ack body darting through the air was enough to shake
the nerve of anybody. The car "wabbled." It shot towards the tracks, and
then back again.

Perhaps that was a happy circumstance, after all. For as the car swerved,
there was a splintering crash, and the windshield was shivered. The body
of the panther shot to one side and the motor car escaped the full shock
of the charge.

Over and over upon the ground the panther rolled; and off toward the road,
in a long, sweeping curve, darted the automobile.

"Lucky escape!" Tom shouted, turning his blazing face once to look back at
the party in his car.

"Oh! More than luck, Tommy!" returned Ruth, earnestly.

"It was providential," declared Helen, shrinking into her seat again and
beginning to tremble, now that the danger was past.

"Good hunting!" exclaimed the girl from the ranch. "Think of charging a
wildcat with one of these smoke wagons! My! wouldn't it make Bashful Ike's
eyes bulge out? I reckon he wouldn't believe we had such hunting here in
the East--eh?" and her laugh broke the spell of fear that had clutched
them all.

"That critter beats the biggest bobcat I ever heard of," remarked Jerry
Sheming. "Why! a catamount isn't in it with that black beast."

"Where'd it go?" asked Tom, quite taken up with the running of the car.

"Back to the ravine," said Ruth. "Oh! I hope it will do no damage before
it is caught."

Just now the four young friends had something more immediate to think
about. This Jerry Sheming had been "playing 'possum." Suddenly they found
that he lay back in the tonneau, quite insensible.

"Oh, oh!" gasped Helen. "What shall we do? He is--Oh, Ruth! he isn't
_dead_?"

"Of a strained leg?" demanded Jane Ann, in some disgust.

"But he looks so white," said Helen, plaintively.

"He's just knocked out. It's hurt him lots more than he let on," declared
the girl from Silver Ranch, who had seen many a man suffer in silence
until he lost the grip on himself--as this youth had.

In half an hour the car stopped before Dr. Davison's gate--the gate with
the green lamps. Jerry Sheming had come to his senses long since and
seemed more troubled by the fact that he had fainted than by the injury to
his leg.

Ruth, by a few searching questions, had learned something of his story,
too. He had not been a passenger on the train in which Jane Ann was riding
when the wreck occurred. Indeed, he hadn't owned carfare between stations,
as he expressed it.

"I