CHAPTER XV
Like a song soaring over the camp fire, clear and wonderfully sweet in the hushed and tremulous darkness, Alice’s laugh had been her only good-by to Hugh. He hadn’t approved of this night journey after the lost sheep. He was new to the mountains, yet he had sensed a vague and whispered menace in the dark forest into which the trail would lead her. He had protested to the last instant; he wanted to go himself, and he had felt a weight of apprehension and concern that she could not explain away. The very breathlessness in the air was in some way sinister; the light patches of moonlight in the big timber only accentuated its mystery, only darkened—by light of contrast—the gloom of the thickets. Yet her only answer had been a laugh.
It was true that the laugh was not really one of mirth. She felt no fear, but she was not amused at his. Rather she had laughed in simple and undeniable joy, and she didn’t quite know its source. It was a little gratifying that this bronzed, well-bred man should be anxious about her. It touched her more than she was ready to admit, even to herself. Yet she really thought that his concern was unjustified.
She knew these mountains. She felt that in some measure at least she had mastered them. She could shoot straight with her pistol: if indeed Broken Fang—the great cougar that had begun to display a rather disquieting arrogance in the presence of men—should find and follow her trail, she had full confidence that the fire from her six pistol cartridges would frighten him away. She had lived long enough in the mountains to know that rare and few are the wild animals that will even menace human beings. The coyotes were abject cowards, the ordinary run of cougars—although sometimes given to trailing a night wanderer for long and unpleasant hours on the mountain trails—always seemed to lack courage to attack, and the wolves would not have their pack strength until the winter. The wolf pack in the snow, she knew perfectly, was not a thing to trifle with. But the gray creatures were living singly now, or in pairs, and starvation had not yet come upon them. In these days of full feeding they were scarcely braver than the coyotes. It seems to be true that any animal that hunts in packs or groups acquires a ferocity, a wild and frenzied courage not possessed by the lone hunter. Partly it is a matter of mob psychology, partly a sense of resistless strength,—but its reality naturalists are unable to deny. It can be seen even in the swarms of miniature ants that—with appalling ferocity—will attack the greatest creatures of the wild. But there were no packs here. The moonlit aisles were safe.
Yet she did not want to go. It was as if the voice of reason within her—the voice that urged her forth—were obscured by the incorporeal voices that spoke in her inner being. One was that of the forest, and it spoke in warning. “Come not on to my darkened trails,” it might have said. “They are thine in the daylight hours, but at night they belong to the beasts. This is the time of talon and fang, and thy flesh is tender. I am old and wise, but also I am new, with the newness of the young world. And my spirit is Death.” And the other voice was that of the ruddy camp fire behind her. “Stay, stay, stay,” it crackled. “Here is thy hearth and thy heart. Stay, tender one.”
As the shadows encroached and the firelight grew ever more dim, she found herself looking back—again and again—to the bright blaze. To-night it was home, and these forest trails were dark and silent. She entered the forest, but ever she saw its cheering gleam between the trees,—a bright haven of refuge where Danger could not come. She didn’t entirely understand. She had ventured forth into the forests at night before, but never with such regret.
She could still see the form of Hugh seated beside the fire; and the sight moved her strangely. But she would not admit—even to herself—that part of the appeal of that bright circle of light was due to his presence. It had never seemed so dear, so much like home before, but it could not be because of the straight, manly form that abode there. Was he not just a lowly sheep herder, a weakling whose metal had been proven false in the crucible of life? What did he mean to her: just an employee that would soon pass on to other occupations. Yet she had felt wholly secure and comforted beside his fire. She remembered the play of his shoulders as he had hewed the fir log; and she found herself longing for his protection now. Yet what right had she to think that this weakened city man would be a fort in time of stress? She was of the mountain strain, and unlike many of her city cousins she did not accept the fact of his masculinity alone as being a tower of strength. Such dangers as did abide in the Smoky Land forest were no respecters of the males of the species: strength and courage alone must be tried and proven. Hugh had failed in life, she thought; why should he not also fail in courage and strength? The mountain women do not love weak men. They are down to realities, life is a constant battle for existence, and they want a warrior—whether gentleman or not—beside them through the long, dangerous hours of night. Hers were the mountain standards. And what could she expect from Hugh?
