The Man of the Forest Part 30

"Ex-cuse me, Bo. I--Haw! haw! haw!" Then Dale lurched off, holding his sides.

Bo gazed after him and then back at Helen.

"I suppose if I'd been kicked and smashed and killed you'd laugh," she said. And then she melted. "Oh, my pretty riding-suit! What a mess! I must be a sight.... Nell, I rode that wild pony--the sun-of-a-gun! I rode him! That's enough for me. YOU try it. Laugh all you want. It was funny. But if you want to square yourself with me, help me clean my clothes."

Late in the night Helen heard Dale sternly calling Pedro. She felt some little alarm. However, nothing happened, and she soon went to sleep again. At the morning meal Dale explained.

"Pedro an' Tom were uneasy last night. I think there are lions workin'

over the ridge somewhere. I heard one scream."

"Scream?" inquired Bo, with interest.

"Yes, an' if you ever hear a lion scream you will think it a woman in mortal agony. The cougar cry, as Roy calls it, is the wildest to be heard in the woods. A wolf howls. He is sad, hungry, and wild. But a cougar seems human an' dyin' an' wild. We'll saddle up an' ride over there. Maybe Pedro will tree a lion. Bo, if he does will you shoot it?"

"Sure," replied Bo, with her mouth full of biscuit.

That was how they came to take a long, slow, steep ride under cover of dense spruce. Helen liked the ride after they got on the heights. But they did not get to any point where she could indulge in her pleasure of gazing afar over the ranges. Dale led up and down, and finally mostly down, until they came out within sight of spa.r.s.er wooded ridges with parks lying below and streams shining in the sun.

More than once Pedro had to be harshly called by Dale. The hound scented game.

"Here's an old kill," said Dale, halting to point at some bleached bones scattered under a spruce. Tufts of grayish-white hair lay strewn around.

"What was it?" asked Bo.

"Deer, of course. Killed there an' eaten by a lion. Sometime last fall.

See, even the skull is split. But I could not say that the lion did it."

Helen shuddered. She thought of the tame deer down at Dale's camp. How beautiful and graceful, and responsive to kindness!

They rode out of the woods into a gra.s.sy swale with rocks and clumps of some green bushes bordering it. Here Pedro barked, the first time Helen had heard him. The hair on his neck bristled, and it required stern calls from Dale to hold him in. Dale dismounted.

"Hyar, Pede, you get back," he ordered. "I'll let you go presently....

Girls, you're goin' to see somethin'. But stay on your horses."

Dale, with the hound tense and bristling beside him, strode here and there at the edge of the swale. Presently he halted on a slight elevation and beckoned for the girls to ride over.

"Here, see where the gra.s.s is pressed down all nice an' round," he said, pointing. "A lion made that. He sneaked there, watchin' for deer. That was done this mornin'. Come on, now. Let's see if we can trail him."

Dale stooped now, studying the gra.s.s, and holding Pedro. Suddenly he straightened up with a flash in his gray eyes.

"Here's where he jumped."

But Helen could not see any reason why Dale should say that. The man of the forest took a long stride then another.

"An' here's where that lion lit on the back of the deer. It was a big jump. See the sharp hoof tracks of the deer." Dale pressed aside tall gra.s.s to show dark, rough, fresh tracks of a deer, evidently made by violent action.

"Come on," called Dale, walking swiftly. "You're sure goin' to see somethin' now.... Here's where the deer bounded, carryin' the lion."

"What!" exclaimed Bo, incredulously.

"The deer was runnin' here with the lion on his back. I'll prove it to you. Come on, now. Pedro, you stay with me. Girls, it's a fresh trail."

Dale walked along, leading his horse, and occasionally he pointed down into the gra.s.s. "There! See that! That's hair."

Helen did see some tufts of grayish hair scattered on the ground, and she believed she saw little, dark separations in the gra.s.s, where an animal had recently pa.s.sed. All at once Dale halted. When Helen reached him Bo was already there and they were gazing down at a wide, flattened s.p.a.ce in the gra.s.s. Even Helen's inexperienced eyes could make out evidences of a struggle. Tufts of gray-white hair lay upon the crushed gra.s.s. Helen did not need to see any more, but Dale silently pointed to a patch of blood. Then he spoke:

"The lion brought the deer down here an' killed him. Probably broke his neck. That deer ran a hundred yards with the lion. See, here's the trail left where the lion dragged the deer off."

A well-defined path showed across the swale.

"Girls, you'll see that deer pretty quick," declared Dale, starting forward. "This work has just been done. Only a few minutes ago."

