he door. Never had those
chubby legs flown so fast, but even as the light from the mouth of the
cave glimmered around her, she heard a crunching on the gravel from
behind, and then a hand, it seemed, caught her cloak and jerked her to a
stop.

She fell sprawling, head over heels, and when she looked up, there sat
Bart upon his haunches above her, growling terribly, and gripping the
end of the cloak. No doubt about it now. Black Bart would have his teeth
in her throat if she made another movement toward the entrance. A city
child would have either gone mad with terror or else made that fatal
struggle to reach the forbidden place, but Joan had learned many things
among the mountains, and among others, she knew the difference between
the tame and the free. The old dappled cow was tame, for instance;
and the Maltese cat, which came too close to Bart the year before and
received a broken back for its carelessness, had been tame; and the
brown horse with the white face and the dreary eyes was tame. They
could be handled, and teased, and petted and bossed about at will. Other
creatures were different. For instance, the scream of the hawk
always made her shrink a little closer to the ground, or else run
helter-skelter for the house, and sometimes, up the gulches, she had
heard the wailing of a mountain lion on the trail, hunting swiftly, and
very hungry. There was even something about the dead eyes of certain
lynxes and coyotes and bobcats which Daddy Dan trapped that made Joan
feel these animals belonged to a world where the authority of man was
only the strength of his hand or his cunning. Not that she phrased
these thoughts in definite words, but Joan was very close to nature, and
therefore her instincts gave her a weird little touch of wisdom in such
matters.

And when she lay there tangled in her cloak and looked up into the
glowing eyes of Bart and heard his snarling roll around her, and pass in
creepy chills up her back, she nearly died of fear, to be sure, but she
lay as still as still, frozen into a part of the rock. Black Bart was
gone, and in his place was a terrible creature which belonged there
among the shadows, for it could see in the night.

Presently the bright eyes disappeared, and now she saw that Bart lay
stretched across the entrance to the cave, where the long shadow was now
creeping down the slope. Inches by inches she ventured to sit up, and
all it brought from Bart was a quick turn of the head and a