All-Story Weekly, Vol. 112, No. 1 — page 14: what you’re looking at

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4 of a confidence that she was not as others —not like those people the old boar had known. The old boar himself stood a little in advance of the others, in an attitude of strained attention, with no movement in all his gaunt tall body except the occasional twitch of an ear. It would have reminded one of the legend of Circe, the daughter of Helios, who changed men into swine—to see the girl and the wild hogs standing there like that. The old boar might have been Odysseus himself, minus the moly herb. _ The old boar let out a whoof! Even if this intruder did belong to the human breed, she was perhaps nothing to be afraid of. She was evidently alone. She was evidently unarmed. There was every sign of weakness about her. What was she to keep him and his people from the spread banquet? Besides, the old boar had a memory. There was a fierce red-hot coal of a grudge in the back of his primitive brain. Some of the sows and youngsters were getting restless. They were expecting him to do something. He flicked an ear. The bris- tles on the high arched back of him now came to a stand, shivered down, came to a stand again. The girl never heeded. It was this that gave the old boar pause. Maybe she wasn’t human after all. Maybe she was a ghost. There was none of the dreaded scent of the two-legged creatures. There was scarcely any breeze, but such as there was came from the ’Glades. Whoof! ‘This couldn’t go on forever. A bowlegged skunk ambled out of an adjacent thicket and began to help himself to the best of the berries. There was red in the hog-captain’s eye. When he charged, if he did charge,.it would be as swift as lightning. Few things in the woods could avoid a charge like that, or save itself afterward. His mouth slavered. He showed his white-and-yellow tusks in a grin. The sows and the youngsters tight- ened up. If he charged they would follow him and they were telling him so. With the cunning effrontery of his kind, the skunk profited by the crisis to go ahead ALL-STORY WEEKLY. with his feeding. A big gopher-turtle had dug a cave not three feet away—a safe re- treat for any skunk where no pig could follow him. By this time a pinkness had come through the gray of the atmosphere. The forest mists were dissolving, and the trees were no longer giants, but just trees, as wild as the trees of Eden, and as beautiful —heavily leaved or fronded, hung with vines and tree-ferns, air-plants and orchids. A mocking bird appeared as if by magic, out of nowhere, on the tip of a haw and began to sing, as indifferent to tragedy as the reddening sunbeams. A_ fox-squirrel (as big as a fox) swayed the branch of a wild-tamarind with its long leap from a sugarberry-tree. If the girl had continued to stand per- fectly still, perhaps the old boar might yet have hesitated. Few things in the wild will attack the perfectly motionless, when that motionless thing is unfamiliar. They “may draw near and sniff and study. But it was.as if the song of the mocking-bird and the movement of the squirrel had brought the girl to a present recollection. She started. She turned. She reeled slightly and sunk a little lower against the platform of the ruined lodge. Just then, her eyes lit on the boar, and flashed out a message of utter fear and helplessness. She tried to scream as the boar lunged to the charge. CHAPTER III. TWO SORTS OF GHOSTS. HE old boar knew it. He had known it all along. He had carried the knowledge all along in some group of cells in the back of his brain—an instinc- tive knowledge—an experience inherited from his ancestors: the knowledge that it was not good for any of his kind to attack the children of man. But now the knowl- edge had come up to the surface of his brain too late. He had scarcely started his dash at the girl before the woods to the right of him let out a flash of fire—a gust of smoke and thunder. Something smote him through. comiclboolk C©