“Neither do I,” replied the colonel.  “Spread out around the tree and see if you can find where he came down.”

But a thorough search failed to reveal, to the investigators, any trace.

“I never saw anything like this,” declared the colonel.  “He seems to have disappeared completely.”

“But where could he have gone?” asked Jack, anxious for the safety of his brother.

“I wish I knew,” returned the colonel.  “If there were any birds around here big enough we might suspect that one of them had carried him off, but we will evidently have to await Pepper’s own explanation of the enigma.”  Then he added after a moment: 

“Well, boys, we have got to the end of the trail.  I don’t know what to do next.”

“That reminds me,” started Dick, when there was a hiss, a snarl and a flash through the air from the tree, under whose branches they were standing, and an immense wild cat, spitting and clawing, landed on Dick’s back.

“Help!  Murder!” shouted Dick.  “Take it off!”

For an instant the boys were so dumfounded by the suddenness of the attack that they all jumped in different directions, but the colonel, with a well-directed blow from the heavy stick he carried, knocked the animal off of Dick, but not before his coat had been torn and Dick himself scratched by its claws.

Snarling and spitting the cat now crouched, facing the colonel, and seemed about to spring.

“Knock him over the head!” shouted Donald.  “Hit it in the head with a stone,” looking about for a weapon.

“Look out!” called Rand, “give me a chance at it!” drawing back his bow and letting fly an arrow which pierced the animal’s body and knocked it sprawling, when Gerald added a blow from a well-directed stone.  With a wild scream the cat bounded into the air and fell motionless to the ground.

“Look out, Rand!” cautioned Dick, creeping back from the bushes into which he had fled as soon as he had gained his feet, as Rand went up to where the cat was lying.  “Take care it don’t spring on you!”

“No danger,” replied Rand:  “it’s dead.”

“Faith, thin, Oi w’udn’t trust it, dead or alive,” said Gerald.

“That was a good shot, Rand,” commended the colonel, “and just in time.  A full-grown wild cat is an enemy not to be despised.”

“I should say not,” agreed Dick.  “Ugh!  I feel as if I had been scraped with a curry-comb.  I wonder,” with a look at his clothes, “if I couldn’t get a job somewhere as a scarecrow?”

“But what has become of Pepper?” asked Don.

“That is the puzzle that we have got to solve,” replied the colonel.  “For the present the only thing we can do is to go back to Creston and see if we can’t pick up some new clues.”

The boys, with Colonel Snow, slowly made their way back to the town, carrying with them the body of the cat, the skin of which Rand proposed to have tanned for a trophy for the club room.