She headed into the forest, and she saw the light of the camp fire wink out behind her. It left her singularly alone. A vague depression came upon her, an uneasiness that she could not name or place. There was a sense of utter isolation never felt before. The feel of her pistol butt in her pocket—her belt had been packed among the supplies—reassured her. Then she hastened on, down the moonlit trail.
The forest was never so mysterious. The moonlight had struck away all sense of familiarity. The silver patches between the trees were of fairyland, the dusk of the shadowed thicket was incredibly black; even the changeless pines, majestic and inscrutable emblems of the wilderness, were like great, nebulous ghosts of giants. The woodland was full of ghosts: fleet-footed phantoms that sped along the trail before her, ghostly shadows that leaped behind; little, feeble ghosts of noises that couldn’t be real, and ghostly messages in the wind that whimpered and cried in the distant thickets. Yet she could not feel the wind’s breath on her face. Rather the forest was breathless, tense, vaguely sinister as never before.
Steep was the trail she took, and ever the silence seemed to deepen. She kept watch ahead for the flock, pale white in the moonlight. She found herself listening closely for any sound that might indicate their position, either the faint bleat of the ewes or the triumph cries of such beasts of prey that had killed from their numbers. But while she did not hear these things, the silence was full of other, lesser sounds. All the creatures of the forest were stirring in their night occupations, and so deep and unfathomable was the stillness that it seemed to her that she could discern their each little motion. Sometimes it was the distant tread of the deer in the buckbush. No rains had fallen since April; the brush was dead and dry as she had never before seen it, and even the stalking folk made a misstep occasionally. She heard the Little People stirring in the leaves; once a gopher, once a porcupine rattled his quills with a pretended fierceness a short distance off the trail, and once a lynx mewed like a domestic cat behind her.
She hastened on. She turned into a little valley that she knew,—a place the mouth of which was obscured by brush and in which a wing of the flock might have been easily lost. And then she found the white band, bedded down for the night.
There had been casualties earlier in the evening, but mostly the beasts of prey had not yet found them. She started to drive them the long three miles back to camp.
Still the moonlight worked its conjurations in the forest; and she felt a growing discomfiture. At first she laid it to nerves. She had been tired after the day’s ride, and perhaps the long walk after the sheep had overtaxed her already exhausted body. The sense of oppression, of distant and unfamiliar peril in the forests about her grew ever more pronounced. She tried in vain to hurry the sheep. Never, it seemed to her, had they moved so slowly. The first mile took interminable ages, the second was too long for belief. No luxury, no achievement by which women usually gauge happiness could mean so much to her to-night as that little bright circle in the distant camp over which Hugh stood guard.
She was on the last mile by now, and she kept straining to see the first gleam of the camp fire through the trees. Perhaps all her apprehension had been but fancy, after all. It was only a little way farther—scarcely a mile—and the adventure would soon be over. The forest was oddly hushed and breathless.
And at that instant a strange cry came tingling up to her through the unfathomable depths of forest. It was such a sound as does not catch the consciousness immediately, beginning too dim and faint even to recognize as sound, and at first she found herself doubting its reality. The least rustle of the thickets beside her, the faintest stir of the distant wind drowned it out. Yet with such gradual encroachments as the hour hand makes on the face of the watch, it swelled and grew until all disbelief was dead, and all other sensation transcended.
The deep silence of the primeval forest alone had enabled her to detect it at first, but its quality of obscurity slowly passed away. Soon she had begun to have some idea of the quality of its tones. It was slowly, steadily gaining, and the only inference could be that whatsoever made the sound was coming toward her at an incredible pace,—something that ran behind her and cried out in beastial savagery.
A frantic flood of thoughts swept over her: blind hopes that the cool depths of her subconsciousness refused to accept. Perhaps the cries were of some wilderness hunter on the trail of deer,—a trail that closely coincided with her own. In a moment it would be just a thing to laugh at and forget. But even her own prayers, her own unquenchable spirit of optimism could not make the truth untrue. The grim fact slowly grew and strengthened that whatever ran behind her was on her own trail, that she was being remorselessly hunted through the still aisles of the forest.
