VII.

The moon was just beginning to rise. A vague red glow suffused the summit of the eastern mountains. It hardly revealed, but in some sort it suggested, the presence of the vast forests of the Cove, that still stood dusky and gloomily mysterious. The solemn silence, native to the solitudes, was for the nonce annihilated. The whole night seemed to ring with the shouting triumph of the boys. The cry of the dogs was unintermittent. Naught impeded the wild chase, save that now and then a projecting root caught an unwary foot, and a boy would go crashing to the ground, his companions jumping over his prostrate form, or perhaps falling upon him, then scrambling up together and away again hilariously. Sometimes a horn would sound, and if one had cared to listen he might have wondered to hear the countless blasts that the echoes wound, or laughed to fancy how that mimic chase in the air did fare. Sometimes, too, a voice would call out from the van of the line, “Oh, Mister Coon!” And anon Keedon Bluffs repeated the words in a solemn staccato, as if they were some uncomprehended incantation. “Oh, Mister Coon!”

What that gentleman thought of it all nobody can say. Whether he resented the fact that his coat was considered too good for him, and just good enough for a cap for somebody else; or whether he felt complimented that he was esteemed so game that it was accounted a pleasure to see him fight, singly, a score of savage dogs, and die in the jaws of the enemies he crippled, nobody will ever know. The only certain thing is that he carried his fat and his fur, and his palpitating identity inside of them, as fast and as far as he could. And then in desperation he swiftly climbed a tree, and sat there panting, looking down with eyes whose dilated pupils defied the night, to mark how the fierce rout came at full cry over the rise. The boys knew what he had done, notwithstanding the dark forests that intervened, for the dogs announced in loud and joyful barks that the coon was treed as they besieged the oak, springing as high as they could about its trunk. There was a chorus, “Oh, Mister Coon!” from the hunters as they came pelting over the hill, almost dead beat with the run. For the coon had footed it bravely, and treeing him was long delayed.

The torches, skimming swiftly about under the oak, which was close upon a precipice, flared in the darkness far along the slopes, and the coon hunt glimpsed from the distant cove was like an errant constellation, run away from the skies. Nearer, flame and smoke flaunted back in the wind, showing the colors of a limited section of the autumn woods close about, and thus conjuring an oasis of gorgeous brilliance in that desert of gloom. In the radiance of the fringed flaring lights might be distinguished, in high relief against the dusky background, Ike’s eager face, and Skimpy’s hatchet-like features,—as he bent to beseech Bose to calm himself instead of bounding futilely about the tree which he could not climb like the dream-dog,—and the muscular poses of Obadiah Sawyer, who wielded the axe about the trunk of the tree. How the echoes answered! How the rocks rang with the stalwart strokes! The chips flew with every cleavage. The dogs leaped, and barked on every shrill key of impatience. The coon, barely visible, crouched in the darkness, growled, and looked down on his boisterous enemies. “Keep out’n the way o’ this axe, I tell ye,” Obadiah Sawyer would cry as the backward motion would threaten one of the boys or their four-footed comrades, who pressed so close about the tree as to lose all sense of safety.

Suddenly, without any warning, the trunk of the tree not half severed, the coon ran down almost over Obadiah into the midst of the dogs. There was a frantic plunge amongst them; a fierce growling and yelping and snapping; a crunching of teeth; and now and then as one suffered the sharp fangs of the coon, a hideous clamor that seemed to pierce the sky.

The boys stood amazed at this innovation on the part of Mr. Coon, whose sense of etiquette does not usually permit him to tackle the dogs until the falling of the tree throws the hapless creature into their jaws. How he distinguished the sound in all that shrill tumult Skimpy could never say;—a low growl, exceeding in ferocity aught he had ever before heard, caught his attention. He moved back a pace and held the torch aloft. There, upon the bole of the tree, slowly descending from limb to limb, with lissome noiseless tread, with great yellow eyes, illuminated by the flare, was a full-grown female panther, made bold enough to face the light by the imminence of the danger, for the cutting down of the tree meant certain dislodgment amongst the dogs and the boys. This was the denizen of the oak, the discovery of whom had made the coon prefer the dogs.

Skimpy needed but a single glance. He said afterward that it flashed upon him in a moment that the animal’s young were perhaps in a crevice of the great wall of rock close at hand, and that for this reason she had not fled from the noise and the lights. Skimpy dashed his torch to the ground, and crying “Painter! Painter!” he set out at a pace which has seldom been excelled. All the torches were flared upward. The creature glared down at the boys and growled. There was not a gun in the party. Obadiah in a sort of mental aberration flung his axe into the tree; it almost grazed the animal’s nose, then fell upon the back of a yelping dog.

