As we looked, Harry suddenly turned to me and said:  “Roy, let’s go into the lair.  There is just one chance in a thousand that we may get a shot.”  Now I must admit that I was not very enthusiastic about that little excursion, but in we went, crawling on our hands and knees up the narrow passage.  Every few feet we passed side branches from the main tunnel in any one of which the tiger might easily have been lying in wait and could have killed us as we passed.  It was a foolhardy thing to do and I am free to admit that I was scared.  It was not long before Harry twisted about and said:  “Roy, I haven’t lost any tigers in here; let’s get out.”  And out we came faster than we went in.

This was only one of the times when the “Great Invisible” was almost in our hands.  A few days later a Chinese found the blue tiger asleep under a rice bank early in the afternoon.  Frightened almost to death he ran a mile and a half to our camp only to find that we had left half an hour before for another village where the brute had killed two wild cats early in the morning.

Again, the tiger pushed open the door of a house at daybreak just as the members of the family were getting up, stole a dog from the “heaven’s well,” dragged it to a hillside and partly devoured it.  We were in camp only a mile away and our Chinese hunters found the carcass on a narrow ledge in the sword grass high up on the mountain side.  The spot was an impossible one to watch and we set a huge grizzly bear trap which had been carried with us from New York.

It seemed out of the question for any animal to return to the carcass of the dog without getting caught and yet the tiger did it.  With his hind quarters on the upper terrace he dropped down, stretched his long neck across the trap, seized the dog which had been wired to a tree and pulled it away.  It was evident that he was quite unconscious of the trap for his fore feet had actually been placed upon one of the jaws only two inches from the pan which would have sprung it.

One afternoon we responded to a call from Bui-tao, a village seven miles beyond Lung-tao, where the blue tiger had been seen that day.  The natives assured us that the animal continually crossed a hill, thickly clothed with pines and sword grass just above the village and even though it was late when we arrived Harry thought it wise to set the trap that night.

It was pitch dark before we reached the ridge carrying the trap, two lanterns, an electric flash-lamp and a wretched little dog for bait.  We had been engaged for about fifteen minutes making a pen for the dog, and Caldwell and I were on our knees over the trap when suddenly a low rumbling growl came from the grass not twenty feet away.  We jumped to our feet just as it sounded again, this time ending in a snarl.  The tiger had arrived a few moments too early and we were in the rather uncomfortable position of having to return to the village by way of a narrow trail through the jungle.  With our rifles ready and the electric lamp cutting a brilliant path in the darkness we walked slowly toward the edge of the sword grass hoping to see the flash of the tiger’s eyes, but the beast backed off beyond the range of the light into an impenetrable tangle where we could not follow.  Apparently he was frightened by the lantern, for we did not hear him again.