“We’ll pay you two dollars a day—and furnish you with supplies,” she assured him soberly.—Frontispiece. [See page 122.]

SHEPHERDS OF

THE WILD

By EDISON MARSHALL

Author of

“The Snowshoe Trail,” “The Voice of the Pack,”

“The Strength of the Pines,” etc.

A. L. BURT COMPANY

Publishers New York

Published by arrangement with Little, Brown and Company

Printed in U. S. A.

Copyright, 1922,

By Little, Brown, and Company.

——

Published February, 1922

Printed in the United States of America

Shepherds of the Wild

CHAPTER I

The mouth of the canyon was darkened with shadows when the bull elk came stealing down the brown trail through the dusky thicket. In all this mountain realm, a land where the wild things of the forest still held sway, there was no creature of more majestic bearing or noble beauty. He was full-grown; his great antlers swept back over his powerful shoulders; and it was evident from his carriage that he had no fear of such enemies as might be lurking in the gloomy canyon. For it was known far through the forest that even the great puma or the terrible grizzly, unless they had the advantage of ambush, treated Spread Horn with considerable respect.

Signs of July were everywhere: signs that were large print and clear to the eyes of the wild creatures, but which would have been mostly unintelligible to men. The huckleberries were just beginning to ripen in the thickets as always, in the seventh month. The fledglings, the little weasel noticed as he climbed here and there through the branches, were just the July size,—still soft with the fat of squabhood but yet big enough to make a pleasing lump in the stomach. The pines are a wonderful calendar in themselves; and only to the eyes of human beings, badly in need of spectacles, do they seem never to change. They go from a deep, rich green to a strange dusky blue, and now they were just about halfway between. This fact, as well as the size and developments of their cones, indicated as clearly as a printed calendar that the month was July. Besides, old Spread Horn had a sure index to the month in his own antlers.

Time was, and not many months back at that, when he had no more sign of antlers than his own cows. The time would come, just before they fell off completely, when they would be suitably hard and sharp for the edification of any rival stags that should attempt to disrupt his family life. Just at present they were full-grown but still in the “velvet,”—covered with a sort of tawny fuzz that was soft to the touch. It indicated July without the least chance for doubt.

He came slipping easily down the canyon; and there was no reason whatever for expecting him. He walked into the wind: his scent was blown behind. Otherwise certain coyotes and lynx and such hunters, too ineffective ever to get farther than hungry thoughts and speculations, would have been somewhat excited by his approach. Spread Horn made it his business to walk into the face of the wind just as much as possible, and in that way he was aware of all living creatures in the foreground before they were aware of him. To walk down the wind, all creatures know, is to announce one’s self as clearly as to wear a bell around the neck.

Neither did the great elk make any sounds in particular. If indeed a twig cracked from time to time beneath his foot it was not enough to arouse any interest. He was not especially hungry, but now and then he lowered his head to crop a tender shoot from the shrubbery. At such times he kept watch, out of the corner of his eyes, for any enemies that might be waiting in ambush beside the trail. He would stake his horns and hoofs against any wild creature that inhabited Smoky Land, in a fair fight; but the puma—and sometimes even the grizzly—didn’t always play fair. They knew how to leap like the blast of doom from a heavy thicket.

A coyote—most despised of hunters—saw Spread Horn’s tall form in the shrubbery and glided away. There was a legend in the coyote’s family of how once a particularly bold forefather had seized a cow elk by the leg, and of the subsequent tragedy that had befallen. The only result, it had seemed, was a careful and patient dissection of the gray body beneath the front hoofs of the bull—arriving just the wrong moment—and Gray Thief had no desire to start a new legend on his own account.

Spread Horn showed no surprise at his appearance. His only neighbors were the wild folk,—the only people that he knew. For the wild creatures were still, as far as facts went, the real owners and habitants of Smoky Land. It is true that in various heavy and dusty books in legal offices it could be learned that this particular part of Idaho was public domain, but as yet few frontiersmen had come to clear away the forest and till the meadows. The place was really startlingly large—distances are always rather generous in the West—but few were the maps that named it. Those that had gone to fish in its waters and hunt its mountains thought of it always as beyond,—beyond the last outposts of civilization, beyond the end of the trails, and clear where the little rivers rose in great springs. The cattlemen had named it, and at the end of the dry summer, when forest fires ranged here and there through the high ridges on each side, the name was particularly appropriate. Because of the structure of the passes the winds were likely to fill the region with pale, blue smoke.

In reality Smoky Land lay on the great shoulders of the Rockies,—a high plateau, studded here and there by grim and lofty snow peaks. It was not a land for gentlefolk. It was a hard, grim place, a forbidding land where the sun was a curse in summer and the winds a stinging lash in winter, where great glaciers gleamed in the morning light and snow fields lay unchanging above the line where the timber became stunted and died. There were rugged crags and impassable cliffs, deep gorges and dark, still canyons; miles of gray sliderock and glossy grass slope; and through it all, dwelling like a spirit, there was a beauty that could not be denied. It manifested itself to every sweep of the eyes.

Game trails wound and crisscrossed through the thickets, and the dung was not dried to dust and the tracks half obliterated and stale as in many of the game trails of the West. One only had to wait, to lie still as a shadow in the coverts to see such sights as the forest gods usually reserved for the chosen few. Sometimes it was a doe, stealing with mincing steps and incredible grace from thicket to thicket; sometimes a puma, glaring of eye and hushed of foot and curiously interested in all the doings of the deer; sometimes an old black bear grunted and mumbled and soliloquized as he blundered along; and there is a tale, one that only the swans that come to the high lakes lived long enough to remember, that years ago, in a particularly cold winter, Old Argali, the great mountain ram, led his flock down from the high peaks to feed on the green banks of the streams.

Spread Horn knew them all. They were his neighbors. Also he knew the people that lived in the cataract at the bottom of the gorge. Sometimes, when he paused to drink, the salmon rushed past him in their mysterious journeyings,—their fourth-year migration to the waters in which they were born. They come to spawn in the waters where they were themselves spawned before they go down to the sea, and after they spawn they die. To the naturalist there are strange significances in this repatriation of the salmon. There is a sense of curious relationships,—for strong men, too, always try to return to their homeland for their last days. After four years, almost to the day, the salmon come fighting their way back through the riffles, into dreadful gorges, up cataracts, and high is the waterfall that holds them back.

The salmon were not the only water people that Spread Horn knew. He had seen the trout, too (of course the salmon himself is just an overgrown trout that has taken up a seafaring life) and some of them, like the salmon themselves, took an occasional thousand-mile jaunt to the ocean. These were the great steelheads and such seagoing people, and sportsmen say that a five-pounder at the end of a silk line will permit, for ten tearing, fighting, breathless moments, a glimpse into the Promised Land. But you can imagine the mighty salmon, who have spent four years in the sea and who have swum about the reefs of Kamchatka, regarding them with some patronage. Then there were the little trout: quivering, timid, sparkling creatures that, although great stay-at-homes and never going to sea, still look very beautiful in a creel.

It seems to be one of Nature’s aims to make life interesting and exciting for all her creatures, so she had provided certain other river-folk to entertain these finned people. Their method of entertainment was to take a sudden leap into a riffle or trout pool with glittering, gleaming razor-edged teeth all set and ready. One little instant’s delay in darting to safety, one little clasping of those wicked teeth into the beautiful silver shoulder,—and the trout leaped no more for flies in the cool of the evening. These were the otter and mink and such fur-bearing people, and they existed in plentiful numbers because in this region the trapper had not yet made himself particularly manifest. Then there were plenty of mergansers and other feathered fishermen to take care of the fingerlings.

The cattle herds fed through the region, and sometimes sportsmen penetrated its fastnesses, but mostly Smoky Land was simply the wilderness, primeval and unchanged. The venerable grizzly still dug for marmots on the high ranges,—the great killer that shared the mountain monarchy with the bull elk. The Rocky Mountain goat, white-whiskered as a patriarch, had a range just adjoining that of the bighorn. The wolf pack sang of death and hunger when the ridges were swept with snow.

The late afternoon sunlight, shot and dappled by the shadows of the leaves, fell over the bull elk’s body; and the animal sensed the approach of night. It was the drinking hour. A spring flowed at the foot of the glen, Spread Horn knew, and he turned toward it, stealing softly. And all at once he seemed to freeze in his tracks.

The wind had brought him a message, unmistakably as wireless telephones bring messages of approaching foes across a battle field. His nervous reaction was instantaneous: danger, go slow! Yet it was not a familiar smell, and scientists would have a hard time explaining why the stag had at once recognized its menace. For the creature from whom it came was almost a stranger to these mountains, and it was wholly possible that Spread Horn had never perceived the breed before.

He stood still, gazing, and he looked a long time through the shrubbery branches down to a little green glade beside the spring. He raised one foot and lifted his long muzzle. Then he gave the warning cry,—the sound with which, in the fall, he would warn his herd of danger.

There was no more distinctive cry in the whole wilderness world than this,—a strange, whistling snort, beginning high on the scale and descending to a deep bawl. It traveled far through the stillness. He waited a breathless instant while the echo came back to him. Then he sprang and darted at full speed away into the heavier thickets.

Far below, at the spring, an unfamiliar figure in these wilds leaped to his feet with a guttural cry. It was also a distinctive sound: and no wonder the little chipmunk paused in his scurried occupations to listen to it. Even to the addled brain of the squirrel it suggested annoyance and anger,—a quality possessed by the snarl of the puma when it had missed its stroke. No wonder Spread Horn had fled. The figure was none other than that tall harbinger of death and peril, man.

“It was an elk,” the man cried. “You’ve missed your chance.”

Some one stretched on the grass at his feet answered with a half-snarl. “To hell with the elk,” he replied. “You’ve tipped over the last quart.”