The wild cries were louder now, evolving from vague and distant rumblings to prolonged and savage bays, ferocious as any wilderness cry she had ever heard. It sounded like apack,—that terrible organization that knows no fear and against which not even the stately elk can stand. The cries had a strange exultant quality, a sense of power, and at the same time the hunting lust that can be discerned in the yell of the wolf pack in their first strength of autumn. Yet this was no autumn. The leaves were yet unfallen. The wolves were still mated, or else ran in pairs. And a great fear began to creep like a poison through her veins.
And ever the chorus grew louder, swelling into a veritable thunder that seemed to shudder, with long, undulating waves of sound, through the hushed air. It seemed to her that she heard the distant pound of running feet on the trail. And now she no longer gave thought to what these hunters might be. It no longer mattered. She only knew that some new and terrible peril was leaping forth upon her, a ferocious enemy that would contest her effort to reach the safety of the fire. The sheep broke into a run, and sobbing she sped after them.
CHAPTER XVI
Landy Fargo tried to approach the sheep camp with some caution. It was an instinctive effort: he had not the slightest idea that the lone human occupant of the little meadow could waken from his deep sleep to hear him. Nevertheless, Fargo didn’t believe in taking unnecessary chances. He rode slowly, trying to avoid the whip of dry brush against the horse’s body. Yet it was to be noticed that the coyotes, lingering hungrily at the flanks of the flock, slipped from the trail when he was still two hundred yards distant.
The thickets were unusually dry: they cracked and popped as the horse passed through. Miniature explosions of popping twig and crackling brush followed every step of the horse.
Still there was no one to hear him. The forest was breathless. And all at once, through a rift in the underbrush, he saw the gleam of Hugh’s camp fire.
For an instant Fargo’s human faculties simply and utterly deserted him; and he stood gaping like a beast at the guttering flame. A strange little shiver of cold and fear crept over him. He had expected only moonlight and silence, perhaps the bedded sheep unwatched and a heap of gray ashes, but a herder’s well-mended fire had not had a place in his calculations at all. Twenty-four hours had passed since the murder, and yet the flame still flickered like a soul that could not pass. Was it a ghost fire: was the shapeless shadow that he thought he could make out beside it the specter of one who had risen from Death to watch the sheep? The sight went straight home to his dark superstitions.
Just for a moment he sat motionless in the saddle; then he started to turn back. His eyes bulged ever so slightly. And then a great cold seemed to come down, stab, and transfix him.
For a voice spoke from the camp. It came clear and strong into the darkness where he waited. “Who’s there?” some one asked.
Except for his sudden gusty breathing, Fargo made no sound in reply. He started to turn his horse.
“If you don’t answer, I’ll think it’s a coyote and shoot,” the voice came again. “I give you till I count three——”
Fargo had won his point bybluffingmany times, he had known how to call the bluffs of other men; but he had no delusions about the hard, quiet voice that came out to him from the fireside. Very plainly the man meant what he said. But at least it wasn’t Dan the herder who had risen and spoken. The tones and words were not the melodious utterances of the Italian laborer who had been Hugh’s predecessor. The only other explanation that occurred to Fargo was that the murder had been discovered, and the man who had called him was an officer of the law who had been put on guard.
Fargo instantly decided it would not be wise to attempt to disobey these summons. Like most wrongdoers he had an abject horror and fear of the law, and the moment was of the greatest terror he had ever known. Yet he dared not turn and flee. In his panic he was unable to remember that not in one chance out of a hundred could a bullet find him in the darkness. For all he knew the man at the fire was already staring at him through his sights, and possibly the whole camp was surrounded by the officers. His mouth felt dry, his hands numb as he rode out into the circle of firelight.
And then his fear changed in a moment to devastating rage. The form was revealed quite clearly now: simply that of a lowly sheep herder in soiled clothes and with unshaven face. Had José lied about the murder? Yet this man was not Dan, the herder. There was nothing to believe but that Crowson had already discovered the crime and had hired a substitute.
There was nothing to fear here. His arrogance swept back to him and his eyes leaped savagely over the trim form that now had risen to greet him. It was a slender figure, the kind he could hammer to paste beneath his flailing fists. He swung down from the saddle, once more feeling himself completely master of the situation.
“What do you mean?” he demanded savagely, “hollerin’ out and threatenin’ me that way.”
