Page:They who walk in the wilds, (IA theywhowalkinwil00robe).pdf/21

 the box-car. He was an old hand and knew how to open it.

But as the door slid smoothly back, the tramp got the shock of his life. Something huge and furry struck him with a force that sent him sprawling clean across the farther rails and over into the ditch. At the same insantinstant [sic] the engine snorted fiercely (she was on an up-grade) and the wheels began to turn with a groaning growl. Mishi went leaping off at top speed through the woods, doubly driven by the desire to find his master, and by his terror of the panting, glaring locomotive. Deep in the spruce-woods he crouched down at last, with pounding pulses—while the train with Merivale asleep in his berth, thundered on steadily through the wilderness night.

As Mishi lay there in the chill darkness, his nostrils drinking in the earthy scents of the wet moss and the balsamy fragrances of the spruce and pine, faint ancestral memories began to stir in the young puma's brain, and his pupils dilated as he peered with a kind of savage expectancy through the shadows. He had long, long forgotten utterly the den upon the mountainside, the caresses of his savage mother, and that last desperate battle with the marauding fox. But now dim, fleeting pictures of these things, quite uncomprehended, began to haunt and trouble him, and his long claws sheathed and unsheathed themselves in