CHAPTER II

It is a far cry from the fastnesses of Idaho back to the lounging room of the Greenwood Club in a great and fashionable city on the Atlantic seaboard; but that distance must be traveled in order to explain at all, to the satisfaction of the old camp-robber bird that perched and squawked upon a limb beside his camp, the presence of Hugh Gaylord in Smoky Land. It all went back to a June evening, immediately preceding the dinner hour, in which he had a short and somewhat important talk with that gray, wise, venerable head of the board of governors whom all men knew fondly as the “Old Colonel.”

It was always very easy to learn to love the Old Colonel. On the particular late June night in question the Colonel looked his usual best in correctly tailored dinner clothes, possessing only one note of individuality, the black bow, obviously factory-tied, set at his collar at a rather startling angle.

“Gaylord,” he said suddenly. “I’d like a few words with you. Bring your glass over to my chair.”

The young man thus addressed had been one of a gay group across the lounging room, and they all looked up with interest. It was a remembered fact that when the Colonel spoke in that tone of voice it was well to listen closely. Gaylord himself smiled and came at once toward him. The group went on with their talk.

The club lights showed the young man plainly, yet he did not in the least stand out. In fact, at first glance there was very little to distinguish him from most of the other men of his age that frequented the club rooms. It was not until two weeks later, when his great adventure had actually begun, and when the camp-robber studied him from the tree limb, that his real personality stood forth. Of course it was by light of contrast. In these luxurious rooms he was among his own kind: in those far mountains he was a stranger and an alien.

He was a familiar type: rather boyish, kind-hearted as are most men who have lived sheltered lives, a fair athlete and a good sportsman at the poker table. It was enough; most of his young friends were wholly satisfied with him, and except perhaps for a vague, troubled hour—usually late at night—Hugh Gaylord was wholly satisfied with himself. And perhaps the reason why the blood mounted higher in his cheeks as the Colonel summoned him was his realization that the old man had had sterner training, and that he possessed X-ray eyes that could read straight into a man. In the first place the Colonel had amassed a fortune by his own resistless effort. In the second, he had known the great school of the forest. He was a sportsman whose metal had been tried and proven on the game trails of two continents.

His eyes leaped over Hugh’s face, and he wondered if he had undertaken a vain task. He knew that a steel-worker cannot make tempered blades out of inferior metal. He wondered if he could hope for any real response from the treatment he was about to suggest. Hugh looked soft, and soft men are not usually made hard by a few weeks in the mountains. To follow the high trails, to seek the hidden people, to scale the cliffs and wade the marsh require a certain hardihood of spirit to start with,—and Hugh Gaylord seemed lacking in that trait. It was not that he had a weakling’s body. Because it was the thing to do in his own circle he had kept himself fit on the gym-floor of his athletic club. His hands were hard and brown, his figure lithe, his face and neck were tanned in tennis court and golf links.

Yet that hard-eyed old woodsman looked at him straight and knew the truth. Hugh would not be able at once to enter into the spirit of the land where the Colonel was about to advise him to go. The lean foresters, natives of the land, would not accept him either; nor would they stay to eat at his camp. They wouldn’t linger to tell him secrets of the wild. If they talked to him at all, it would be to narrate long and impossible adventures that are usually, on the frontier, the “feed” for tenderfeet. He could not enter into the communion of the camp fire; and yet no one—except possibly the Colonel himself—could tell him why.

Perhaps he lacked the basic stuff. The Old Colonel was a little despairing: he had begun to fear that in this lay the true explanation. But perhaps—and this was the old man’s hope—the matter got down to a simple phrase of ancient usage: that Hugh had merely not yet learned to be a “man of his hands.” The meaning goes deeper than mere manual toil. It implies achievement, discipline, self-reliance. It is not a thing to mistake. It promotes the kind of equality that the Old Colonel himself knew,—that which abides at a Western cow ranch or in the battle trench. Hugh’s face was not unlined; but dissipation rather than stress had made the furrows. The lips did not set quite firm, the young eyes were slightly dimmed and bloodshot. There was, however, the Colonel saw with relief, no trace of viciousness in his youthful face. He was an Anglo-Saxon: after the manner of most Northern men he was an honest young debaucher, taking his orgies rather seriously and overdoing them in a way that would be shocking in a Latin. Possibly the same Northern blood gave him a background of strength: this was the old man’s hope.

“You’re looking a bit seedy, Hugh,” the Old Colonel began in his usual straightforward way. “I’m afraid you’re getting to be sort of a poor stick.”

His tone was that with which he was wont to begin an interesting story: perfectly matter-of-fact, just as if he were pronouncing a judgment on the weather. Hugh flushed to the roots of his hair but he didn’t take offense. No one ever could take offense when the Colonel told them truths.

“Complimentary mood to-day, eh, Colonel,” Hugh commented lightly. In reality he didn’t feel in a festive mood at all. But he sat still, dreading what might come next.

“No, not particularly,” the Colonel answered soberly. “You know, Hugh, the interest I’ve always taken in you. And you know why.”

Yes, Hugh knew why. It went back to one of his own mother’s girlhood romances,—a rather beautiful story such as men tell their wives and sweethearts but from masculine reserve do not talk over among themselves.

“I know,” Hugh agreed.

“I can’t see,” the old man went on thoughtfully, “that in spite of the—er—damnable joy of having you around, you’re any good to yourself or any one else. Why don’t you lay off of it a while?”

“You mean—this?” Hugh tilted his glass up on one edge.

“I didn’t happen to mean that, but perhaps I’d better include it. I saw you last night, Hugh, and I’m not one to think hard of a boy for an occasional exhilaration. But the trouble was—it was the night before too, and the night before that, and nobody knows how many more such nights. You’re looking a little soft around the mouth, and just a little—too old for your years. Won’t do, Hughey boy. I mean why don’t you lay off this sort of life you’ve been leading: too much ease, too much loaf, too much booze, too much chorus, not enough work. Oh, damn their skins! I wish they’d sent you to France.”

“And I guess you know how I felt about that,” Hugh replied in his own defense. Yes, the Colonel knew: Hugh had really and earnestly wanted to go to France. He had been commissioned, however, rather sooner than was best for him, and he had been kept in an office in Washington.

“And the worst of it is you never even had to go through the grind of being a real buck private, with nothing particularly in sight. You’ve had everything too easy. You ought to sweat once, and feel a few breaks in your skin and a few sore muscles. Soft, Hugh, soft as soap. Lazy as sin. Why don’t you get out and rough it for a while?”

Hugh stood up. “I don’t know——” he began stiffly.

“But I do. Sit down.”

The eyes of the two men met, and those of the old man smiled under his bushy brows. Hugh sat down again. He knew, only too well, how true these words were. He had always been soft, and trial had never hardened him. “I suppose the same old chant—to go to work.”

“Not this time. I’m going to prescribe another treatment—a more pleasant one. I know there’s no use of asking you to go to work. I don’t see what work you could do. Sitting around an office, considering the safe and sane nature of your investments, wouldn’t help you much. But, Hugh, I have some English friends—good enough beggars most of ’em—and once or twice they’ve confessed—that the only thing that kept them from utter damnation was devoting their lives to sport.”

Hugh knew about these “good enough beggars” that were friends to the Colonel—many of them men of great names and titles whom lesser Americans would boast of knowing. The Old Colonel shook his head somewhat sadly, and for a moment his eyes gazed out over the twilight grounds.

“When I say ‘sport,’ ” he explained, “I mean he-man sport. Into Africa after lions. Shooting a tiger from the ground. Up to Tibet after snow leopards. Down to New Zealand after trout. Going—going—going—never getting soft. Blizzards and jungle and thirst and cold. I know there’s no chance for me to get you to do real work. But damn me—I can’t help but think there’s a little of the old stuff in you somewhere, and I’ve been thinking that a hard course with rifle and fly rod might—might get you going along the right lines. If you’d once learn to love the outdoors, and learn to love to fight, who knows what might not happen.”

“And you suggest—that I take a trip after lions?”

“Lions are hard game, not for children,” was the reply. “ ‘I hunted the lion,’ was one of the few things an old and tough Egyptian Pharaoh saw fit to record imperishably on his monument—but you’re not a Pharaoh yet. I’ve got something here.”

He fished through many waistcoat pockets and drew out a clipping, spreading it out on the broad arm of his chair. “I thought of you when I read it—and cut it out—and I thought what I would have done if it wasn’t for the old game leg. I thought maybe it would stir up your dormant imagination and set you off. Read it.”

Hugh read, noting first that the clipping was a reprint from an Idaho paper:

The stockmen of the Smoky Land section, up Silver Creek way, say that unless government hunters come to their aid, the stock business in that district will be seriously impaired. Wolves and coyotes seem extra plentiful this year, and besides a giant cougar, to whom the sparse settlers have given the name of Broken Fang, has been ranging there for some months, doing thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to cattle and sheep. From the size of his track and the occasional glimpses of him, the residents of that section think that he is the largest of the great cats that has ranged in Idaho for many years.

The Old Colonel studied Hugh’s face as he read. “Not very interesting, eh?” he commented at last. “My boy—he would be a trophy. I know something about that hairy old breed of mountaineers in the Upper Salmon country. They don’t take the trouble to give a puma a name unless he’s a moose. I know quite a little about pumas, too—or cougars, they call ’em. Usually they are about as dangerous as white rabbits. But once in a while one of them gets overgrown and thinks he bosses the range. If wounded—and sometimes by a long chance even if he isn’t wounded—they put up a wicked fight. This big boy would be a trophy worth having; besides, you might pick up a grizzly or a smaller puma. There are always trout, and this is trout-time in the West. Why don’t you go after him?”

The Old Colonel always put his propositions in just that straight-out way; and it made them hard to refuse.

“You mean—go out there three thousand miles on a long chance of killing this cattle-slayer?”

“Why not? You’re not paralyzed or anything. You ought to see Idaho. Every man should. As I said, there are worlds of smaller game. Every man ought to have an objective in his trip; so I say go to Smoky Land. These two weeks might teach you to love the woods so you’d go again and again. And a few trips to the high ranges, once you really got to love ’em and play ’em right, might make—might do wonders for you. Please give me the pleasure of telling the boys that Hughey Gaylord has gone big-game hunting.”