Hugh looked at him, considering just what he had meant. And perhaps his lips drew up in a faint smile. If there was one thing his experience with the sheep had taught him, it was to smile: smile at misfortune, smile at the little, everyday comedy of life,—and smile with real amusement at such storming, bullying men as this. But it was true that a moment before he had not been in the humor for mirth. He had known at once that the step in the darkness was not that of the coyote, or any of the hunters of the wild. It was a horse, and its rider could kill from a distance: perhaps it was the same foe that had crept into camp the previous night and had murdered Dan. His voice—he remembered with a strange, inward pleasure—had sounded level and clear; but nevertheless a wholly justified apprehension had been upon him. He had been entirely at a disadvantage. He made a fair target beside the leaping flame and he could not see his enemy at all. And he was still somewhat white about the lips as he stood up.
And if Fargo had only remained silent, Hugh would have been willing to have welcomed him at his fire. The loneliness of the wild places was already upon him, and any stranger that walked those darkened hills might have found shelter in his own tent. And this was the man who—a few days before—had been inwardly proud that he never made chance acquaintances, that he never accepted another for friendship or discourse except through the channels of his own social plane. It wasn’t being done by the men he knew: to arrive at any comradeship without first a correct introduction and then a certain amount of preliminary. How great had been the change! Yet in this case the man was obviously unfriendly; and Hugh slowly stiffened beneath his angry gaze.
“What do you mean by it?” the man demanded. “Hollerin’ out?”
“Why, I meant——” Hugh replied, in a perfectly casual tone, “exactly what I said. That I’d shoot if you didn’t reveal yourself. I’m against coyotes, wild or human. And what are you doing here?”
Fargo noted with some amazement that the tables had been—as if by a magician’s magic—instantly turned about; and that he himself was no longer the inquisitor. He bristled, furious that this lowly herder should not instantly yield to his own superiority. Yet he suddenly remembered certain little facts that tended to restrain him. The man was in his rights: and perhaps it was best to have some explanation for his presence on the night following a murder.
“Don’t go making any inferences you’ll regret later,” he warned. “I’m bear huntin’—got a pack of dogs out there somewhere, and they got away from me.” He stepped one pace nearer. “And I want you to know I’m not expectin’ any back talk from such as you. All I’d have to do was to say the word, and old Crowson would fire you in a minute.”
“You’re one of his friends, are you?” Hugh asked easily.
“He’ll do what I say—don’t you mind about that.”
“Then perhaps”—Hugh struggled an instant and caught at a name that Alice had spoken—“you’re José Mertos.”
Fargo started—hardly perceptibly—and caught himself at once. “Do I look like a Mexican?” he demanded.
“Just a bit stout for a Mexican,” Hugh went on appraisingly. He didn’t know why, but a slow anger had begun to take hold of him. “Then maybe you’re—Fargo.”
“And what if I am?”
The eyes of the two men met, and Hugh saw the bulldog lips drawing back over the strong teeth. The lids half-dropped over his own eyes, and he stood as if deep in thought.
He had been a little afraid, at first. Even now he was not blind to the evident strength of the formidable body, the huge fists, the brutal jaws. Yet—he suddenly knew to his vast amazement—these things no longer mattered. Instinctively he knew that he was face to face with a mortal foe; but he felt a miraculous trust in his own strength.
“I know something about Landy Fargo,” Hugh answered quietly. “He’s not the man I let sit by my fire. And the sooner you get away I think the better it will be.”
Fargo glared, and there ensued a half-second of strained silence, of curious immobility on the part of them both. The fire blazed beside them, the shadows leaped and danced, far away the moon gleamed on the white peaks of the Rockies. The whole forest world was wrapped in impenetrable silence. Fargo snarled, then started to turn.
And at that instant each of them forgot—for a little while—each other’s presence. They stood wholly silent, scarcely breathing,—listening as men listen when life itself is at stake. From far away in the still forest—in the direction that Alice had gone—both of them heard the faint, savage bay of the hounds.
No human being, at that distance, could mistake the cry. The pack was hunting. It was running its game. And from the wild excitement and exultation of the clamoring voices, it was plain that the trail was hot, that the hounds were almost upon their prey.
