To the something that seemed to walk by his side, he spoke of these things, as if it had been visible. Strange actions, strange thoughts for the president of the Kosmos Chemical Company, the great antagonist of Loree of the Solar Selling Company, the David to Loree's Goliath, the swordfish to the colonel's whale! Think, however, of David, with all the stones spent against the giant's buckler, and cowering within the lethal reach of that spear like a weaver's beam; or of the swordfish, with broken weapon, hunted to the uttermost black depths by the oncoming silent yawning destruction. And in Van Dorn's case, the enemy was an avenger as well as a natural foe. Poor little Kosmos Chemical Company with its big name, its great deposits of "a prime commercial necessity"--see prospectus--its dependence on railways with which Loree was on terms of which Van Dorn never dreamed, its old and wily foe, skilled to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, raging for the loss of his ewe lamb, whom, notwithstanding his giantship, he had loved for twenty years to Van Dorn's two, and had dreamed dreams and committed crimes for! Not very strange after all, perhaps, that the man went on muttering somnambulistically. They say that one gripped in the lion's mouth is numb and filled with delusions. Suddenly, putting life into the dead scene, a bounding form came into view past a thicket--a noble buck with many-pointed antlers, moving with great deliberate leaps among the giants' spilikins. The delicate, glassy hoofs, the slender, brittle limbs and horns, fragile as china, seemed courting destruction in those terrific entanglements. Yet the beautiful animal, as if by some magic levitation, rose lightly from a perilous crevice between two logs, turned smoothly in mid-leap, struck the four pipe-stem limbs into the only safe landing-place, shot thence with arrowy spring between two bayonet-like branches to another foothold, and so on and on, every rod of progress a miracle. He stopped, snuffing the air. Instinctively the hunter leveled his rifle; and then came into view the buck's retinue, two does, one large and matronly, the other a last summer's fawn. The sleep-walker's eyes softened, the rifle swung downward from the point-blank aim, snapping a twig in its descent, and with swift, mighty bounds, the deer vanished, putting a clump of bushes between themselves and the foe with unerring strategy. "Toward the lake," said the hunter. "I'll follow!" There came the report of a distant rifle from the direction of the deer's flight, then another and another. Some one was working a repeater rapidly. The hunter stopped, took off his deerskin jacket, turned it hair side out, and like a soldier making for the firing-line, pressed forward after the deer.