"How can you tell?" queried Bo.

"Look! See that gra.s.s. It has been bent down by the deer bein' dragged over it. Now it's springin' up."

Dale's next stop was on the other side of the swale, under a spruce with low, spreading branches. The look of Pedro quickened Helen's pulse.

He was wild to give chase. Fearfully Helen looked where Dale pointed, expecting to see the lion. But she saw instead a deer lying prostrate with tongue out and sightless eyes and b.l.o.o.d.y hair.

"Girls, that lion heard us an' left. He's not far," said Dale, as he stooped to lift the head of the deer. "Warm! Neck broken. See the lion's teeth an' claw marks.... It's a doe. Look here. Don't be squeamish, girls. This is only an hourly incident of everyday life in the forest.

See where the lion has rolled the skin down as neat as I could do it, an' he'd just begun to bite in there when he heard us."

"What murderous work, The sight sickens me!" exclaimed Helen.

"It is nature," said Dale, simply.

"Let's kill the lion," added Bo.

For answer Dale took a quick turn at their saddle-girths, and then, mounting, he called to the hound. "Hunt him up, Pedro."

Like a shot the hound was off.

"Ride in my tracks an' keep close to me," called Dale, as he wheeled his horse.

"We're off!" squealed Bo, in wild delight, and she made her mount plunge.

Helen urged her horse after them and they broke across a corner of the swale to the woods. Pedro was running straight, with his nose high.

He let out one short bark. He headed into the woods, with Dale not far behind. Helen was on one of Dale's best horses, but that fact scarcely manifested itself, because the others began to increase their lead. They entered the woods. It was open, and fairly good going. Bo's horse ran as fast in the woods as he did in the open. That frightened Helen and she yelled to Bo to hold him in. She yelled to deaf ears. That was Bo's great risk--she did not intend to be careful. Suddenly the forest rang with Dale's encouraging yell, meant to aid the girls in following him.

Helen's horse caught the spirit of the chase. He gained somewhat on Bo, hurdling logs, sometimes two at once. Helen's blood leaped with a strange excitement, utterly unfamiliar and as utterly resistless. Yet her natural fear, and the intelligence that reckoned with the foolish risk of this ride, shared alike in her sum of sensations. She tried to remember Dale's caution about dodging branches and snags, and sliding her knees back to avoid knocks from trees. She barely missed some frightful reaching branches. She received a hard knock, then another, that unseated her, but frantically she held on and slid back, and at the end of a long run through comparatively open forest she got a stinging blow in the face from a far-spreading branch of pine. Bo missed, by what seemed only an inch, a solid snag that would have broken her in two.

Both Pedro and Dale got out of Helen's sight. Then Helen, as she began to lose Bo, felt that she would rather run greater risks than be left behind to get lost in the forest, and she urged her horse. Dale's yell pealed back. Then it seemed even more thrilling to follow by sound than by sight. Wind and brush tore at her. The air was heavily pungent with odor of pine. Helen heard a wild, full bay of the hound, ringing back, full of savage eagerness, and she believed Pedro had roused out the lion from some covert. It lent more stir to her blood and it surely urged her horse on faster.

Then the swift pace slackened. A windfall of timber delayed Helen. She caught a glimpse of Dale far ahead, climbing a slope. The forest seemed full of his ringing yell. Helen strangely wished for level ground and the former swift motion. Next she saw Bo working down to the right, and Dale's yell now came from that direction. Helen followed, got out of the timber, and made better time on a gradual slope down to another park.

When she reached the open she saw Bo almost across this narrow open ground. Here Helen did not need to urge her mount. He snorted and plunged at the level and he got to going so fast that Helen would have screamed aloud in mingled fear and delight if she had not been breathless.

Her horse had the bad luck to cross soft ground. He went to his knees and Helen sailed out of the saddle over his head. Soft willows and wet gra.s.s broke her fall. She was surprised to find herself unhurt. Up she bounded and certainly did not know this new Helen Rayner. Her horse was coming, and he had patience with her, but he wanted to hurry. Helen made the quickest mount of her experience and somehow felt a pride in it.

She would tell Bo that. But just then Bo flashed into the woods out of sight. Helen fairly charged into that green foliage, breaking brush and branches. She broke through into open forest. Bo was inside, riding down an aisle between pines and spruces. At that juncture Helen heard Dale's melodious yell near at hand. Coming into still more open forest, with rocks here and there, she saw Dale dismounted under a pine, and Pedro standing with fore paws upon the tree-trunk, and then high up on a branch a huge tawny colored lion, just like Tom.