His right arm circled the
beast's neck in front of the right shoulder, his left behind the
left foreleg, and so great was the force of the impact that the
two rolled over and over several times upon the ground, the cat
screaming and clawing to liberate itself that it might turn upon
its attacker, the man clinging desperately to his hold.
Seemingly the attack was one of mad, senseless ferocity unguided by
either reason or skill. Nothing, however, could have been farther
from the truth than such an assumption since every muscle in
the ape-man's giant frame obeyed the dictates of the cunning mind
that long experience had trained to meet every exigency of such an
encounter. The long, powerful legs, though seemingly inextricably
entangled with the hind feet of the clawing cat, ever as by a miracle,
escaped the raking talons and yet at just the proper instant in the
midst of all the rolling and tossing they were where they should be
to carry out the ape-man's plan of offense. So that on the instant
that the cat believed it had won the mastery of its antagonist it
was jerked suddenly upward as the ape-man rose to his feet, holding
the striped back close against his body as he rose and forcing it
backward until it could but claw the air helplessly.
Instantly the shaggy black rushed in with drawn knife which it
buried in the beast's heart.
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