them. I told you about killing the old tiger and his mate, and bringing in the cubs to the doctor, so he could sell them to the traders and buy supplies for his hospital. Well, once I had done that, I wanted to do it again. I guess there was something of my old desire to study cats in me yet, for I was overjoyed when I heard wild stories about a giant black leopard that haunted the trail far up the river. You see, the mountain streams were drying up, and the big cats were being driven out of the mountain forests to the river jungles.

“The stories they told about that big black cat made a fellow’s blood run cold. He was big as a tiger. He was a fierce man-eater. His fangs were twice the size of a tiger’s, and each one like a knife blade. He had been seen to seize a full grown man, and before the man’s companions could fire upon him, to leap to the bough of a tree, ten feet from the ground, the man in his jaws, too. The others had fled in terror. They never knew what terrible fate had overtaken their companion until a few days later a second party passing that way had found his bones strewn beneath that tree.

“Of course I laughed at their stories. A black cat do a thing like that? Why, the one in the zoo back home was not three times the size of a house cat, and he, the keeper had told me, was eight years old.

“I did not believe their stories, but the natives believed them, and would not stir up the river road; and none would come down it, either; so those who were sick could not come to the hospital I had helped to make better. This made me angry.

“‘I will go and kill that black cat,’ I said to the doctor. ‘I will have his skin for a foot mat!’

“He smiled in a friendly way, and bade me not be rash. The black leopard, he told me, was much more to be feared than the tiger. Unlike the tiger, he killed for the fun of killing. He climbed trees, and there on the dark trunk, seeming but a part of the tree itself, he waited for his prey. In the gloom of the forest, he dropped without a sound, and his attack was most terrible. He was truly large, too, six feet in length from tip of nose to base of tail.

“I did not believe the doctor. Had I not seen a full grown black leopard in the zoo? Was he not an insignificant fellow? And yet, I was a little afraid, for I remembered that the black cat in the zoo had not been afraid, when all the other great cats cringed in dark corners of their cages. I was a little afraid, but I would not admit it.

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