In the daylight the brush and briers had been annoying and hurtful, and the roughness of the way very trying. Now the one was wounding and cruel; the other made every step with his jaded limbs a torture. With the low spirits engendered by the great fatigue, came a return of the old fears and tremors. The continual wails of the wildcats roundabout filled him with gloomy forebodings. Every hair of his head stood stiffly up in mortal terror when a huge catamount, screaming like a fiend, leaped down from a tree, and confronted them for an instant with hideously-gleaming yellow eyes.

"Cuss-an'-burn the nasty varmint!" said Fortner angrily, snatching up a pine knot from his feet and flinging it at the beast, which vanished into the darkness with another curdling scream.

"Don't that man know what fear is?" wondered Harry, ignorant that the true mountaineer feels toward these vociferous felidae about the same contempt with which a plainsman regards a coyote.

At length Fortner slackened his pace, and began to move with caution.