Each boy seemed to announce his flight by taking up the panic-stricken cry of “Painter!” The dogs had discovered that more had been treed than the coon, which at last had been killed. They would not heed the whistlings and the callings of their masters, and as the boys ran a tremendous yelping and growling announced that the panther had sprung from the tree amidst the pack. Presently something, with its tail between its legs, shot by the hindmost boy, and another, and yet another. The dogs had felt the panther’s teeth and claws and were leaving, but none of these fugitives was Bose.

“Oh,” cried Skimpy, “le’s go back—le’s go back—Bose will be bodaciously eat up! Le’s go back an’ call Bose off!”

“Call the painter on, ye mean!” exclaimed Ike. “Ye can’t do nuthin’ ter hurt a painter ’thout ye hed a gun!”

“Oh Bose!” plained another of the Sawyers in a heart-wrung voice. “What’ll mam do ’thout Bose! Sech a shepherd! Sech a dog ter take keer o’ the baby, too! Sech a gyard dog!” For Bose’s virtues were not all belligerent, but shone resplendent in times of peace. “Oh _Bose_,” he shrieked down the wind, “let the painter be!”

“Oh _Bose_!” cried Obadiah in a tone of obituary. “Sech a coon dog! _Bose!_ An’ a swimmer! _Bose!_ How he used ter drive up the cow! Oh, _Bose_!”

“Ye talk like nobody in the mountings hed a dog but you-uns,” panted one of the fleeing hunters. “Ye ought ter be thankful ye air out’n the painter’s jaws—’thout no gun!”

“Oh, Bose ain’t no common dog!” cried the bereaved Skimpy; “Bose is like folks! Bose _is_ folks!” rising to the apotheosis of grief.

He did not run like folks. Deserted both by boys and dogs he had bravely encountered the panther. It required not only a broken rib and repeated grips of the creature’s teeth, but the stealthy approach of its mate to convince Bose how grievously he was overmatched. Then this gifted dog, whose prowess was only exceeded by his intelligence, saw that it was time to run. He passed the boys with the action of a canine meteor. He sought the seclusion beneath the house and he did not leave it for days.

When Ike struck into the road that leads by Keedon Bluffs he was feeling considerably nettled by the result of the adventure, and resolved that hereafter he would always carry a gun for any presumable panther that might hang upon the outskirts of a coon-hunt. He walked on slowly for a time, sure that the panther would hardly follow so far, if indeed she had followed at all. He listened now and then, hearing no sound of the hunt or of the hunters. It was growing late, he knew as he glanced at the sky. The moon had risen high—a waning moon of a lustrous reddish tint, sending long shafts of yellow light down the dusky woods, and, despite its brightness, of grewsome and melancholy suggestions. As the road turned he came upon the great Bluffs towering above the river, and he noted the spherical amber reflection in the dark current below, with trailing lines of light and gilded ripples seeming to radiate from it. A vague purple nullity had blurred the familiar distances, but close at hand all was wonderfully distinct. The gloomy forest on one side of the road drew a sharp summit line along the sky. A blackberry bush, denuded of all but a few leaves, was not more definite than the brambly wands of its shadow on the sandy road. As he drew nearer he noted how dark the water was, how white in the slant of the yellow moonlight rose the great sheer sandstone Bluffs; how black, how distinct were the cavities in the rock. And the voiceless beams played about the old cannon-ball on the ledge. How silent! Only his crunching tread, half muffled in the soft sand; the almost imperceptible murmur of the deep waters; the shrilling of a cricket somewhere, miraculously escaped from the frost. Near midnight, it must have been. He realized how tired he was. He suddenly sat down on the verge of the Bluffs, his feet dangling over, and leaned his back against a bowlder behind him.

He drew a long sigh of fatigue and gazed meditatively below. The next moment he gave a quick start. There along the ledges and niches of the great Bluffs, climbing down diagonally with the agility of a cat, was a dark figure, that at the instant he could hardly recognize as beast or man—or might it be some mysterious being that the cavities of the rock harbored! As he remembered the stories of the witches of Keedon Bluffs, which he had flouted and scorned, he felt a cold thrill quiver through every limb.

A sharp exclamation escaped his lips. Instantly he saw the climbing creature give a great start and then stand still as if with responsive fright. He bent forward and strained his eyes.

He had not yet recovered his normal pulse; his heart was still plunging with wild throbs; nevertheless he noted keenly every movement of the strange object, and as it turned in the direction whence came the intrusive voice, it looked up apprehensively. Ike said nothing, but gazed down into the pallid face lifted in the white moonlight.