hunter smiled with satisfaction and his lean brown fingers tightened their grip on the butt of the long rifle cocked across his shoulder.
None of the three, not even Corane the Raven, knew that as they skirted a rhododendron thicket fringing a precipitous brook, pale yellow eyes surmounted by a round white spot as big as a wild turkey's egg had gazed upon them coldly from the thicket's recesses. None of them knew that when they had passed on up the slope, a long, sinuous, tawny shape emerged from the rhododendrons and followed in their footsteps, gliding as silently as a ghost amid the massive gray trunks of the burly oaks and the towering tulip trees.
The fear in those pale eyes was stronger than the anger which was in them also. Koe Ishto had learned long since that the Raven was not his foe. But now the Raven was not alone. With him marched two white hunters; and in one of these two Koe Ishto recognized at once his most implacable enemy, the tall, stoop-shouldered, buckskin-clad white man who had wounded him long ago and who camped from time to time on the lower slopes of Unaka Kanoos and ranged widely over the rocky heights as well as the timbered valleys. The big—puma feared the tall woodsman in the buckskin shirt and coonskin cap wherever he found him; but when Gilyan ranged high on Unaka or followed some trail
