Page:Gray Eagle (1927).pdf/138

 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,