Hugh felt the wave of red spreading in his cheeks again. He knew perfectly what the old man had been about to say—“to make a man of him.”

“Remember,” the Old Colonel urged further, “you’re an Anglo-Saxon—a white man of straight descent. It’s a heritage, Hugh. And it implies an obligation.”

“I’d hate it,” Hugh protested.

“Try it and see. Perhaps—there might be a miracle.”

Hugh drained his glass; then stood up. “Very well, I’ll start next week,” he said at last simply.

Thus this son of cities gave his promise to go forth into a man’s land: a land of trial and travail, of many perils and strong delights, a jagged mountain land where the powers of the wilderness still ruled supreme—and yet a place where miracles might come to pass.

CHAPTER III

The camp-robber, perched on a limb, was in considerable of a mental turmoil. His mentality was never of an extra high grade, and to-day his intellectual grasp had almost failed him. And the reason was that he had made an astonishing discovery; and these remote Idaho forests had suddenly revealed to him a form of life that he hadn’t had any idea existed.

Of course his true name wasn’t “camp-robber.” In reality he belonged to that noisy, thievish jay-magpie assemblage that is to be found in almost all of the great Western forests, and he had a long and jaw-breaking scientific designation besides. But on the lower East Side it isn’t necessary to hunt up the name in full of Tony the Dip, because the title describes him better than the name his mother gave him. It was much the same with the camp-robber. He got the title from his habits and it fitted him to perfection.

He was rather a gay old bird with considerable blue and gray in his feathers, and in his several months of life he had concluded that he knew these Idaho woods from one end to another. He thought it would be a long, cold summer day before he would meet a situation that he could not immediately handle. He knew just how to look twice into a cluster of leaves and twigs before he lighted among them—lest a certain little brown-furred cutthroat that was rather unpleasantly known to his family should be waiting in ambush. He knew how to select a nest-site out of the reach of a prowling raccoon, and he was as impertinent and saucy from all this knowledge as words can tell. Yet out of a perfectly clear ground, so to speak (it wouldn’t be correct to say out of a clear sky when referring to one who habitually lives in the sky) two utterly unknown and enormous living creatures had revealed themselves.

The camp-robber had been winging back and forth through the forest and had flitted down to the spring for a bath. One of the two figures was standing erect, shaking his fist at the speeding form of Spread Horn,—a creature from the back of which the camp-robber had almost, if not quite, gathered vermin. The other was lying down, gazing moodily at an interesting-looking object that had oozed what had seemed to be dark blood on the pine needles. In form they resembled bears; yet he didn’t for an instant think that they were. They were not deer or cougar or even overgrown raccoons. He perched upon the limb to think it over.

Yet the camp-robber never spends a great deal of time in such a profitless occupation as thought. At once his instincts began to get busy inside of him. He was a born kleptomaniac, and he was simply fascinated by the number of bright and interesting things lying about the ashes of the dead fire. He began to have all manner of pleasing conjectures in regard to them. Like many gentlemen-of-fortune in the Parisian underworld he had a long ancestry of famous criminals; and now he remembered certain advice his mother had given him when he was a fledgling in the nest.

“If ever you find a camp of men,” one can imagine the old mother-bird chirping, as she flicked her tail here and there, “fly right down into it. You will have more fun than you ever had in your life before.”

These were men: no other supposition remained. The camp-robber squawked once, in enthusiasm, and sailed down to the ground beside the prone figure.

The result was rather astonishing. For the second at least Hugh Gaylord forgot the late tragedy to his last bottle of bourbon. A smile that was singularly winning and boyish played around his lips.

It was not quite Gaylord’s way to smile at such little things as this. It usually required a very keen jest from a clever comedian in a musical comedy to draw a smile from him. Strangest of all, he hadn’t been in the least in the humor for gaiety since the first day he had come to these stern, lonely mountains.

He watched the bird with growing astonishment. His surprise was really no less than that of the camp-robber on first beholding the two men. The bird hopped here and there among the camp supplies, scratched in the pine needles for crumbs, and then, with astounding cheek, began to peck holes in the soap. He had tasted many things in his months of foraging, but here was something the like of which he had never tasted before. The truth was that more than one camp, here and there through the forest, could not yield up such a treat as this. Many of the sparse visitors to the Upper Salmon mountains regarded the use of soap as they did Christmas,—something to celebrate once a year.

Hugh had not discerned the fleeting form of the elk in the thickets, and except for his guide, this bird was the first living thing he had seen since he had come to Smoky Land. It was not that the forest did not literally teem with life. The trouble lay in Hugh’s eyes. The living things of the great forest are always furtive and hidden, and they only yield their most priceless secrets to those who seek them.

A man never sees clearly when his brain is misted and blurred from the fumes of strong drink; besides, Hugh had not yet gone a half-mile from camp. He was a tenderfoot in the raw, and the forest creatures had been able to discern his heavy tread in plenty of time to get out of sight. He had been disgusted and annoyed by the discomforts of camp life, and he was eager to return to his own kind; his stock of liquor had been running low and without it he did not believe he could exist; he spoke loudly and his spirit was dead within him: and thus the forest had remained a closed book. His choice of a companion had not been particularly fortunate either. Pete had good blood in him, the blood of as brave and hardy a race as ever lived, but degeneracy was upon him and his people. He had been employed as Hugh’s guide, but he had found it much more convenient to stay in camp and drink Hugh’s whisky.

The Indian guide would have been a familiar type to any one of the hardy, farseeing frontiersmen that occasionally ranged through the forest, but Hugh himself would have wakened some wonder. He was still obviously a man of cities. He wore the outdoor clothes of a gentleman, which is but rarely the outdoor garb of the frontier. They were stained with dirt and their careful crease was destroyed; yet they marked him as a tenderfoot.

The truth was that the Colonel’s experiment had seemingly failed: the few days that Hugh had already spent in the far Rockies had wrought no change in him. He had not found Broken Fang—the great cougar that had already won a name through a thousand square miles of Idaho forest—and he was ready to admit to himself, at least, that he had made no real effort to find him. He had fished once, succeeding in breaking a number of expensive gut leaders and high-grade flies in the brush along the stream. The remainder of the time he had lain in camp, wishing he hadn’t come. Fortunately the two weeks were nearly over.

The guide brought his wandering mind back to the disaster of his liquor. “I know where you can buy quart—take place that one I spilled,” the Indian said.

Hugh’s face brightened. “Lead me to it.”

“Just over ridge. Sheep camp there—only one this part of mountains. Herder’ll have extra quart or two.”

Hugh looked at his watch. “We can get over and back by dark?”

“Maybe soon after. Going to be pretty dusky right away.”

The man spoke true. The twilight was falling over Smoky Land. The sun was set, the tall pines seemed to darken above them, the dusk grew and deepened between the distant trunks. The immeasurable silence of the mountain night, broken by such little sounds as only accentuate the hush, was deepening about them.

Hugh had no answer at first. For once no words were at his lips, and it was a good and portentous sign. He stood listening. Perhaps because the visit of the camp-robber had been an impulse to his imagination, perhaps only because the effect of his last drink was dying within him, some little portion at least of the age-old magic of the wilderness twilight was going home to him. Now that his guide’s voice died away, he was a little startled by the vastness of the silence.

Far and wide through the forest the wild creatures were starting forth on their night’s business. But they moved with stealth. Hugh had an instant’s dim realization that thickets moved and rustled in the ultimate reaches of hearing; that dim shadows wavered so far distant that he could not be sure of them. The wilderness forces were coming to life.

He lifted his face. As usual in the twilight hour, the faintest breath of wind came slipping, light as a deer-tread itself, from the further mountains. He saw the two long ridges that enclosed his particular part of the plateau, and the last light of day gleamed on their tall, white, snow-laden peaks. These were the high Rockies; sentinel mountains grand and austere.

These mountains looked just at hand in the daylight, but now in the gathering gloom they seemed to be receding into the infinite distance. The attention of Hugh Gaylord was not usually held by mere scenic beauty, but to-night, for a lone, long instant, he felt vaguely stirred.

Then a faint, sharp sound reached him through the growing silence. It came from an amazing distance, and but for the fact that all his senses had been unusually alert he would not have discerned it at all. All that was left of it was a faint prick in the eardrums,—a noise that a beetle might make in the leaves.

“Did you hear something?” he asked his guide doubtfully.

“Yes,” the Indian replied. “Little noise. Know who made it?”

“A shot?”

“Yes. Maybe ’nother hunter, but they don’t often come here. Over toward sheep camp. But gotto hurry heap—get whisky—come back while plenty light to see.”

Hugh nodded, and they headed up the ridge.

CHAPTER IV

It was written, by those special jungle gods that plan entertainment for tenderfeet, that Hugh Gaylord should get some slight taste of the real mountains on his walk to the sheep camp. It was only a mile, but the trail was nothing whatever like the golf course that Hugh had been wont to walk around on Friday afternoons. It was narrow and brown, and hard-packed by the feet of the wild folk that had been passing up and down that way since the mountains were new. They hadn’t been careful to keep the grade under six per cent. There was also an occasional rock and a rather frequent dead log that had to be leaped. Moreover the berry vines scratched the face and caught at his clothes when the trail twined between the heavier thickets.

Hugh had been proud of his physical condition. He had been under the tutelage of a high-paid physical director, and he could swing the Indian clubs a startling number of times without fatigue. Before that walk was done, however, the fine edge of his self-assurance had been somewhat dulled. In the first place, the pace was rather fast. Pete the guide was inordinately lazy and a wretched guide, but like most wilderness men who get their exercise in walking game trails rather than in swinging Indian clubs, he knew how to make the long miles slide under his feet. It is not an accomplishment of a day—that bent-kneed, shuffling walk, shoulders sagging and feet falling lightly—and it is far from graceful. But it clicks out four miles in every hour through the long mountain day without fatigue. It carries a man up mountains and into glens, and he feels fresh at the end. To-night Pete was in a particular hurry. The devils that dwell just under the dark skins of all his race were crying for strong drink. Besides, darkness would be upon them very soon.

