Ted followed swiftly, for now the hunt had a definite pattern. A young buck, chased out of the thickets on Burned Mountain, might linger in the beeches. A wise old one would hurry as fast as possible into the thickets at the head of Coon Valley, and the nearest route lay through the scrub beech at Glory Rock. Ted was still a quarter of a mile away when he heard the single, sharp crack of a rifle.
He left the trail and cut directly toward Glory Rock. A volley was very picturesque and sounded inspiring, but whoever ripped off half a dozen shots in quick succession was merely shooting, without much regard to aiming. Ted murmured an old hunter's adage as he ran, "One shot, one deer. Two shots, maybe one deer. Three shots, no deer."
He ran down the slope into Coon Valley and found John Wilson standing over Pythias. The hunter's delighted eyes met Ted's, but mingled with his delight was a little sadness, too.
"He'll never be a better trophy than he is right now."
It was true. At the height of his powers, Pythias faced a certain decline. Soon he would be old, and the wilderness is not kind to the old and infirm that dwell within it.
John Wilson laughed. "I know it. Look at him! Just look at him! I'll bet his base tine is thirteen inches long!"
"Are you trying to beat yourself out of seventy-five dollars? I did promise you twenty-five dollars for every inch in its longest tine, if I got a head that satisfied me! This is surely the one!"
Ted grinned. "I'll dress it for you," he offered.
He turned the buck over, made a slit with his hunting knife and pulled the viscera out. At once it became evident that John Wilson was the second hunter of whom Pythias had run afoul, for he had been wounded before. Ted probed interestedly. Entering the flank, the bullet had missed the spine by two inches and any vital organs by a half inch. It had lodged in the thick loin, and nature had built a healing scab of tissue around it.
Ted probed it out with his knife and almost dropped the missile. In his hand lay one of Carl Thornton's distinctive, unmistakable, hand-loaded bullets.
John Wilson asked, "He's been wounded before, eh?"
"Ted, I swear that you're more excited than I am!"
_Ted scarcely heard. He was here, beside Glory Rock, the day after Smoky Delbert was shot. Damon and Pythias, always together, and a deer so badly wounded that it couldn't possibly go on. Damon hadn't gone on. Only Pythias had. Hurt but not mortally, he had left enough blood on the leaves to convince Ted that there'd been only one deer._