Hugh suddenly turned his eyes to Fargo, trying to interpret the strange, exultant look in his brutal face. His own eyes narrowed. Then he started,—a strange convulsive jerk that no man had ever seen in him before. It was an instinctive recoil at a great dread and horror that suddenly swept over him. There had been no time for thought. It was as if a voice had spoken, instantly and clear, and had told him the real character of that wild hunt in the darkness.
For he had heard, infinitely dim but sharp as a needle prick through almost a mile of silent forest, the explosion of Alice’s pistol. Some great danger was upon her and her little flock; even now, perhaps, she was fighting for her life. It was a moment of crisis not alone for her but for him: the time in which his metal would be tried in the fire. He knew, surely as if a voice had told him, that there were no seconds to waste.
“No,” he said clearly, “I believe you’d better stay here. I’ll take your horse.”
There was no time to catch and saddle Alice’s animal, feeding at the edge of the meadow. There was no tone of request in the words. He had simply given an order: with his very life he would see that it was obeyed.
“You will, will you?” Fargo howled. “We’ll see about that——”
Hugh reached for the reins, and it seemed to him that Fargo’s hand was fumbling at his hip. That in itself didn’t matter. Hugh only knew that he wanted the horse and that nothing must stand in the way. Fargo was shouting, his dark mouth was open. And Hugh lashed out with his fist, aiming straight for the savage lips.
He struck with all his strength, scarcely in rage but just as a means to an end. He had never fought before, yet the blow came unerringly and with terrific power. There could be only one result to such a blow as that. He dimly heard Fargo grunt—like a beast as it falls below the butcher’s stroke—then saw him reel and fall. He started to swing into the saddle.
It was better, he thought, that this man remain unconscious until he returned. He didn’t forget that he was still shepherd of the flocks and that Fargo was an enemy. Some great test lay before him, and the fewer his foes the better. He leaped down—like a cougar springing from his ambush—and struck once with each fist into the soggy, brutal face.
They were terrific blows, but expedience, rather than cruelty, was the motive behind them. Hugh did not even wonder at himself. He swung lightly on to the horse and lashed it to a gallop.
CHAPTER XVII
These were not wolves. This fact dawned upon Alice Crowson, running her little flock at top speed toward the camp, before ever she saw their savage forms burst forth from the thickets behind and even before she discerned the twitch and leap of their shadows in the distant stretch of moonlit canyon. Only in the starving time of winter had wolves approached with such terrible fearlessness and frenzy. Nor was the cry that long, strange running song of the wolf pack. She knew their breed. They were enormous hounds: such a savage pack as might have started forth from some awful Underworld of fable.
And it would have been better were they wolves. Not for nothing has man waged immemorial centuries of warfare, not only upon wolves but on the great felines as well. They have been taught a wholesome respect for the tall breed that has come to dominate the earth, and much hunger and madness must be upon them before they will dare raise fang or claw against him. But it is not this way with dogs. They have lived among men since the first days of the cave dwellers; they have found men out; they have been willing slaves and faithful servants, and once the impulse comes to attack, there is no ingenerate barrier of instincts to hold them back.
Alice glanced behind, and the Little People that watch with such bright eyes all the dramas of the forest heard her utter an unfamiliar sound. It sprang instinctively to her lips. “Hugh!” she cried to that beetling silence. “Help me, Hugh.” Yet she knew that she cried in vain. She was still more than half a mile from the camp; and Hugh could not hear her, and he could not save.
For the pack had revealed itself. There was a stretch behind her almost bare of underbrush; the great trees laid shadows across it like iron bars across the windows of a cell, and shapeless black shadows were leaping across it. There was a countless number of them, and they seemed to be overtaking her with heart-breaking rapidity. Instantly she knew that she could not hope to reach the camp before they would be upon her.
She must not permit herself to lag behind. Her place was with the sheep. The savage hounds were on their track, and her one hope was that her presence, with the aid of the pistol, might hold them off until she could head the helpless band into the camp. She tried to blind her eyes to another, more dreadful, possibility. This was no time to admit it into her thoughts. But surely, surely they would not attackher. Dogs always barked and menaced, but they rarely really attacked human beings. Yet the thought kept creeping back, haunting her, filling her—in those little seconds of stress in which the pack leaped nearer—with an unnamable horror. It couldn’t be that they were so frantic that they would tear her down in order to get at their prey. Fate did not have that in store for her at least,—their cruel fangs at her tender flesh, their leaping, frenzied bodies lingering just an instant beside her, then racing on after the terrified sheep.
