Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 422, page 19 by Various Authors
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a sound had escaped him; but from that moment his claws never relaxed their hold, and we could see that with his teeth he was silently tearing the throat of his victim.'
The Robinsons of the desert were now in an awkward predicament; for although they had been safe from the peccary, the cougar could climb a tree like a squirrel. A noise, however, disturbs him from his meal, and swinging the dead animal on his back, he begins to skulk away. But he is interrupted before he can reach cover; and as the new-comers prove to be twenty or thirty peccaries, summoned to the field by the dying screams of their comrade, he has more to do than to think of his dinner. To fling down his burden, to leap upon the foremost of his enemies, is but the work of an instant; but the avengers crowd round him with their gnashing jaws and piercing cries, and the brute darts up the tree like a flash of red fire, and crouches not twenty feet above the heads of the horrified spectators! The father, however, after some agonising moments of deliberation, brings him down with his rifle; and the cougar, falling among the eager crowd below, is torn to pieces in a moment. But this does not get rid of the peccaries, who set up their fiendish screams anew as they discover two other victims in the tree. The father fires again and again, dropping his peccary each time, till five lie dead upon the ground; but the rage of the rest only becomes more and more furious--and the marksman is at his last bullet. Here we shall leave him; and such of our readers as may be interested in his fate--who form, we suspect, a very handsome percentage on the whole--may make inquiries for themselves at his Desert Home.
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FOOTNOTES:
[1] Or the Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness. By Captain Mayne Reid. London: Bogue. 1852.
THE VATTEVILLE RUBY.
The clock of the church of Besançon had struck nine, when a woman about fifty years of age, wrapped in a cotton shawl and carrying a small basket on her a