“Isn’t he cunning!” observed Bess.
“He thinks he’s hitched.”
“They are trained that way. You see, on
the plains there are so few hitching posts,”
said Rhoda dryly.
The others dismounted, too. Rhoda was hunting
among the great boulders that littered the grassy
bottom. When they asked her what she was looking
for, she called back that she would show them a boiling
spring if she could find it.
Suddenly Nan lifted her head to listen. Then
she started up the canon, which, in that direction,
grew narrower between the walls.
“Don’t you hear that calf bawling?”
she demanded, when Bess asked her where she was going.
“Oh, I hear it,” said Bess, keeping in
the rear. “But how do you know it is a
calf?”
“Then it is something imitating one very closely,”
sniffed Nan, and kept on. The next minute she
shouted back: “It is! A little, cunning,
red calf. And, oh, Bess! it has hurt its leg.”
She ran forward. Bess followed with more caution.
Suddenly there was a crash in the bushes, and out
into the open, right beside the injured calf, came
a red and white cow. This animal bawled loudly
and charged for a few yards directly toward Nan Sherwood.
“Oh, goodness, Nan! Come away!” begged
Bess, turning to run. “That old cow will
bite you.”
But it was not the anxious mother of the calf that
had startled Nan. She knew she could dodge the
cow. But above the place where the calf lay,
on a great gray rock that gave it a commanding position,
the girl saw a huge, cat-like creature with glaring
eyes and a switching tail.
She had never seen a puma, not even in a menagerie.
But she could not mistake the slate and fawn colored
body, the cocked ears, the bristling whiskers, and
the distended claws, the latter working just like
a cat’s when the latter is about to make a charge.
And it looked as though the savage beast could quite
overleap the cow and calf and almost reach Nan Sherwood’s
feet.
A TROPHY FOR ROOM EIGHT
Nan was badly frightened. But she had once faced
a lynx up at Pine Camp, and had come off without a
scratch. Now she realized that this mountain
lion had much less reason for attacking her than had
the lynx of the Michigan woods; for the latter had
had kittens to defend.
The huge puma on the rock glared at her, flexed his
shoulder muscles, and opening his red mouth, spit
just like the great cat he was. Really, he was
much more interested in the bleating red calf than
he was in the girl who was transfixed for the moment
in her tracks.
Bess, who could not see the puma, kept calling to
Nan to look out for the cow. She was more in
fun than anything else, for she did not believe the
cow could catch her chum if the latter ran back.
What amazed Bess Harley was the fact that Nan stood
so long by the clump of brush which hid the rock on
which the puma crouched from Bess’s eyes.
