ng at noon. There had been no word about it.
She might not have thought of coming again. This was like a cold
breath through the jungle. It was as intolerable as the other thought
of her disappointment.

. . . There was an almost indistinguishable _slithering_ of soft pads
in the branches. Skag looked up suddenly and the air seemed jerked
with a concussion of his start. The monkeys were back. They had been
watching, the branches filling. When he looked up, the whole company
stirred nervously.

Skag laughed. It was good. There was but one formulated thought--that
Carlin would be glad to hear this; she would appreciate this. The
return of the monkeys had a deep significance to Skag, because he had
really first seen the wonder of Carlin just here--working over the
wounded one. The immediate tree-lanes were filled with watchers in
suffocating tension then. It was curiosity now--nothing covered, but
playful. Skag wished he could chant like the priests, for the
monkey-folk. He wished he had many baskets of chapattis to spread out
upon the grasses for them. . . . As he sat, face-lifted, he heard that
tiger-cough again.

The monkeys huddled a second--it was panic--then they melted from
sight. It was like the swift blowing away one by one, of the top
papers of a deep pile on a desk.

Skag was now essentially absorbed. It couldn't be a mistake. The
monkeys knew. He himself knew from days and nights with the big cats.
There was no cough just like that. It was in a different direction
from before, back toward the city this time, but as before, muffled and
close down to the riverbed. . . . Nothing of the cub left in that
cough; neither was there hurry or hunger or any particular rage or
fear. A big beast finishing a sleep, down in some sandy niche by the
river; a solitary beast full of years, a bit drowsy just this moment,
and in no particular hurry to take up the hunt. Such was the picture
that came to Skag with a keen kind of enjoyment. The thrill had lifted
his misery for a minute. This was something to cope with. It took
away the heart-breaking sense of inadequacy.

It wasn't the thrill of a hunt that animated Skag. The fact is, he
hadn't even a six-shooter along. This was the closeness of the real
thing again--the deep joy, perhaps, of testing outside of cages once
more, the power that had never failed. And just now along the river
and beyond the place where the cough came from--Carlin was com