These thoughts, together with all the stories he had ever read of mountain-lions, flashed through the lad’s mind in the few minutes that elapsed between the first and third of those terrible cries. Before it could utter another the fearful beast would be upon him, and with tense muscles he braced himself for the coming conflict. He would not have a chance for more than one shot. If it failed him, all would be lost.
The sound of the third wailing cry had hardly died away when, with a gasp half of relief that the suspense was ended, half of dread, Phil caught a momentary glimpse of a brown furry object moving through the trees. It would next appear from behind yonder clump of bushes. The rifle was slowly lifted, a deliberate sight was taken along its shining barrel, and then, as the furry object appeared at the precise point where it was expected, the forest echoed with its ringing shot. But the bullet had not been allowed to fulfil its fatal mission. One blessed instant had been granted, even as the trigger was pressed, in which to give the barrel a slight upward jerk, and deflect the leaden messenger from its deadly course.
The rifle fell from Phil’s nerveless hand, as weak and faint he leaned against a friendly tree trunk. As he stood there, staring with still unbelieving eyes, a little fur-clad child, not more than four years old, walking on the tiniest of snow-shoes, came close to him, smiled trustfully up in his face, and, holding out a small mittened hand, said:
“Come, man. Come wif Nel-te. Mamma say come.”
[Illustration: “COME, MAN. COME WIF NEL-TE. MAMMA SAY COME”]
If Phil had been nearly paralyzed with horror to discover, as his eye glanced along the levelled rifle-barrel, that he was aiming at a human being, he was almost equally staggered at hearing the fur-clad atom who called himself Nel-te address him in English. How could it be? Who was he? How came he there, alone in that vast wilderness of trackless forest, ice, and snow? Where had the child spent the night just passed, that had been so filled with terrors to him? How had he lived through it? Where _was_ his mother?
All these questions and more he asked the child as he sat on a log, and, drawing the little one to him, gazed at him as though he were unreal, and might at any moment vanish as mysteriously as he had come.