?? dying like a falling star, as if some
clutch were stifling it.

"Hea-vens!" The girls, blanching,
shrank against the opposite cave-wall,
which shuddered behind them.

A bat, flying low, a winged Fear,
brushed Tanpa's cheek, as she stood, transfaed??
-and her cry was almost as hysterical
as theirs.

In the blackness of that Tinker's Pot
behind the looming fissure, were there
other things--other things besides a boy,
a broken braggart of a boy?

Was Death in the pot with him? Had@
he sipped of its mystery--only to perish?
Death--it seemed a raving possibility--@
in the shape of some wild animal, perhaps
--a live, a clutching claw!

Tales were always current among the
mountains, trappers' tales--and most of
them airy "traveler's yarns", too--of
strange tracks seen in lonely spots, of
lynx and bobcat; and even of the young
and roving panther.

[[143]]

p142 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p143w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p144

v?