iercing
scream again, and with it enlightenment, and Gloria sank back, seeming
to melt into the snow about her. Yonder, just upon the next ridge where
the moonlight carved in fine details the outline of a big bare boulder,
stood the thing that had screamed; in this light its great body was
weirdly magnified, so that the entire length of seven or eight feet
appeared to Gloria's frightened eyes twice that. Long-bodied and lithe,
small-headed and merciless, steel-muscled and chisel-clawed, the big cat
in silhouette twitched its restless tail back and forth nervously, and
from snarling jaws sent forth its almost human call to cut across vast,
still distances.

Gloria drew back and back where she crouched, her body pressed into the
snow-bank, in a panicky desire to hide. The big cat had smelled the
meat, she guessed swiftly. When it leaped upward, seeking to snatch down
the swinging weight, or clambered up the pine, then she must spring up
and run, run as she had never run in her life, away from this terrible,
murderous thing, back to King. Unconscious of cold and wet, she cowered
and waited, scarce breathing. She saw how the big beast put up its head
and sniffed; did it in reality smell the meat? Or had it sensed her
presence?

For what seemed a very long time the gaunt-bodied animal stood as still
as the rock beneath it; then, silent and swift, it turned and, like a
cat at home leaping down from a table, dropped into the shadows at the
base of the rock, and was lost to Gloria's sight in a little hollow. She
waited, her eyes staring.

Again, all of a sudden, she saw it. Moving with the stealthy caution
which is its birthright, it appeared fleetingly a score of feet lower on
the steep slope, the body and its shadow, a twin for stealthy silence,
gone in a flash, reappearing once more still lower on the slope and just
beyond the pine sapling. It was coming on. Fascinated, Gloria sat like
stone, with never a thought of the rifle lying across her knees.

The mountain-lion leaped downward softly from stage to stage of the
canon-side, paused under the pine, lifted its head, and sent forth again
its hunger-cry. All this time Gloria sat breathless; the
fear-fascination still held her powerless. She watched the animal crouch
and gather its strength and hurl its lean body upward. The lion fell
back, the ripping claws having missed the meat by some two or three
feet, and Gloria heard the low, rumbling growl. Again it sprang; again