The grass-filled lair lay shimmering in the breathless heat, silent save for the echoes of the bleating goats.  Crouched behind the screen of branches, for three long hours we sat in the patchwork shade,—­motionless, dripping with perspiration, hardly breathing,—­and watched the shadows steal slowly down the narrow ravine.

It was a wild place which seemed to have been cut out of the mountain side with two strokes of a mighty ax and was choked with a tangle of thorny vines and sword grass.  Impenetrable as a wall of steel, the only entrance was by the tiger tunnels which drove their twisting way through the murderous growth far in toward its gloomy heart.

The shadows had passed over us and just reached a lone palm tree on the opposite hillside.  By that I knew it was six o’clock and in half an hour another day of disappointment would be ended.  Suddenly at the left and just below us there came the faintest crunching sound as a loose stone shifted under a heavy weight; then a rustling in the grass.  Instantly the captive goat gave a shrill bleat of terror and tugged frantically at the rope which held it to the tree.

At the first sound Harry had breathed in my ear “Get ready, he’s coming.”  I was half kneeling with my heavy .405 Winchester pushed forward and the hammer up.  The blood drummed in my ears and my neck muscles ached with the strain but I thanked Heaven that my hands were steady.

Caldwell sat like a graven image, the stock of his little 22 caliber high power Savage nestling against his cheek.  Our eyes met for an instant and I knew in that glance that the blue tiger would never make another charge, for if I missed him, Harry wouldn’t.  For ten minutes we waited and my heart lost a beat when twenty feet away the grass began to move again—­but rapidly and up the ravine.

I saw Harry watching the lair with a puzzled look which changed to one of disgust as a chorus of yells sounded across the ravine and three Chinese wood cutters appeared on the opposite slope.  They were taking a short cut home, shouting to drive away the tigers—­and they had succeeded only too well, for the blue tiger had slipped back to the heart of the lair from whence he had come.

He had been nearly ours and again we had lost him!  I felt so badly that I could not even swear and it wasn’t the fact that Harry was a missionary which kept me from it, either.  Caldwell exclaimed just once, for his disappointment was even more bitter than mine; he had been hunting this same tiger off and on for six years.

It was useless for us to wait longer that evening and we pushed our way through the sword grass to the entrance of the tunnel down which the tiger had come.  There in the soft earth were the great footprints where he had crouched at the entrance to take a cautious survey before charging into the open.