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 had held him as a hostage until the war drums no longer throbbed in the Overhills. But if the Raven never forgot that injury, neither could he forget what Gilyan had done. Thenceforward he was the white hunter's pledged brother.

There was one other who did not forget.

The big he-cub whose face Gilyan had glimpsed along his rifle barrel that May afternoon in the canebrake learned, that afternoon, a lesson which struck deep. Crouching behind the creek bank where the path came down to the stream, he saw his mother meet her end. He saw, too, in that same moment, a man leap from the doorway of the cabin in the clearing—a tall, stoop-shouldered man clad in buckskin and wearing a coonskin cap. In an instant the cub was gone, a lithe yellow-brown shape speeding in long bounds up the creek bed, hidden from the man's view by the canes.

Thus at the very outset of his independent career—for until then he had hunted with his mother and accepted her guidance—Koe Ishto, the puma of Unaka Kanoos, learned the deadly power of the tall buckskin-clad woodsman with whom, through no desire of his own, he was to wage a long war of craft and cunning. The experience amazed and terrified him. The young puma ran half a mile, a great distance for one of his short-winded race, before he halted; and even then his halt was only