The pace took Gaylord’s wind. It brought queer pains low in his chest and an odd heaviness in his legs. But for all that, a physician could have prescribed no better medicine for him. The sweat leaped from his white skin and felt prickly at his neck and forehead, and the fumes of alcohol departed from his brain. The truth was that in this deepening twilight Gaylord saw more clearly than any time since his arrival at Smoky Land.

His senses became more alert, his eyes began to penetrate deeper into the thickets. He began to notice dainty mountain flowers, and he took a singular delight in the tracks of the wild things that had been left in the trail. Here a coyote had skulked, here a wolf had raced along in some chase of death, and here a cougar had crept by in some dreadful business of a few nights before. His hearing was sharper, and once the rustle of leaves above his head called his attention to a family of gray squirrels, disporting on the limbs. He found himself watching, with unexplainable interest, his guide.

For the first time he marked clearly the silent tread, the peculiar alertness of his carriage, and most of all the dark surface-lights in his eyes. As they headed deeper into the thickets a strange change seemed to come over the man. Perhaps the liquor was dying in him, too, or possibly Gaylord’s imagination was playing tricks upon him. He received an odd impression that hitherto his guide had been asleep and had just now wakened. They were near the sheep camp now; they could hear the faint bleat of the bedding animals, and the Indian seemed to forget the other’s presence. All at once he began to stalk in earnest. He slackened his pace: Gaylord behind him slackened his. The moccasined feet had fallen softly before; now they seemingly made no sound at all. The dark eyes brightened, the muscles rippled under the dusky skin, a new vitality seemed to come over him. The truth was that this son of a savage race had not undergone so great degeneration but that he still responded to the age-old intoxication of the falling night. It was the hunting hour, and Hugh could imagine the tawny cougar, Broken Fang, whom he had come to slay, responding in the same way.

Abruptly the Indian paused and held up his hand. Hugh crept near.

“—— Big animal—close,” the guide whispered. “Maybe you get a shot.”

Hugh stood still, listening. Far distant he heard the usual, faint mysterious sounds that the early night hours always bring to the wilderness world; but if anything, the primordial silence was more heavy and portentous than ever. The snow peaks still gleamed faintly, and he sensed their majesty and grandeur as never before. It was not alone an impression of beauty. Beauty is an external thing alone: in this moment of farseeing, he understood something of their mighty symbolism, their eternal watch over the waste places. He saw them as they were: grand, silent, unutterably aloof.

“How do you know?” he asked, in reply to his guide. “I don’t hear anything.”

The truth was that Pete would have found considerable difficulty in telling just how he knew. Rather it was a sixth sense, an essence in the air that blunter senses could not have perceived. “We’re near flock—maybe lot of varmints hanging close. Always is—around sheep. Don’t know what animal came near just now—cougar, I think.”

“Maybe old Broken Fang himself?”

“I don’t know. Heap maybe not. Country’s big.”

Pete was given to telling lies, on occasion, but he had told the truth for once. Hugh’s eyes leaped from peak to peak, and he began to realize something of the vast, tremendous distances of the region. They pushed on, over the ridge and through the last of a heavy wall of brush.

They came out on the edge of a small meadow,—one of those grassy, treeless stretches that are so often encountered in the high ranges. Silver Creek ran through it: a stream that was a “creek” only in the Western sense. In reality it carried more water than many a famous river. It was narrow, however, lined with thickets, and evidently deep and swift. Five hundred yards beyond the great forest encroached again, and the meadow was even more narrow, parallel to the creek. And at the first glance Hugh might have thought that the meadow was covered with deep snow.

It was the sheep. They were bedding down for the night,—a flock that could not contain less than three thousand ewes and lambs. They had crowded so close together that they occupied, in all, a space hardly more than a hundred yards square, and the only break in the white drift was an occasional spot of inky black. These, in a moment’s inspection, revealed themselves as black sheep,—animals that occur in every western flock and are generally used by the herdsmen as markers.

Their numbers staggered Hugh. He wondered how any one herder could care for them. And he was suddenly amazed at the strange thoughts that flooded him.

The truth was that Hugh was an exceedingly sensitive man, finely tuned to all manner of external impressions. Something about that snowy band touched a side of his nature of which he had never been aware before. He couldn’t quite identify the thoughts that stirred him. They dwelt in an unknown realm of his being; he grasped for them but always they flitted away. He held hard on himself and tried to understand. The sheep bleated, the shadows grew over the distant mountains. He began to think that the plaintive bleat of the sheep was playing tricks upon his imagination. It sounded to him almost as a direct appeal for help and protection. He realized at once the truth of a fact he had heard long ago,—that sheep, above all other domestic animals, are dependent upon men for their very lives. A horse may run freely in the waste places, fighting off with slashing fore feet and terrible teeth such wild enemies as molest it. The cattle can range far in comparative safety: for even the great grizzly has been known to avoid the horned steer. Even the hogs, half-wild in the underbrush, have some means of self-protection. These sheep had none.

But the thoughts he had went deeper than that. He was dimly aware of a vague symbolism, a realization that in this mountain scene could be read some of the great, essential truths of life. He had a curious impression of being face to face, for the first time in his life, with realities,—in spite of the paradoxical fact that a vagueness, seemingly a bewilderment, was upon him.

All his life Hugh Gaylord had dwelt in cities. He had traveled far: sometimes in motors, usually in luxurious sleeping cars, occasionally in steamships. Yet he had never really been outside of cities. He knew the hurrying throngs, the great buildings, the busy streets. The shops, the theaters, the gaiety had been acquaintances as long as he could remember. He had never dreamed of a world without these things. Yet, in an instant, all of them seemed infinitely distant. Strangest of all, they suddenly didn’t seem to matter.

It was an impression that all his life there had been a cloud before his vision, and all at once he could see clear. Here, not in those swarming cities, was reality. The cities had been built in a day; the other factors that had been so necessary in his life—his clubs, his motor cars, his amusements, even much of the great world of business—were merely mushroom growths of a little handful of centuries that men called the age of civilization. Strangely, they no longer seemed to him the basic things of existence. Rather now, for the first time in his days, he was face to face with life,—life in its simplest phases, with all its unrealities and superficialities swept away. This was no vista of the present: this scene of the white sheep bedding down for the night in the dim light of the herder’s fire. Rather it was an image of the uncounted ages. All the basic elements of life were here: the flocks, the herder’s little shelter, the fire glowing in the falling darkness, the watchful shepherd dog guarding the lambs, the beasts of prey lurking in the growing shadows.

There was nothing here to perish or change. It had been the same for uncounted centuries,—since the first dim days when the nomads drove their flocks over the plains of Asia. Cities are born, grow great, are cursed with wickedness, and perish. The flocks still wander on the hills. Men catch new fancies, follow new teachings, build new orders, and pursue new ways. The firelight of the herder still glows in the twilight. Civilization rises and falls like the tide. The beasts of prey still lurk in the thickets to slay the sheep. Fashions, hobbies, pleasures, habits and modes of life, faiths and doctrines, even kingdoms and palaces start up, flourish, change and die,—and still the shepherd dog keeps his watch.

He was suddenly called from his reverie by the voice of the guide beside him. “Fire’s about out,” the man said. “Time herder put on more fuel.”

It was a commonplace remark, yet it compelled Hugh’s attention. His startled eyes turned to the Indian’s impassive face. “It’s not cold to-night,” he replied. “What’s the need of the fire?”

The Indian made no immediate reply. He did, however, hold up his hand. Hugh listened. Somewhere back of them in the thicket a twig broke with miniature explosion. Then two leaves rustled together.

“That’s why,” the Indian said. “Keep off varmints.”

At that instant the dog discerned them and came barking toward them. He was a beautiful shepherd—from his unusual size evidently a crossed breed—and the light was still good enough for them to see his lustrous coat, his powerful form, his intelligent head, his fine brush that he carried high. The dog slowed to a walk, and Hugh spoke to him. A moment more the animal was at his knees.

Hugh had always been a dog-lover—giving his regard to an ill-mannered, savage German police dog that lived a parasitical life at his city house—and he knelt quickly to caress the shepherd’s head. And for the second time that night he had a series of impressions that he could not trace or name.

They arose from the behavior of the dog. The animal seemed oddly nervous and shaken, and the great, brown, lustrous eyes were full of singular appeal. He ran from them a little way, barking, then returned as if he desired them to follow him. “What’s the matter, old boy?” Gaylord asked. “What’s up?”

The dog barked again, coming to his arms for more petting. Then the Indian dropped to his knees with a curious little cry.

Pete the guide had an exceedingly good command of English for a half-breed. But in that moment of astonishment the use of the language fell away from him, and his only utterance was an exclamation in his own almost-forgotten tongue. He rubbed his hand over the animal’s shoulder.

“What is it, Pete?” Hugh asked quietly.

“He’s creased. Dog’s been shot—bullet took away a little skin.”

“The shot we heard?”

“No. That rifle shot. The dog shot with pistol.”

“And how in the world did you find that out?”

“Not know sure—looks heap like a scratch by small-caliber bullet. Couldn’t hear pistol shot so far.”

“I’ve heard,” Hugh said thoughtfully, “that it isn’t good form—for a herder to shoot at his own dog.”

“Maybe not that,” the Indian went on. His tone was so strange and flat that Hugh whirled to stare at him. “Fire’s burning out too—sheep getting restless. Maybe better see where herder is.”

“Don’t you suppose he’s in his shelter tent?”

“We’ll look and see.”

They started out into the clearing, the dog running in front of them. The sheep, after the manner of their kind, paid no attention to them. They walked swiftly toward the little tent beside the stream.

The dog stopped, sniffing at something that lay in a little clump of thicket. When still a few paces distant, Hugh thought it was one of the black sheep, separated from the flock. The Indian, however, made no such mistake. And he hardly turned to glance at it.