It occurred to her that there might be time, even yet, to spring up a tree and leave the sheep to their fate. Yet was not she the shepherdess, the guardian of the flock? But she saw the issue clearly, and her eyes glanced about for some tree with branches low enough where she could climb to safety. But already that chance was lost. She was in a region of open forest—great trees standing one by one with branches starting fully fifty feet above ground—and even now the dogs were at her heels.
She swung about, she saw their huge, dark forms in the moonlight. No man could look into their yellow-green eyes and doubt the madness that was upon them. The pack seemed to divide, some of them closed in, the others circled about and arrested the flight of the sheep. They drew up, wholly enclosed by the savage ring. And Alice reached for her pistol.
Through its long years that forest had never beheld a stranger scene: the huddled band of white sheep, the girl—the eternal shepherdess of the wilderness—standing guard over them, the savage pack in its grim circle. Over it all abided the mystery of the moon, and ranged about were the tall, impassive pines. The high range behind was a sweep of incredible beauty. But just an instant the tableau endured. It broke, the enchanted immobility of the forms gave way to lightning movement, the shadows leaped—met—sprung apart with the sense of infinite motion, the whole scene was in an instant the wild confusion and stress of a nightmare. The hounds sprang toward the sheep.
Alice screamed, cried out, then fired her pistol. Her aim was none too good the first shot. Her terror cost her the steadiness of her hand. Yet at once she recalled the dreadful fact that the only shells she carried were in her pistol, her reserve supply having been packed among her camp supplies, and she must not waste one. But the leaping dogs were an almost impossible target: her second shot succeeded only in scratching along the shoulder of Old Ben, the pack leader, arousing his savagery all the more.
The sheep were dying now. Already the scene was one of unspeakable carnage. Yet it was true that the full madness of the feast of death was not yet upon them. They lingered to worry their dead before springing to a fresh victim. And such times gave Alice her only feeble chance to use her pistol.
The third shot went true: the dog fell kicking in the dry pine needles. Two of the others, maddened by the sight of the death struggle, sprang with revolting fury upon his defenseless body. She fired at them, sobbing when she saw she missed again. It was her fourth shot; and only two remained.
A pistol has never the power of a rifle. It lacks the ability to shock and stun, and, worse, has nothing of its deadly accuracy. And it was all too plain that she had not succeeded in terrifying the pack. Still they plunged at the sheep, avoiding only those that were crowded about her knees, and their fury was increasing with every instant. Every breath saw more of their domestic instincts fall away from them, giving way to the deadly passions of the wild.
She fired the fifth time, and once more she shot true. The dog died in the pine needles. Then she heard the pistol’s sharp sound again.
Then, at the darkest thought of all, a sob caught at her lips. Perhaps she should not have fired that last, little remaining pistol ball. For she looked and saw that a new madness, a more terrible ferocity had come upon the pack.
Perhaps it was just that they were launching full upon the feast of death at last. Perhaps the sheep died too tamely, and in their pack strength they were swept with new desires. The pungent smell of blood, the shots, the casualties in their own ranks, and the sight of this slight, sobbing figure in the middle of the white band filled their canine brains with fury and their veins with lust. Their excitement was at the highest pitch: and she raised her voice in a frantic scream for help.
For her eyes had dropped down to Ben, the terrible leader of the pack; and his glowing eyes were no longer fixed upon the sheep. Instead he was crouched, snarling,—just out of leaping range in front of her; and white foam was at his fangs. And then he came creeping toward her, across the blood-stained pine needles.
Out of the corner of her eyes she saw other black forms, all of them snarling, all of them stealing along the flanks of the little flock in her direction. There was no defense. The last cartridge in her little pistol had been spent. Regret, infinitely bitter, seized her at the realization that the last shot should have been saved for her own moment of ultimate need.
Darting down the narrow game trail, Hugh Gaylord sped in the direction of the shots. In all the forest dramas that the pines had looked down upon—the lightning flight of the deer before the wolf pack, the elk speeding madly with the lynx at his flanks—they had never seen a more desperate ride, a wilder race. He had lashed the horse into the fastest pace it knew: not loping, not running easily, but a frantic run to burst open the heart and force the jets of blood through the walls of the veins. Hugh was riding for Alice’s life, and the least fraction of the last second might hold the issue.
