score to settle; and now the time for settling it had come.
It was Gilyan's life or Koe Ishto's. The Raven could not, by simply withdrawing from the hunt, undo what he had done. Gilyan now knew too definitely the general location of Koe Ishto's lair. He could find it without further aid, and that he would find it sooner or later was certain. The Raven knew that there was only one way in which he could atone, only one way in which he could save his people from the calamity which he had all but brought upon them. And with that long score to settle he was glad that there was only one way.
For many minutes he did not move. He lay on his back, his eyes open now, listening to Gilyan's slow, heavy breathing, planning carefully the thing that he was about to do. At last his hand groped along the rocky surface to his left and closed upon the long knife which he had placed within easy reach beside his bow and his spear.
There would be no outcry. The King's Commissioner would awake at dawn to find a dead man lying at the entrance of the cave; and by that time the Raven would be far on his way towards the unknown wilderness beyond the headwaters of Ocona Lufta, where no white man had ever trod.
Still lying on his back, he turned his head very slowly to the right.
For some moments he was not sure of what he saw. The fire had died away to nothing. Overhead a few stars glittered. A half moon shone feebly through a thin veil of cloud. In the faint light even the Indian warrior's trained vision failed to discern the outline of the puma's form. Yet something about the shape of the stout chestnut oak limb slanting above the wide ledge in front of the cave fixed his attention. Instinctively he studied it; and all at once he knew that Koe Ishto crouched on the limb ten feet above the spot where Gilyan lay.
Amazement held him motionless, but even in his amazement he understood. Instantly he realized that only one thing could have brought Koe Ishto to that place, that only one thing could have nerved him to mount the chestnut oak at the base of the cliff and take his stand on the limb above the ledge where the hunter was sleeping. Koe Ishto had changed his lair. He had abandoned the high cave near Unaka's summit and had brought his cubs to this other cave which he had never utilized before. The Raven knew that somewhere in the black recesses of that deep slit in the rock the cubs were hiding.
In an instant his plan was formed. It came to him suddenly, complete and perfect, as though some voice had whispered it in his ear. His right hand laid down the knife, groped cautiously for a moment, closed upon the slim, straight shaft of his spear. Very slowly, so slowly that the movement was almost imperceptible, he turned over and began to crawl inch by inch across the ledge towards the cave's entrance.
Always as he crawled he watched the vague bulk of Koe Ishto on the great oak limb almost directly over Gilyan's head. He saw the long body of the puma tremble and stiffen, and immediately he halted and for perhaps five minutes remained motionless. Even more slowly than before, he crept forward again, until he vanished in the obscurity of the cave.
For some minutes there was no sound except the slow breathing of the two sleeping men. Then a shrill, piercing scream split the silence; the scream of a puma cub in fear or pain; a puma cub which had felt the prick of the Raven's spear.
At once Gilyan—a light sleeper, like all wilderness hunters—awoke and sat bolt upright. And at once a long, dark shape, dim, shadowy, incredibly huge, launched itself from the oak limb above and fell full upon him, smashing him down upon the rock.
He uttered no sound. His neck was broken; probably his skull was crushed. Koe Ishto, growling savagely, crouched upon the body, his long tail twitching to and fro, his eyes shining like huge emeralds lit with yellow fire. Sir Alexander Twining, awakened by harsh, shuddering growls which seemed to shake the air within the cave, raised himself on his elbow. He saw those eyes and the vague, dreadful bulk behind them, and gave himself up for lost.
Suddenly from the blackness of the cave Corane the Raven strode forward, his spear leveled. For an interminable minute puma and Indian faced each other; and as the slow seconds passed the Raven knew that behind the emerald eyes, burning like live coals in the darkness, fury and fear were struggling for the mastery.
He could almost read in the changing glare of those eyes the progress of the struggle; and from the beginning he had little doubt as to the outcome. For one reckless moment, as the scream of his cub rang in his ears, Koe Ishto's fury had triumphed. In the madness of that moment he had hurled himself upon his nearest enemy. So much the Raven had foreseen and expected confidently; but, knowing the puma kind, he believed that this would be the end.
For as much as a minute he waited motionless, his right hand gripping the leveled spear, ready for what might happen. Then slowly he raised his left hand above his head in the gesture of peace and farewell. Next moment the burning eyes vanished and the ledge was empty except for the dead man lying twisted and limp.
It was the Indian who broke the silence. Standing at the cliff's edge, his tall, sinewy form superbly erect, his face lifted to the faint stars, he intoned in the Cherokee tongue a chant of praise to the Spirit of Unaka Kanoos, the Red God of the Thunders, Koe Ishto's master and lord, who had given the great cat courage to serve the Raven's need. Then he turned to King George's Commissioner.
"Corane the Raven has fulfilled his promise," he said in English. "He has led the white chief to Koe Ishto, the Cat of God. When it is light he will lead the white chief back to the camp of his people."