“The herder’s other dog,” he explained. “Knew there ought to be two. Better shooting this time.”

Hugh felt a little stir of excitement. The black dog had been slain by a small-calibered bullet, and his body was still warm. The Indian increased his pace.

A second more, and they were at the door of the tent. It was hard for them to see clearly at first. The shadows were quite deep inside. And at first they were only aware of a heavy, strange silence that seemed to grow and deepen as they stood looking.

The herder was not standing up to greet them. Neither was he busy at any of his late-evening tasks. They made out his figure dimly, sprawled on his blankets in one corner of the tent.

“By Jove!” Hugh exclaimed. “I believe the beggar’s asleep.”

But he didn’t speak quite the truth. In reality, he believed something far different. It is the way of a certain type of man to avoid at all costs any appearance or semblance of hysterics or sensationalism. Hugh was of that type, and he unconsciously shrank from the utterance of his true beliefs.

“Not asleep,” the Indian replied bluntly. He stopped, walked into the tent, and turned the man’s body in his hands. No wonder the camp fire was dying. Its tender—the sheep herder—had been shot and killed a few moments before.

CHAPTER V

Hugh Gaylord had never known a more mysterious hour than that in which the darkness fell over the sheep camp. At the end of it he felt as if he had lost himself in a dim and eerie dream and only the eternal reality of the sheep, bedding down and bleating in the falling shadows, made it credible to him. But the mystery did not lie in the qualities of the scene itself. Rather it was in his own attitude toward them: a feeling of familiarity and long acquaintance that he could not understand.

It all seemed so natural and real. Even the dim twilight and the glow of the dying fire seemed something vividly remembered from long ago. Yet there was nothing here of the world he knew, the world of cities and gaieties and throngs. There was nothing in his past life to explain the intimacy he felt. At the edge of the little meadow the dusk deepened between the trees. The strong profiles of the pines dimmed and blurred, the distant peaks receded—with a curious effect of actual motion—into the further recesses of the twilight. Here and there the stars were pushing through, and he suddenly regarded them with some wonder. He couldn’t ever remember noticing them in particular before. Perhaps the smoke that ever hung over his city mostly obscured them; possibly he had never had occasion to think about them. Now he was startled by the same curious sense of familiarity,—as if he had lain beneath them a thousand-thousand years and they were old friends come back to talk to him again.

They grew inexpressively bright. Their numbers increased, they filled the sky, they grouped themselves in geometrical patterns and designs, dropping down as if on invisible threads to the spires of the distant pines. For one little instant, as he raised his eyes aloft, he was an astrologer of old, and a knowledge of the ages was upon him. He felt stirred to the depths of his being.

He dropped his eyes to regard the sheep. The outline of the separate animals was altogether lost by now: they were just a dim, white mass in the faint glow of the fire. It was the same as always: they had all bedded down for the night. He saw the light spring up in the herder’s tent as the guide lighted a candle, and this was familiar too.

The Indian came out and with strong, steady strokes began to break wood for the fire. The swarthy face looked unusually dusky in the red glow of the coals. As yet the two men had not discussed the grim find in the tent. There had been scarcely nothing to say in regard to it. Hugh felt no especial excitement or awe: he had been almost as cold and impassive in regard to the tragedy as Pete himself.

Such an attitude might have been expected in the guide, but it caused some self-wonder to see it in himself. Pete was a wilderness man, and if there is one lesson to be learned in the primeval forest it is the reality and the inevitability of death. He was used to death. He had seen it every day. All night long the ancient war of the wilderness waged on, and many were its casualties. The night shuddered with them: the agony of the deer in the cougar’s claws; the crunch of fangs when the wolves tracked down their game; even the shrill, terrible death-cry of the birds when the climbing marten overtook them on their perches. Not for nothing does the buzzard watch all day from the clouds. He knows; and whoever listens to the wilderness voices knows too. The wild, despairing song of the pack, the wail of the coyote, even the murmur of the pines is a song of death, immutable and dark, at the end of their little days. But what did Hugh know of these things? He had always lived a sheltered life. Yet now he felt no horror, no excitement, only the realization that he was face to face with reality at last.

The guide had heaped fuel on the fire and it threw a bright glare over the whole camp. Hugh could even make out the dark border of the forest at the extremities of its glow. Then the Indian turning back into the tent, Hugh entered also.

“Then the shot we heard was the one that killed this man?” he asked.

“Yes. Pistol killed dog. Maybe we too far to hear shot.”

“And you haven’t any idea—what could have been the motive, the reason for killing him.”

“Yes——” The Indian paused and stared down at the still form.

“What do you think it was?” Hugh spoke very quietly.

“Big fight—over the range,” Pete explained with difficulty. “This big cattle country—cattlemen always try to keep out sheep. Maybe other reasons too, but that began it. Always shooting—cattlemen and sheepmen. This first flock anywhere near—first in this part of Smoky Land.”

“Then it was just cold-blooded murder.”

“Yes. No signs of a fight. Maybe shot him through tent door, then tried to kill dogs. Killed one, wounded other. Now I cook supper.”

The Indian, wholly without emotion, began to take stores from the dead herder’s grub-box. He noted that the man’s supplies seemed almost gone, only a few potatoes, a small piece of bacon in an oiled paper, and a little flour remaining. The guide saw his look of question and made explanation.

“Camp-tender come soon,” he said.

“And who is the camp-tender?”

“Each sheep camp has two men. One herder. The other packs in supplies—food for herder, salt for sheep. Come every two weeks, maybe sooner, and camp-tender due here pretty soon. But he’ll find—plenty sheep dead.”

For once Hugh did not have to ask questions. The guide’s last few words explained, in a measure, the motive for the murder. Without a herder and with only one dog left to care for the flocks, the beasts of prey would find easy hunting. “But we’ll stop that game,” Hugh said decidedly. “To-morrow morning—to-night, if you think we can make the trail, we’ll go in and take this man’s body to the coroner. Then the sheep owner can send up another herder.”

Hugh looked up to find an odd, grim little smile at the guide’s lips. It was a thing to notice: this dark savage was not given to smiling. “You don’t know sheep,” he explained. “You don’t know Running Feet—what he can do in one night.”

By intuition more than by actual interpretation of the words Hugh understood. He studied his guide with growing wonder. For the second time that day Pete had dropped back into his own speech. True, in this case the language itself was Hugh’s own, but the idiom was, beyond all denial, savage. He had revealed for an instant something of the strange poetry of the Indian, as well as the Indian’s imaginative interpretation of the wilderness. Running Feet, past all doubt, referred to some of the predatory animals that habitually preyed on the sheep.

“In other words—if we hadn’t discovered this murder, the flock would be practically wiped out by the time the camp-tender got here?”

“Maybe all gone.”

“Even if they send up a man right away there will be some losses.”

“We start to-morrow,” Pete explained laboriously. “To-morrow sunset before we reach tel—tel—talk-over-wire? Another sunset, maybe another sunrise, before herder can come all long way. Plenty likely can’t get no one. Cattlemen rich—mighty—many. Maybe no one want the job.”

“And we can’t start to-night?”

“Trail too dark. Maybe couldn’t catch the horse. Run fast in the dark.”

Hugh turned quickly. “What horse do you mean?”

Pete smiled again, very dimly. “Eyes maybe half blind. Horse grazing just inside the forest, just outside meadow. Herders always have one horse, maybe two.”

Hugh had not noticed: his eyes were not trained to penetrate the thickets as those of the Indian. And at once he made up his mind as to the morning’s work. After all, it was only decent to get word to the owner of the flock as soon as possible. He would not permit his own hunting trip to stand in the way. It was true that he had been looking for a good excuse to return to civilization, and now he had it; but it was not without some unexpected regrets. He had received a new point of view in this visit to the camp, and he felt that he would enjoy a few more days in the evergreen forest. But even the Old Colonel would understand why it was necessary that he change his plans. In the morning they would catch the horse, place the herder’s body upon it, and go down with their story to the settlements. He wondered if there would be a bereaved family to face; he hoped that this, at least, would be spared him. The murdered man looked like a South-European, evidently of the class of shiftless and uneducated men from which most flock owners have to recruit their herders.

His mind flew back to the Old Colonel, sitting in the Greenwood Club. Some way, the memory of the old man was more clear than any time since he had come. It seemed to him that he could remember, word for word, all that the old sportsman had told him. Curiously he had not remembered being so impressed at the time. In some dim under-consciousness he realized that there would be further instructions for him now; but just what they were he did not permit himself to guess. He was eager to return,—go back to God’s country.

After the simple meal, the guide prepared to go back to the camp after some of the more valuable of the camp supplies and Hugh’s bedding. “And where do you expect to sleep yourself?” Hugh asked.

The Indian pointed to the herder’s bed, as if that explained the matter completely. And, after all, why not? This was no time for nonsense and hysteria. For once in his life, there in that far sheep camp, Hugh felt that he was down to facts.

He heard the departing footsteps of the Indian fading slowly to a dim whisper infinitely distant. He was alone. He awoke with a start to the fact that he was really alone for the first time in his life. At this hour, in his own city, he would be either at his club or at dinner, in each case surrounded by his fellow human beings. Servants slept within a few doors of his room at his own house; his pleasures had always been of a sociable nature. On previous nights in the wild he had his guide: what loneliness he might have felt was forgotten in the fumes of strong drink. For the first time in his life, it seemed to him, Hugh had a chance to become acquainted with himself.

His thoughts were singularly clear as he sat beside the camp fire. He looked back over his past life, and it seemed to him that he was looking for something in it that he could not find. He didn’t know quite what it was. He wasn’t sure why he felt such a sudden, overpowering need for it. Perhaps the name of it was justification,—and yet he could not have told what was the high offense he wanted to justify. There beside the sleeping flock new knowledge came to him, a realization of the great themes and purposes of existence never known before. He felt vaguely uneasy about his wasted days, wishing that he could see some destination, some height, some star to which they were pointing. He had an obscure feeling that all his life he had shirked responsibility; and stranger still,—that in the deep realms of his spirit he was shirking it now.

