“Have they scented us?”

“Hardly; the breeze is against us.  Maybe they heard us break a twig.  They’ve stopped, but they are not looking our way.  Now I wonder—­”

Rattling of stones set into movement by some quick, sharp action, an indistinct crash, but sudden, as of the impact of soft, heavy bodies, a strange wild sound preceded in rapid succession violent brushings and thumpings in the scrub of the hollow.

“Lion jumped a deer,” yelled Jones.  “Right under our eyes!  Come on!  Hi!  Hi!  Hi!”

He ran down the incline yelling all of the way, and I kept close to him, adding my yells to his, and gripping my revolver.  Toward the bottom the thicket barred our progress so that we had to smash through and I came out a little ahead of Jones.  And farther up the hollow I saw a gray swiftly bounding object too long and too low for a deer, and I hurriedly shot six times at it.

“By George!  Come here,” called my companion.  “How’s this for quick work?  It’s a yearling doe.”

In another moment I leaned over a gray mass huddled at Jones feet.  It was a deer gasping and choking.  I plainly heard the wheeze of blood in its throat, and the sound, like a death-rattle, affected me powerfully.  Bending closer, I saw where one side of the neck, low down, had been terribly lacerated.

“Waa-hoo!” pealed down the slope.

“That’s Emett,” cried Jones, answering the signal.  “If you have another shot put this doe out of agony.”

But I had not a shot left, nor did either of us have a clasp knife.  We stood there while the doe gasped and quivered.  The peculiar sound, probably made by the intake of air through the laceration of the throat, on the spur of the moment seemed pitifully human.

I felt that the struggle for life and death in any living thing was a horrible spectacle.  With great interest I had studied natural selection, the variability of animals under different conditions of struggling existence, the law whereby one animal struck down and devoured another.  But I had never seen and heard that law enacted on such a scale; and suddenly I abhorred it.

Emett strode to us through the gathering darkness.

“What’s up?” he asked quickly.

He carried my Remington in one hand and his Winchester in the other; and he moved so assuredly and loomed up so big in the dusk that I experienced a sudden little rush of feeling as to what his advent might mean at a time of real peril.

[Illustration:  Jones about to lasso A mountain lion]

[Illustration:  Remains of A deer killed by lions]

“Emett, I’ve lived to see many things,” replied Jones, “but this is the first time I ever saw a lion jump a deer right under my nose!”

As Emett bent over to seize the long ears of the deer, I noticed the gasping had ceased.