In two minutes he had a little fire going clearly.
He started, with his can, for the water hole.
When within fifteen yards of its edge he saw, between the bushes, a side-saddled pony with down-dropped reins cropping grass a little distance to his left.
Just rising from her hands and knees on the brink of the water hole was Josefa O'Donnell.
She had been drinking water, and she brushed the sand from the palms of her hands.
Ten yards away, to her right, half concealed by a clump of sacuista, Givens saw the crouching form of the Mexican lion.
His amber eyeballs glared hungrily; six feet from them was the tip of the tail stretched straight, like a pointer's.
His hind-quarters rocked with the motion of the cat tribe preliminary to leaping.
Givens did what he could.
His six-shooter was thirty-five yards away lying on the grass.
He gave a loud yell, and dashed between the lion and the princess.
The "rucus," as Givens called it afterward, was brief and somewhat confused.
When he arrived on the line of attack he saw a dim streak in the air, and heard a couple of faint cracks.
Then a hundred pounds of Mexican lion plumped down upon his head and flattened him, with a heavy jar, to the ground.
He remembered calling out:
"Let up, now—no fair gouging!" and then he crawled from under the lion like a worm, with his mouth full of grass and dirt, and a big lump on the back of his head where it had struck the root of a water-elm.
The lion lay motionless.
Givens, feeling aggrieved, and suspicious of fouls, shook his fist at the lion, and shouted:
"I'll rastle you again for twenty—" and then he got back to himself.
Josefa was standing in her tracks, quietly reloading her silver- mounted .38.
It had not been a difficult shot. The lion's head made an easier mark than a tomato-can swinging at the end of a string.
There was a provoking, teasing, maddening smile upon her mouth and in her dark eyes.
The would-be-rescuing knight felt the fire of his fiasco burn down to his soul.
Here had been his chance, the chance that he had dreamed of; and Momus, and not Cupid, had presided over it.
The satyrs in the wood were, no doubt, holding their sides in hilarious, silent laughter.
There had been something like vaudeville—say Signor Givens and his funny knockabout act with the stuffed lion.
"Is that you, Mr. Givens?" said Josefa, in her deliberate, saccharine contralto.
"You nearly spoilt my shot when you yelled.
Did you hurt your head when you fell?"
"Oh, no," said Givens, quietly; "that didn't hurt."
He stooped ignominiously and dragged his best Stetson hat from under the beast.
It was crushed and wrinkled to a fine comedy effect.
Then he knelt down and softly stroked the fierce, open-jawed head of the dead lion.
"Poor old Bill!" he exclaimed mournfully.
"What's that?" asked Josefa, sharply.
"Of course you didn't know, Miss Josefa," said Givens, with an air of one allowing magnanimity to triumph over grief.
"Nobody can blame you.
I tried to save him, but I couldn't let you know in time."
"Save who?"
"Why, Bill.
I've been looking for him all day.
You see, he's been our camp pet for two years.
Poor old fellow, he wouldn't have hurt a cottontail rabbit.
It'll break the boys all up when they hear about it.
But you couldn't tell, of course, that Bill was just trying to play with you."
Josefa's black eyes burned steadily upon him.
Ripley Givens met the test successfully.
He stood rumpling the yellow-brown curls on his head pensively.
In his eye was regret, not unmingled with a gentle reproach.
His smooth features were set to a pattern of indisputable sorrow.