The great shepherd dog came and crouched beside him, and the man held the soft head in his hands. His thought went back to the pedigreed, savage, characterless dog that he himself owned, and unconsciously he compared the animals. The thought returned to him again and again, try as he might to repel it. It haunted and disturbed him, and he didn’t know why. His own dog had won numerous ribbons at the dog shows, he had been bought at a fabulous price, and his pedigree went back many generations. Yet by what fairness could the two animals be named in the same breath? One was a slacker: the other a brave and faithful servant of a great cause. One was an ornament in a dog show: the other guarded—with his life if necessary—the grazing flocks. From dawn till dark he was at his toil, through the blasting heat of summer and the bitter winter cold, watching through the night and running through the day. Hugh was not blind to the fact of his present fidelity: that although his master lay murdered and he himself had been slightly wounded, the brave animal still kept his watch over the sheep. He had been busy at it when the two men had come, and even now his intelligent eyes studied the shadows of the encroaching forest. Hugh felt a sudden glow in his heart. His hands pressed tighter at the soft ears.

A word came to Hugh’s lips and he spoke it in the silence. “Service,” he said softly. “Old fellow, you give service.” Suddenly he knew that this was the great debt that all living things owed: service in the great cause of existence that no man fully understands. He tried to remember what service he himself had given. Dim regrets swept over him.

He rose to throw more wood upon the fire; then stood listening to the voices of the forest. They were so faint and obscure that he had to strain to hear them. It was strange that he had been deaf to them before. They came whispering through the mighty silences, and they filled him with haunting memories. At first the crackle of the fire had obscured them, but as he waited the separate tones became more distinct and permitted some measure of interpretation. He heard the rustling of the thickets, the noise of flicking leaves dim as eyelids winking against a pillow, the sad murmur of the pine limbs, scraping together. Behind them all was the faint murmur of the wind,—a little wind that had sprung up in the snow fields and was making a secret march down through the thickets.

Something of the same sense of familiarity that had come to him on first observing the sheep returned to him now. It seemed wholly natural that he should be sitting here in the silence, beside the flocks.—Throughout the ages men of his breed had sat the same way, the firelight playing on them, the faithful dog beside them. The wind whispered and stirred in the wilderness just the same, the white sheep slept. Watching the flocks,—the phrase was as old as the mountains themselves.

Yet for a moment he found it hard to believe in the dangers of which the guide had spoken: dangers that would soon exterminate the flock except for the protection of herders and dogs. No scene could be more peaceful: the dark forest so lightly stirred by the wind, the river singing past, the soft firelight, the stars in the sky. The breath of the night was sweet and cool; surely there would be no hurry about notifying the flock owner of the herder’s death. He turned again to the dog. “You can take care of them, can’t you, boy?” he asked.

He glanced down, then stiffened with excitement. For once the dog did not seem to hear him. The animal had got up and now was standing braced, every nerve and muscle alert, gazing into the shadows beyond the river. Hugh’s hand fell on the shaggy neck, but the animal didn’t start. And the hair stood stiff like quills at the shoulders.

“What is it, boy?” Hugh asked.

The dog made no answer. Instead, a strange and terrible reply came from the wilderness. It was a dreadful, a commanding voice, and it seemed to freeze the whole forest world with horror. It obliterated the wind and silenced all the little voices to which Hugh had listened with such delight a moment before. It was a long, wild scream, beginning low in the scale and rising to an incredible height.

For innumerable seconds, it seemed to Hugh, the same crescendo note was maintained. The air seemed to shudder. Then, with great soaring leaps, the scream dropped away into a long, singsong whine. Slowly this faded, growing dim and more dim, until it was just a dying whimper in the air. Hugh couldn’t tell exactly when the voice ceased. He had a strange impression that it still continued, only so dim and fine that human ears were not tuned to receive it. Then the wilderness silence closed down again.

The dog leaped forward, barking, and Hugh found himself erect, with his rifle in his hands. In his own heart he knew this wilderness voice. If he did not know the breed that uttered it, at least he realized its savagery, its age-old menace. There is no utterance that pen can describe more wild and weird than some of the twilight cries of the coyotes; yet Hugh was inclined to think that another, more deadly animal had spoken in this case. On a few occasions he had heard members of his club—back from hunting trips in the West—describe the cries of the cougars or pumas: one of the most distinctive and awe-inspiring of all the wilderness voices. It is not heard often. Many men have lived years in the forest without ever hearing it at all. But once heard it is never forgotten. Hugh believed that he had heard it now.

And it had meant more to him than the mere night cry of an animal. It typified to him the very spirit of the wilderness. It was the voice not alone of a hungry creature, stalking in the shadows, but—in his thought—it expressed all the ancient terror of the darkness, the primeval forces that war with man.

Nothing had changed. Still the sheep slept in the meadow and a great beast of prey menaced them from the shadowed forest. The long conflicts against the powers of the wilderness had not yet been won: the shepherds of Judea might have known the same cry. The fire burned low, and it seemed to Hugh that the shadows gathered menacingly about the sheep.

Perhaps Broken Fang himself had spoken. Besides its menace and savagery the voice had been also a living expression of power and pride that only one of the greatest of wilderness creatures would possess. No craven coyote, he believed, could utter such a ringing challenge. The dog raced around the flock, seemingly ready to protect them with his life. No wilderness voice was so terrible as to frighten him from his watch.

And then, at the most wonderful thought of all, Hugh’s heart gave a great leap in his breast. Watching the flock! That was it,—he was watching the flock himself. True, the dog was still on guard, fearless and constant in his vigil, but he could not claim all the guardianship of the sheep. It was his own presence as much as the growlings of the dog that kept the puma at a distance. Except for him, white fangs even now would be tearing at the throats of the lambs.

For the first time in his life he was serving. Was not his gun resting in his hands? For once in his life he was bearing arms in the oldest war that mankind knows,—the war against the menace of the wild. The blood leaped and sang in his veins.

CHAPTER VI

In the hour before Pete, the guide, returned with camp supplies to the sheep camp, Hugh had a chance to observe various things about this mountain land of which he had never been aware before. He sensed, for really the first time, the mystery of the forest in the darkness. The domain of man, it seemed to him, extended just to the limits of the little meadow where the sheep were bedded: beyond that lay the Kingdom of the Wild. He saw, with an inner gladness and stir, the long outline of the high range against the pale western sky,—the one part of the firmament the darkness had not yet completely over-spread. The peaks seemed to rise to the upper reaches of the heavens; between them he could see the sweeping concave line, rough-edged, of the pine forests. He learned certain things concerning the way the firelight leaps into the shadow and the darkness comes racing back. He heard the various overtones, known only to a woodsman, in the crackle of the fire. At the end of the hour he beheld an even greater mystery.

At first it was just a smear of silver, suddenly catching his eye, in the darkness of the east. It grew, it extended; clouds were ensilvered by it and broken apart; it gleamed with indescribable beauty, and in a moment it evolved into the moon. The orb rose higher, the beams slanted down.

But the enchantment of the forest only seemed to deepen beneath it. Only at intervals could the beams penetrate between the trees, and the silver patches that came, now and then, between the trunks only mystified the eyes. And it soon became an indisputable fact that these patches were not motionless and unvarying in outline as Hugh might have expected. Sometimes they blended and moved; and once or twice a swift shadow flicked across them. There was only one explanation. Living creatures—beasts of prey such as always linger about the sheep flocks—hovered at the border of darkness ready to swoop forth.

Pete returned soon after and began upon the simple tasks of the night. He went to the edge of the forest, returning with a bundle of fir boughs for Hugh’s bed. He chopped more fuel, and once he mystified the Eastern man by some hurried business in the dead herder’s tent. He seemed to be making a frenzied search for something that he needed very badly.

He found it at last, and a moment of drama resulted when he came forth into the firelight. A dark bottle was clutched in each of his hands. Hugh glanced at them, then looked with even greater interest at the deep lines in the guide’s face.

“I’ve found ’em,” the Indian told him eagerly. “Knew sure he had ’em somewhere. Fire water.”

The blood leaped once in Hugh’s veins, and a great desire seemed to set fire to his brain. For a moment it seemed to cost him all power of thought. His hand started to reach forward. Then, almost as if the gesture had been inadvertent, he drew it slowly back.

He smiled; and his eyes gave no sign of the vision that was before them. The Indian’s sight was keen, but he had no realization of the grim and terrible battle that was being waged in the man’s own soul. There was no outward indication of the convulsive wrench that had been necessary to draw his hand back to his side. Even in that mountain silence, voiceless as the interstellar spaces, the Indian could not hear the voice of demons, shrieking within the man.

The truth was that Hugh had just been given a glimpse into his own soul: a sight that he had never really had before. He did not know from whence such power of vision came. It was something the wilderness had taught him in the hour that he had watched the sheep. He had always been ready to deny that strong drink had any hold upon him whatsoever. He believed that he had always drunk heavily because there had been no reason for doing otherwise. That such a hold could exist upon any one of the self-reliant, aristocratic circle in which he moved was simply one admission that would never be made, but had rather been linked with the offensive sentimentality that has constituted so much of the hue and cry of over-officious prohibitionists. Yet in one single vivid second of introspection he knew the truth. In this hour when all his best instincts warned him to abstain, the craving was almost too terrible to resist.

But he won that fight at last. He would have been ashamed to admit it, but little, icy sweat-drops had come out upon his forehead. And the victory left him curiously sobered. For the first time in his life, it seemed to him, he knew Hugh Gaylord as he really was.

The guide still stood waiting. Hugh’s eyes swept to the flock. The two of them were on guard to-night, and this was no time to blur the senses with heady liquor. A hard task awaited them on the morrow. Besides—it was dead man’s drink.

“Put it back,” Hugh directed quietly.

The Indian stiffened, and his dark face grew sullen. Hugh watched him coldly. It looked like mutiny, and Hugh might have wondered at his own composure, his confidence in his own ability to win this battle, too.

