Tom, understanding the difficulty at a glance, agreed.  Between the four young folk they managed to carry Jerry Sheming to the car.  They had scarcely got him into the tonneau when a series of yells arose from the crowd down near the derailed freight train.

“Look out!  Take care of that panther!  I told you she was out!” shouted one voice above the general uproar.

Ruth Fielding and her friends, startled indeed, ran to the brow of the hill.  One of the wide-branched trees rose from the bottom of the ravine right below them.  Along one of the branches lay a long, cat-like body.

“A black panther!” gasped Tom.

CHAPTER II

THE PANTHER AT LARGE

“Say! let’s get out of here!” exclaimed the girl from the West.  “I don’t want to be eaten up by that cat—­and Uncle Bill would make an awful row over it.  Come on!”

She seized Ruth’s hand and, leaving Tom to drag his sister with him, set off at full speed for the motor car, wherein Jerry Sheming, the stranger, still lay helpless.

Helen was breathless from laughter when she reached the car.  Jane Ann’s desire not to be eaten up by the panther because of what Mr. Bill Hicks, of Bullhide, Montana, would say, was so amusing that Tom’s twin forgot her fright.

“Stop your fooling and get in there—­quick!” commanded the anxious boy, pushing his sister into the tonneau.  With the injured Jerry, the back of the car was well filled.  Tom leaped into the front seat and tried to start the car.

“Quick, Tom!” begged Ruth Fielding.  “There’s the panther.”

“Panther!  What panther?” demanded Jerry, starting up in his seat.

The lithe, black beast appeared just then over the brow of the hill.  The men who had started after the beast were below in the ravine, yelling, and driving the creature toward them.  The motor car was the nearest object to attract the great cat’s wrath, and there is no wild beast more savage and treacherous.

Tom was having trouble in starting the car.  Besides, it was headed directly for the huge cat, and the latter undoubtedly had fastened its cruel gaze upon the big car and its frightened occupants.

Ruth Fielding and her friends had been in serious difficulties before.  They had even (in the woods of the Northern Adirondacks and in the foothills of the Montana Rockies) met peril in a somewhat similar form.  But here, with the panther creeping toward them, foot by foot, the young friends had no weapon of defense.

Ruth had often proved herself both a courageous and a sensible girl.  Coming from her old home where her parents had died, a year and a half before, she had received shelter at the Red Mill, belonging to her great uncle, Jabez Potter, at first as an object of charity, for Uncle Jabez was a miserly and ill-tempered old fellow.  The adventures of the first book of this series, entitled “Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill; Or, Jasper Parloe’s Secret,” narrate how Ruth won her way—­in a measure, at least—­to her uncle’s heart.