“‘Did you kill him, Dan?’ asks Faro Nell.

“‘Why, no, Nellie,’ replies Dan, as he steps outen the stirrups an’ beams on Faro Nell.  She’s still a bit onstrung, bein’ only a little girl when all is said.  ’Why, no, Nellie; I don’t kill him speecific as Wolfville onderstands the word; but I dismisses him so effectual the kyard shore falls the same for Silver Phil.’”

CHAPTER II.

Colonel Sterett’s Panther Hunt,

“Panthers, what we-all calls ‘mountain lions,’” observed the Old Cattleman, wearing meanwhile the sapient air of him who feels equipped of his subject, “is plenty furtive, not to say mighty sedyoolous to skulk.  That’s why a gent don’t meet up with more of ’em while pirootin’ about in the hills.  Them cats hears him, or they sees him, an’ him still ignorant tharof; an’ with that they bashfully withdraws.  Which it’s to be urged in favour of mountain lions that they never forces themse’fs on no gent; they’re shore considerate, that a-way, an’ speshul of themse’fs.  If one’s ever hurt, you can bet it won’t be a accident.  However, it ain’t for me to go ‘round impugnin’ the motives of no mountain lion; partic’lar when the entire tribe is strangers to me complete.  But still a love of trooth compels me to concede that if mountain lions ain’t cowardly, they’re shore cautious a lot.  Cattle an’ calves they passes up as too bellicose, an’ none of ’em ever faces any anamile more warlike than a baby colt or mebby a half-grown deer.  I’m ridin’ along the Caliente once when I hears a crashin’ in the bushes on the bluff above—­two hundred foot high, she is, an’ as sheer as the walls of this yere tavern.  As I lifts my eyes, a fear-frenzied mare an’ colt comes chargin’ up an’ projects themse’fs over the precipice an’ lands in the valley below.  They’re dead as Joolius Caesar when I rides onto ’em, while a brace of mountain lions is skirtin’ up an’ down the aige of the bluff they leaps from, mewin’ an’ lashin’ their long tails in hot enthoosiasm.  Shore, the cats has been chasin’ the mare an’ foal, an’ they locoes ’em to that extent they don’t know where they’re headin’ an’ makes the death jump I relates.  I bangs away with my six-shooter, but beyond givin’ the mountain lions a convulsive start I can’t say I does any execootion.  They turns an’ goes streakin’ it through the pine woods like a drunkard to a barn raisin’.

“Timid?  Shore!  They’re that timid seminary girls compared to ’em is as sternly courageous as a passel of buccaneers.  Out in Mitchell’s canyon a couple of the Lee-Scott riders cuts the trail of a mountain lion and her two kittens.  Now whatever do you-all reckon this old tabby does?  Basely deserts her offsprings without even barin’ a tooth, an’ the cow-punchers takes ’em gently by their tails an’ beats out their joovenile brains.  That’s straight; that mother lion goes swarmin’ up the canyon like she ain’t got a minute to live.  An’ you can gamble the limit that where a anamile sees its children perish without frontin’ up for war, it don’t possess the commonest roodiments of sand.  Sech, son, is mountain lions.