“I don’t put ’em back,” the guide retorted. “He—won’t need ’em now. Why put ’em back?”

“The reason why,” Hugh explained in a passionless voice, “is because I said so. I remember—I’d forgotten it until now—that there’s a national law against giving whisky to Indians. Besides—you’ve got work to do to-morrow, and I want you to be fresh.”

It was the first time since his arrival in Smoky Land that he had mentioned the man’s race. He knew that he ran the risk of wakening savage anger in the Indian’s breast. Yet he was willing to take that risk.

“What you got to say about it?” the Indian responded insolently. “We go back to-morrow. Job’s over. You ain’t given it to me. I found it. Come on—maybe take a little drink together.”

At that instant Hugh remembered that he was of a dominant race, and the familiarity of the remark grated somewhat unpleasantly upon him. He got up rather leisurely. He felt that in case of emergencies he preferred to be upon his feet. “Put the bottles back,” he said again. “I happen to be in command of this expedition. If you don’t obey, I’ll fire you right here—and you know what that would mean as far as ever getting a job as guide again. Put ’em back and put ’em back quick.”

The Indian’s expression changed. The sullenness gave way to surprise; then—to some measure, at least—to respect. He turned and walked back to the tent. Then Hugh heard his powerful strokes as he cut more fuel for the fire.

Hugh went to bed soon after this, and the night hours began their stealthy march, one after one, across the spaces of the wilderness. The two men had only a few more sentences of conversation. The silence and the mystery had seemingly taken out of Hugh all desire to talk.

“You told the truth, Pete, when you said this job was almost over,” Hugh remarked from his blankets. “And I’ve been thinking of something. If you’d help me load it on, I might be able to pack that poor devil down to the settlements by myself. You could stay here, and I could hunt up the flock owner and get him to give you a steady job as herder. He’d be grateful enough to you for staying to watch his sheep so that he’ll gladly do it. How would you like that?”

The Indian grunted. “Me no sheep herder,” he said distinctly.

Hugh marked the tone with some surprise. Its inference could not well be mistaken. Evidently Pete felt himself much above such an occupation.

“I thought you might like to be,” Hugh responded pleasantly.

“No. Only dagoes and Mexicans sheep herders. I’m a guide. Other herder got shot. Maybe I get shot too.”

Hugh didn’t pursue the subject further. After all, he couldn’t blame the man. By the code of the West it was degrading work; besides, the war with the cattlemen made it as perilous an occupation as could well be imagined. The glimpse of the still form that the guide had rolled in a blanket and which now lay outside the tent door was evidence in plenty of this fact.

He lay on the buoyant, fragrant fir boughs, watching the dancing shadows. The wilderness stirred and whispered with life. The sheep slept. The moon that had looked upon many shepherds shone on his face.

This same moon meant good hunting to the wild creatures that ranged the forest about the little meadow. It was hard for them to work in the utter darkness. And one can only imagine—because no naturalist has ever yet been able to know in full the inner natures of animals—the thrill and the exultation that had passed from border to border through the wilderness world when the great white disk first rose above the mountains.

“The hunting hour” was the word that passed—in the secret ways of the forest—from mouth to mouth. The wind seemed to carry it, and the whole wilderness thrilled and pulsed with it. Wild, hot blood leaped in savage veins; strange terrible lights sprang up in fierce eyes. “It is time to start forth,” the whisper passed: and the whole wild-life kingdom seemed to go mad.

It was a rapturous, an exultant thing, and human beings—jaded with too many centuries of repression that men call civilization—find it hard to understand. Only those who have stood in a duck blind watching a flock of mallard swing down toward the decoys, only those who have lain pressed to the slide rock and seen the mountain sheep, the incomparable Bighorn, in a long file against the snow, or those who have beheld the waters break and explode as the steelhead strikes can comprehend this wilderness ecstasy at all. The smells on the winds, the little hushed noises in the thickets, the startled waverings of shadows all added their influence; and the blood-lust came upon the beasts of prey.

It was their long-awaited hour. It was their time of triumph: stealth and strength, fang and claw, the stalk in the shadows, the leap, the blow, the feasting in the moonlight. The she-wolf came creeping from her lair, her cubs behind her, and all of their eyes were just so many twin circles of green light in the darkness. Were not the deer feeding on the ridges? The coyotes skulked in the shadows about the sheep camp; the lynx went stealing toward the perches of the mountain grouse. The hunting fever spares none of the flesh-eaters, and from the smallest to the great—from the little, deadly, white-fanged mink following a rabbit’s trail beside the river to the mighty grizzly, stalking a cow elk in the thicket—they felt in their veins the age-old stir that is ever new.

But there was one resident of Smoky Land that felt it more than any of his neighbors. In the first place he was a feline,—and that means that he was just a bundle of singing, vibrant, hair-trigger nerves. For sheer sensuality there are no creatures on earth to equal the cats,—and he was king and monarch of all the breed. The animal that catches his prey by an exhausting run, a simple test of wind and limb, cannot from the nature of things feel the wild rapture and suppressed excitement of one that stalks and leaps from ambush; and the cats are the foremost exponents of this latter method of hunting.

There were certain private reasons, too. Part of the hunting fever is due to pride, a sense of power and might. A lowly skunk, trotting along looking for fledglings, must have a hard time persuading himself he is very great and powerful, but this oversized monarch of the cat family had no difficulty whatever. In his time—and his years were rather more than is best in the wilderness—he had seen the bull elk turn from his path, and that is a sight to pass down to one’s cubs. Even the old black bear, the honey-grubber who is, after all, the most lovable spirit in the forest, had been known to speak politely when the two of them met on the trail. Those who know Growl-in-the-throat can appreciate what a triumph this was,—because he rarely goes to any particular trouble to be polite to any one. This didn’t mean, however, that even in his best days the great cat cared to engage him in a fair fight. Growl-in-the-throat was a honey-robber and an eater of fat grubs; he was forgetful and awkward and given to long weeks of sleeping; but he was living, forked, chain lightning in a hand-to-hand fight. No, it was rather a good thing to keep at peace with Woof.

But the coyotes, the lesser felines, even the wolves—making perfectly good meals off one another when they got the chance—were all fair prey to this tawny forest monarch. It made hunting pleasant. He didn’t always have to be careful to see that he was not being hunted himself. It gave him a certain complacency and arrogance, and he expressed it from time to time in a long, wild, triumphant scream that lesser members of his family were ordinarily afraid to utter, lest it should call their enemies down upon them.

Just as the dark came down he had uttered the cry, and he had tingled with savage ecstasy as it echoed back to him. He had seen the first glint of the moon, and the green glare played in his terrible eyes as he started out upon his hunting. The moonlight showed him vaguely, huge and sinuous and graceful past all words, as he stole through the forest on the way to the game trails of the ridge.

He flattered himself that not even the wild creatures, dreading or waiting for just this moment, had ears keen enough to hear him. A perfect stalk had been his pride, in his younger days, and he still assumed that he possessed it. Time was when his stealing feet—in which his terrible talons were even now encased ready to thrust forth—fell soft as pine needles on the trail. If indeed he were past his prime, at this hour at least—just as the moon rose—he would not admit it.

He opened his savage mouth, and for an instant the moonlight gleamed on the white teeth. The forest people could not have mistaken his identity thereafter. One of the great dog-fangs had been broken sharply off in some stress of years before.

He was the great Broken Fang, the monarch of the cougars. Was not the trail cleared, for long distances ahead, of all the lesser hunters? And yet this triumph brought no pleasure, for it led to the undeniable inference that his feet had spoken loudly, rather than whispered, on the narrow path.

CHAPTER VII

Of the three that lay beside the sheep that night, Hugh slept lightest of all. He missed the effects of strong drink. Night after night—more of them than he liked to remember—he had gone to bed half-torpid from the after-effects of the poison in his veins; but to-night he was singularly alert and watchful. The mountain air got to him for the first time since he had come to Smoky Land, and it invigorated him. Besides, perhaps his mind was too busy with thoughts to yield quickly to slumber.

The Indian came of a race that ordinarily sleeps lightly as the wild creatures—a habit learned by uncounted generations in the wild. It is good—wilderness people know—to be able to spring out of a dream and be instantly alert and ready for any crisis. But to-night he neglected the fire. And of course the late sheep herder slept soundest of all. Loud must be the alarm to waken him.

The night hours passed, and Hugh stirred and muttered in his half-sleep. He was troubled with curious dreams; and even on wakening he didn’t know quite what they were. It seemed to him that some one had been trying to tell him something to which he did not want to listen. He kept trying to shut his ears, yet the words got through. They were accusing words, damning him for shirking a great responsibility that had been put upon him. He could see the scorn in the accuser’s face. He was facing some sort of a test, and he broke beneath it.

He would rouse himself, listen to the mysterious sounds of the night, then drop back to sleep. He couldn’t get away from a recurring dream that some terrible Foe was lurking in the shadows just beyond his vision, ready to swoop down on one who was very weak and helpless; yet he wouldn’t stay to fight it off.

Once or twice he got up to mind the fire, and at such times the night noises reached him with startling vividness. Dawn was nearing; the sheep were stirring and uneasy. Once more he went to sleep. For a little while all his dreams departed. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Get up,” a voice said in his ear. “We got start now—make it down by night.”

He opened his eyes. The forest world was still lost in darkness. True, a faint grayness had spread over the east, but the moon still rode vividly in the sky. And, yes, the sheep had got up and were feeding in the grass.

Hugh leaped to his feet. The guide had already rebuilt the fire; and the two of them went about the tasks that were necessary before departure. Pete caught the horse, Hugh himself completed the cooking of breakfast that the guide had already started. He watched with an extraordinary fascination the grim, certain motions of the Indian as he prepared the herder’s body for the day’s journey. The animal was saddled, the stiffening form tied on. Hugh helped put out the fire—the last act of a real woodsman when he breaks camp—and laid out food for the dog. A few moments more and they were ready to go.

