The glimmer of gray dawn at last and he had never moved from his seat. A
fine, drizzling rain had set in. Clouds of mist brushed against the walls
of his cabin. In the stillness he could hear the big trees shedding their
drops from leaf to bending leaf and the musical tinkle of these as they took
their last leap into little pools below.
With the chilliness which misery brings he got up at last and wrapped his
weather-coat about him. If it were only day when he could go to his work and
try to forget! Restless, sleepless, unable to read, tired of sitting, driven
on by the desire to get rid of his own thoughts, he started out to walk.
As he passed his school-house he noticed that the door of it, always
fastened by a simple latch, now stood open; and he went over to see if
everything inside were in order. All his life, when any trouble had come
upon him, he had quickly returned to his nearest post of duty like a
soldier; and once in the school-room now, he threw himself down in his chair
with the sudden feeling that here in his familiar work he must still find
his home--the home of his mind and his affections--as so long in the past.
The mere aspect of the poor bare place had never been so kind. The very
walls appeared to open to him like a refuge, to enfold themselves around him
with friendly strength and understanding.
He sat at the upper end of the room, gazing blankly through the doorway at
the gray light and clouds of white mist trailing. Once an object came into
the field of his vision. At the first glimpse he thought it a dog--long,
lean, skulking, prowling, tawny--on the scent of his tracks. Then the mist
passed over it.
When he beheld it again it had approached nearer and was
creeping rapidly toward the door. His listless eyes grew fascinated by its
motions--its litheness, suppleness, grace, stealth, exquisite caution. Never
before had he seen a dog with the step of a cat. A second time the fog
closed over it, and then, advancing right out of the cloud with more
swiftness, more cunning, its large feet falling as lightly as flakes of
snow, the weight of its huge body borne forward as noiselessly as the
trailing mist, it came straight on. It reached the hickory block, which
formed the doorstep; it paused there an instant, with its fore quarters in
the doorway, one fore foot raised, the end of its long tail waving; and then
it stole just over the threshold and crouched, its head pressed down until
its long, whitish throat lay on the floor; its short, jagged ears set
forward stiffly like the broken points of a javelin; its dilated eye blazing
with steady green fire--as still as death. And then with his blood become as
ice in his veins from horror and all the strength gone out of him in a
deathlike faintness, the school- master realized that he was face to face
unarmed with a cougar, gaunt with famine and come for its kill.