Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island | Page 4

the Campus Mystery."
In "Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp; Or, Lost in the Backwoods," the third volume of the series, are told the mid-winter sports of our heroine and her friends; and later, after the school year is concluded, we find them all at the seaside home of one of the Briarwood girls, and follow them through the excitement and incidents of "Ruth Fielding at Lighthouse Point; Or, Nita, the Girl Castaway."
When our present story opens Ruth and the Camerons have just returned from the West, where they had spent a part of the summer vacation with Jane Ann Hicks, and their many adventures are fully related in the fifth volume of the series, entitled "Ruth Fielding at Silver Ranch; Or, Schoolgirls Among the Cowboys."
Few perils they had faced, however, equalled this present incident. The black panther, its gleaming eyes fixed upon the stalled motor car and the young folk in it, crouched for only a moment, with lashing tail and bared fangs.
Uttering another half-stifled snarl, the beast bounded into the air. The distance was too great for the brute to pass immediately to the car; but it was plain that one more leap would bring her aboard.
"Start it! Quick, Tom!" gasped Helen.
"I--I can't!" groaned her brother.
"Then we must run----"
"Sit still!" commanded Jane Ann, with fire in her eye. "I'm not going to run from that cat. I hate 'em, anyway----"
"We can't leave Mr. Sheming," said Ruth, decidedly. "Try again, Tommy."
"Oh, don't bother about me," groaned the young man, who was still a stranger to them. "Don't be caught here on my account."
"It will not do us any good to run," cried Ruth, sensibly. "Oh, Tommy!"
And then the engine started. The electric starter had worked at last. Tom threw in his clutch and the car lunged ahead just as the snarling cat sprang into the air again.
The cat and the car were approaching each other, head on. The creature could not change its course; nor could Tom Cameron veer the car very well on this rough ground.
He had meant to turn the car in a big circle and make for the road again. But that flashing black 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 was hoofin' it from Cheslow to Grading. I heard of a job up at Grading--and I needed that job," Jerry had observed, drily.
This was enough to tell