Cross Trails Ninety-Nine’s Mine Snake Strikes Trapped An Account is Closed Out of the Past The Call of the South [13] Cat o’ Mountain CHAPTER I THE PANTHER High on the crags a panther screamed. High Savage, sinister, yet appallingly human—like the malevolent squall of an infuriated hag—the cry tore through the night shadows whelming the mountain-girt gulf of the Traps. Among the gigantic bowlders and the uncanny crevasses of Dickie Barre it hurtled in a shattered wave of sound. Out across the dense tangle of underbrush and the lazy-creeping water of Coxing Hill it fled, freezing in their tracks the smaller brethren of the wild—fox and raccoon and rabbit and mink—which moved there in their furtive foraging. From the forested steeps of Mohonk and Millbrook it reverberated, and among those trees it was swallowed up. Again the malignant wail broke out; and now the beast which voiced it was not in the same spot as before. Somewhere on the very brink of the precipice of Dickie Barre the huge cat had been, and somewhere on that edge he still was. But he was moving, seeking a crack or crevice through which he might steal swiftly downward without hurling himself to death on the[14] rubble of cliff-fragments below; and his failure to find it at once exasperated his ugly nature to its ugliest. His eyes told him something down there was moving. His nose said the thing was human, was hurt, was
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