his coat pocket tied behind his saddle was a handful or two of ground
coffee. Black coffee and cigarettes! What ranchero could desire more?

In two minutes he had a little fire going clearly. He started, with
his can, for the water hole. When within fifteen yards of its edge he
saw, between the bushes, a side-saddled pony with down-dropped reins
cropping grass a little distance to his left. Just rising from her
hands and knees on the brink of the water hole was Josefa O'Donnell.
She had been drinking water, and she brushed the sand from the palms
of her hands. Ten yards away, to her right, half concealed by a clump
of sacuista, Givens saw the crouching form of the Mexican lion. His
amber eyeballs glared hungrily; six feet from them was the tip of the
tail stretched straight, like a pointer's. His hind-quarters rocked
with the motion of the cat tribe preliminary to leaping.

Givens did what he could. His six-shooter was thirty-five yards away
lying on the grass. He gave a loud yell, and dashed between the lion
and the princess.

The "rucus," as Givens called it afterward, was brief and somewhat
confused. When he arrived on the line of attack he saw a dim streak
in the air, and heard a couple of faint cracks. Then a hundred pounds
of Mexican lion plumped down upon his head and flattened him, with a
heavy jar, to the ground. He remembered calling out: "Let up, now--no
fair gouging!" and then he crawled from under the lion like a worm,
with his mouth full of grass and dirt, and a big lump on the back of
his head where it had struck the root of a water-elm. The lion lay
motionless. Givens, feeling aggrieved, and suspicious of fouls,
shook his fist at the lion, and shouted: "I'll rastle you again for
twenty--" and then he got back to himself.

Josefa was standing in her tracks, quietly reloading her
silver-mounted .38. It had not been a difficult shot. The lion's head
made an easier mark than a tomato-can swinging at the end of a string.
There was a provoking, teasing, maddening smile upon her mouth and in
her dark eyes. The would-be-rescuing knight felt the fire of his fiasco
burn down to his soul. Here had been his chance, the chance that he had
dreamed of; and Momus [99], and not Cupid, had presided over it. The
satyrs in the wood were, no doubt, holding their sides in hilarious,
silent laughter. There had been something like vaudeville--say Signor
Givens and his funny knockabout act with the stuffed lion.

[FOOT