“You’re sure you won’t stay—and take a job as sheep herder?” Hugh asked.

“Not me,” the Indian replied. “Herder shot—me shot next.”

“There’s no reason for thinking you would be shot.”

“You don’t know cattlemen—Landy Fargo—José Mertos—Besides—Pete got other work to do.”

Perhaps it was true. The guide had other work to do. Hugh glanced toward the flock. The animals were not bunched so closely now, and some of the lambs were feeding at the very margin of the river. Their numbers, now that they were widely spread, seemed greater than ever.

The shepherd dog came running to him, and Hugh bent to caress him for the last time. He held the head in his hands and looked into the brown eyes. The dog’s gaze did not flinch as is usual when his majesty, man, looks into the eyes of one of the lower creatures. Instead, Hugh couldn’t get away from a haunting idea that the dog’s expression was one of pathetic appeal. It was almost as if the animal had spoken in words, and Hugh could not laugh at his own discomfort. “Aid me,” the dog seemed to say. “Help me keep my trust. The odds are long against me, so give me your aid.”

The dog leaped from his arms; then ran forward a little way, barking, toward the sheep. But Hugh laughed and called him back again.

“Good-by, old fellow,” he said. “Mind the sheep!”

The dog whined softly, and Hugh tried not to understand.

“There’ll be a herder up here in a day or two, if the owner can procure one. And I’ve left out food for you. Good-by again, for the last time.”

But the concluding words of that farewell the animal did not seem to hear. Hugh felt him stiffen in his arms and saw that the intelligent eyes were gazing away, over the flock toward the river. Hugh followed the line of sight, but all he could see was the shadows, bleached here and there by the bodies of the sheep. Then the dog leaped frantically from his arms.

Hugh watched him till the shadows hid him, saw him encircle the wing of the flock, and race at top speed toward the river. It was as if a message had come to him to which Hugh was deaf, that the dog’s eyes had discerned some occurrence on the distant river bank that Hugh himself could not see, and, obedient to a great law within himself, true to a deathless trust that had been bestowed upon him, had dashed forth to give aid.

And the miracle was no less than Hugh thought. The dog had gone to give aid, and no man may say by what avenue of sense, by what inscrutable means he knew that aid was needed. The distance seemed too far for eyesight. There was no actual voice in the air that Hugh could hear. On the green bank of the river one of the ewes raced up and down, bleating pitifully, evidently in great distress. Hundreds of sheep were bleating at the same time, and it seemed hard to believe that the dog could have distinguished a note of distress, unheard in the others, in her voice. She seemed to be gazing in frantic terror down into the wild and seething cataract.

Far across the meadow Hugh did not hear and he did not heed. He turned to the guide, waiting at the horse’s head. “Lead the way,” he ordered. “There’s no use of our waiting any longer.”

Broken Fang, the cougar, had had a discouraging night. Never in his long years could he remember a time of darkness when the hunting had been so barren of results. Now the dawn was coming out, and not even a rabbit had been caught to appease the gnawing hunger within him.

He wouldn’t have liked to admit the true explanation: that he had seen his best days. The cougar shares with all living things a resistless propensity to grow old, and already his years were many. He had had his day. The deer that had died in his talons, even the elk that he had laid low with one lightning, terrible bite to the throat would make a number not pleasing to contemplate by lovers of the wild game. It is to be remembered that an ordinary cougar will kill two deer a week, year on year, until the buzzards come to feed upon him. Broken Fang was no ordinary cougar: for more years than the swan could remember he had ranged through Smoky Land, killing as he went. He had felled the horned cattle; in one starving winter he had fought Cry-in-the-night, the wolf, and had mastered him; he had taken the old tusked boar gone wild in the underbrush. He knew the hunting craft to the last wile, and time had been when a cat-tail plume, falling on the reeds, made more noise than his own step. But he was old: his unusual size proved that fact. By the same token was revealed his past prowess: only an animal that had surpassed in all the wiles of hunting and self-preservation could live to attain such a growth. But to-night—the deer had fled from him before he ever got within leaping range.

The wind had been right, the thickets had hidden his advance, the magic and the thrill of the hunting hour had been upon him. No human ear could have discerned his approach on the winding trail. But the difficulty lay in the fact that the deer have not human ears, but rather marvelous receivers as sensitive as the antennæ of a wireless outfit. Broken Fang was growing old; some of his marvelous muscle-control was breaking; and no longer could he accomplish a successful stalk.

The triumph that he had felt the first hour of the hunt was quite dead in him now. He would have welcomed any kind of prey. Just before dawn he had come upon a porcupine; but even this unprepossessing game had escaped him. It didn’t make a story that he would care to tell to his cubs. There is a certain legend, in the forest, regarding those who cannot catch a porcupine.

“When Quill-back escapes the hunter,” the saying goes, “the buzzards will be full-fed to-morrow.”

The meaning is wholly simple to one who knows porcupines and buzzards. There is no more awkward, stupid, guileless creature in the woods than Quill-back, and the only reason why the beasts of prey haven’t wiped out his breed centuries ago is because he is so fiendishly awkward to kill and eat. One spine in the nose means days of agony, a few in the mouth is apt to bring on slow starvation. And when one hunts porcupines, and they escape him, it means simply that the hunter is getting so old and so stiff that the scavengers may dine upon him very soon. In this case Quill-back crept up a tree and crawled out to the end of a limb where Broken Fang couldn’t get him.

There was no more magnificent slayer in the whole woods than this huge puma, yet he had gone for a full day without food. And it was not to be wondered at that—just before dawn—the blood leaped in his veins anew when he caught the smell of the sheep flock on the wind.

He had killed sheep in plenty in his time, only on the far eastern border of his range. He hadn’t known that any were to be found in this part of Smoky Land. They were an easy game to kill, dying at one little touch to the head or shoulder, and offering no sport at all to a bold hunter of deer. Yet to-night he was in no mood to be discriminating. And it was wholly possible that the smell of that flock seemed to grant a new lease of life.

To linger at the outskirts of the band, to kill when he chose, perhaps even to know that most terrible of all wilderness lusts,—the feast of death. All forest creatures know this feast: they have an inborn passion for it that simply must almost tear them in twain. In all the world of carnage and wickedness there is no debauch that is half so terrible, and the first laws of the forest have decreed against it. For the death-feast is not the rational, honest killing of the hunt. Rather it is the thing that sheepmen dread above all things else: a perfect orgy of slaying, not for food but from desire, the tearing-out of a hundred throats in so many seconds. Yet was not Broken Fang the monarch of the forest? What laws were there to restrain him?

His long tail began to lash back and forth; his fangs caught the dim light of the encroaching dawn as he crept like a serpent through the thickets. The smell became even more plain, the fierce blood leaped even more wildly in his veins. There was nothing here to fear: no leaping camp fire to fill him with the age-old awe, no tall form of the herder on constant guard. He could kill, kill, kill—as much as he wanted—until the savagery in his heart was satiated. It was true that human beings had recently been on guard, but their smell was dim, and even now they were starting away, into the forest.

He paused, taking full stock of the situation. Usually at camps such as this there were, besides the herder with his death-stick, two dogs that would die before they would permit him to touch the sheep. He knew something about the fighting spirit of the shepherd dogs. He knew their blind courage, their terrible ferocity, and he knew only one fighting spirit to compare with theirs,—that with which the she-wolf guards her whelps. Such dogs always seemed to partake of man’s own unconquerable spirit and they were terrible to face. But to-night only one of the dogs was on guard, and he could find killing in plenty before they should come to grips.

Then he drew up short, scarcely able to restrain a yowl of disappointment. He was on the wrong side of the river. A veritable torrent, deep and swift, flowed between. He came of a breed that has no love for water. Of course he could cross in time, he could wander up and down the bank until he found a dead tree stretching the full way over, but he was in no mood for delays. There was a log here, true, slanting down from his own shore, but it thrust down into water but a few feet from the bank and offered no crossing. And his passion almost consumed him at the sight of a ewe and lamb, just out of leaping range,—feeding at the very margin of the river on the opposite bank.

He shivered all over with excitement. He knew already the taste of the red ecstasy in their veins. He knew—in his dark beast-fancy—the feel of their soft flesh beneath his own terrible talons. He lay still, watching greedily.

But the forest gods were good to him, after all. He couldn’t see just what happened. The whole tragedy had occupied but a miniature fraction of a second. Perhaps the bank gave way, possibly the sure little feet missed their hold, or a rock rolled and struck from behind. No matter the cause, the result was the same: the ewe stood alone on the margin. The lamb—a white, dainty creature whose flesh was soft and warm as a bird’s—had fallen into that raging torrent, had been swept down the stream, and as if by a miracle had been hurled into a thatch of dead sticks and driftwood that had been wedged between some of the great bowlders of the river bed.

The glaring eyes beheld its struggles and his own triumph. It was as if the forest gods had planned the whole disaster for his especial benefit. The barrier of the river was an advantage now: such guardians as kept watch over the flock could not cross those frightful waters to fight him off. He had only to steal down the log that slanted into the water, stretch out a paw to the white struggling figure half-submerged in the raft of driftwood, and snatch it up to his own remorseless fangs.

CHAPTER VIII

For the first dozen paces up the trail Hugh tried to shut his ears to the frenzied barking of the dog. He found it hard to believe that the animal was merely rounding up the sheep, keeping them in a compact herd as he had been trained to do. It wasn’t the same cry that he had listened to before. It had an angry, warning quality, a threatening note as if it were trying to intimidate some enemy of the sheep. Then Hugh began to believe that his own fancy was carrying him away. For it seemed to him that the animal’s voice had an actual undertone addressed to himself,—an appeal for aid before it was too late.

But, after all, he was not responsible for the flock. They were not his sheep. He had not been employed by the flock owner to care for them; and the idea of Hugh Gaylord, member of the Greenwood Club, acting as sheep herder was simply laughable. It was not his war,—that in which the herder had been struck down. He was anxious to go back to his own kind, to take up anew his old carefree life in his home city.