Forthwith a big, rosy woman, who had herself fought a bear in her time, and had shot him, too, before he attacked her farmyard, hustled round, and got up such a meal as the travellers had not tasted since they entered the woods.  They had a splendid “tuck-in,” consisting of fried ham, boiled eggs, potatoes, hot bread, yellow butter, and coffee.  And the meal was accompanied with thrilling stories from the lips of the old settler about the hardships and desperate scenes of earlier pioneering days.  Doc coaxed him to relate these for the boys’ benefit.  And many eyes dilated as he told of blood-curdling adventures with the “lunk soos,” or “Indian devil,” the dreadful catamount or panther, which was once the terror of Maine woodsmen.

“So help me!  I’d a heap sooner meet a ragin’ lion than a panther,” said the old man.  “My own father came near to bein’ eaten alive by one when I was a kid.  He was workin’ with a gang o’ lumbermen in these forests at timber-makin’, and was returnin’ to their camp, when the beast bounced out of a thicket all of a suddint.  Poor dad was skeered stiff.  The thing screeched,—­a screech so turrible that it was enough to turn a man’s sweat to ice-water, an’ a’most set him crazy.  Dad hadn’t no gun with him; so he shinned up the nighest tree like mad, an’ hollered fit to bust his windpipe, hopin’ t’other fellers at the camp ’ud hear him.

“But the panther made up another tree hard by, an’ sprang ’pon him.  Fust it grabbed dad by the heel.  Then it tore a big piece out o’ the calf of his leg, an’ devoured it.  Think of it, boys!  Them’s the sort o’ dangers that the fust settlers an’ lumbermen in these woods had to face.

“Wal, dad reckoned he was a goner, sure.  But he managed to cut a limb from the tree with his huntin’-knife, an’ tied the knife to the end of it.  With that he fought the beast while his comrades, who had heard his mad yells, were gittin’ to him.  With the fust shot that one of ’em fired the catamount made off.

“Dad was the sickest man ye ever saw fer a spell.  His wound healed after a bit, under the care of an Injun doctor; but his hair, which had been soot-black on that evenin’ when he was returnin’ to camp, was as white as milk afore he got about again; an’ he was notional and narvous-like as long as he lived.

“He said the animal was like a tremenjous big cat, about four feet high an’ five or six feet in length.  It was a sort o’ bluish-gray color.  An’ it had a very long tail curled up at the end, which it moved like a cat’s.

“Boys, that catamount is the only animal that an Indian is skeered of.  Ask a red man to hunt a moose, a bear, or a wolf, an’ he’s ready to follow it through forest an’ swamp till he downs it or drops.  But ask him to chase a panther, an’ he’ll shake his head an’ say, ’He all one big debil!’ He calls the beast, in his own lingo, ‘lunk soos,’ which means ‘Injun devil;’ an’ so we woodsmen call it too.”

It was at this moment that Lin put his head in at the cabin-door, and announced that “the wagon an’ hosses war a’ ready.”