Page:Gray Eagle (1927).pdf/140

 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