“‘Just because you have told me he is terrible,’ I said, ‘I will take along a strong cage. I will bring him to you alive. We will sell him to the traders, and buy more beds for our hospital.’

“Then the doctor begged me not to be foolhardy. But I would not listen. With four natives to carry the cage, with a rifle in my hand, and a big knife at my belt, I went—went far up the river trail. When the natives would go no farther, I called them dirty cowards, and putting my rifle inside the cage, dragged the cage after me until I had come to a place where, in a deep forest, at the bend of the river, the black cat was said to make his stand.

“I was frightened a little, Johnny, when I saw the bleached bones of a man lying beneath a great tree where mosses and vines hung thick, but I reassured myself by saying the man had died there alone, and the jackals had picked his bones.

“‘That’s the origin of the wild story,’ I told myself. ‘Like as not there is no black cat at all, and I shall go home disappointed.’

“But I didn’t, Johnny, I didn’t.”

Johnny could feel Pant’s hand grip his arm hard, as the black creature in the cage stirred and gave forth a sort of hissing yawn.

“You were never in the jungle at night?” Pant’s tense, vibrant whisper told more plainly than words that he was living over again those hours in the jungle alone.

“No,” breathed Johnny.

“It’s wonderful, and terrible. The sun sinks from sight. Darkness comes and then out shines the moon. And the moonlight! Nowhere else is it like it is in the jungle. It creeps down among the masses of leaves, transforming swinging, swaying limbs into gigantic, twisting serpents, ready at any moment to swing down upon you. It turns every shadow-dotted tree trunk into a beast ready to leap at your throat. It’s weird, fascinating, terrible. Down at the river some beast plunges into the water. You hear the splash, then the swish, swish of his strokes. He is coming to your bank, you are sure. You are afraid. Who would not be?

“But me, I sat by my cage, with the rifle over one knee and watched. One hour, two hours, three hours I watched, until at last all the twisting branches, the spotted tree trunks were familiar to me.

“And then, then he came; the black beast, the great black cat, he came.”

Pant paused. There came a hiss from the cage, as if the black cat, too, 

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