He had only one thought and one prayer: that he could arrive in time. He scarcely tried to guide the horse. He left it to the animal’s instincts to keep to the trail. It was only a little moonlit serpent between walls of brush or through the open tree-lanes; it had treacherous turns, and here and there great logs had fallen across it, yet the reins hung loose and he flailed at the animal’s side with the strap ends. He didn’t know when a low-hanging limb of a tree would crush his skull, when the horse would trip and hurl him to his death. These things simply did not matter. They scarcely entered his mind.
All thoughts of self, even realization of self-identity was gone from him: he was simply the rescuer, speeding to give aid. He suddenly knew—in a blinding flash of light—that in this undertaking not even his own life mattered a hair. If she had been a stranger to him, even the lowliest herdsman, Hugh Gaylord would still have raced to give aid. The Old Colonel had not been mistaken in his judgment of Hugh’s basic metal, and he would have stood, bravely and strongly, this elemental test of manhood. But this was more. The forest was shadowed, the trail was dark, yet Hugh saw more clearly than ever before. Life and death were not the only issues now. All of infinity, it seemed to him, hung in the balance; and no inward doubts, no voice of reason could make it less.
In one instant he realized that Alice was in her own being his life and death, his heaven and hell, his spirit and his world and his stars. She called him through the night, and as long as life dwelt in his body he would fight toward her. Her hands reached out to him, and he would grasp them boldly across the yawning chasm. Danger, death, travail and pain were but gifts to give, freely, with never a regret. The way was dark, but an inward light had come to him.
He heard the second shot, then the third and the fourth. He sped on. The clamor of the pack seemed just at hand. Sharp and piercing above it the last shot reached him. And then there was a long delay, a grim silence that seemed to tear him to pieces with horror. Was the fight over? Did she already lie still? The pack, also, was ominously silent, snarling rather than baying. The pistol was empty,—and Hugh guessed the truth.
To Alice, in that forest nightmare of terror, the last hope seemed gone. The great hounds were creeping toward her, strangely wolfine in their stealth, and it seemed to her that their muscles were gathering to leap. She alone stood in the way of the gratification of their lust. Was not the death-feast waiting, with only her frail body and her pistol, oddly silent, to stand between? Besides, their madness was at its height.
“Hold firm,” a voice kept pleading in her ears. It was the voice of her own being, an inner knowledge that she must still look straight into those lurid eyes. She must not yield herself to terror. To turn, to waver but an instant meant that those white fangs would flash toward her throat. And now the last little vestige of her dominance over them was spent.
She couldn’t hold them at bay any more. Ever they were escaping her, they were crouching lower, their fangs were bared and gleaming. And she had thrown away the last, grim chance that her pistol had afforded. No shot remained to put her forever beyond the ravening circle’s power to harm. The last gate of mercy was irremediably closed.
She was no longer aware of her own screams—scream after scream that soared and throbbed and died in the silence. They carried far, and they wakened strange conjectures in the dark minds of the coyotes, skulking on a distant trail. The prey was at bay, then, the coyotes knew,—the dog pack was at the kill, and, they trembled and shivered themselves with passion. Hugh heard the sounds, and they were like strangling cords about his throat.
The sounds seemed only to further madden the dogs. There was nothing for them to fear—the pistol was silent, the tall, erect form among the sheep had not the strength of the least of them. She stood so slight, so appalled, no more to be feared than one of the ewes that now lay so silent, its whiteness so streaked and stained with red, in the pine needles. Her fate could be the same as that of the lamb, thrown by Fargo to their kennels.
The moment of silence and waiting was almost at an end. In an instant dreadful activity would return to those tense figures, just as when they had attacked the sheep. One little breath remained. Her faltering hands clasped at her breast, as if to shield it.
And then her dull, terror-dimmed eyes saw a strange thing. At first there was only disbelief, then amazement, then a rapturous flood of hope. For the fierce eyes of the dogs were no longer upon her. It was as if they had forgotten her existence, but rather that their attentions had been fixed and held by something beyond the wall of thickets. They were gazing beyond her, and all of them were growling, uneasily, deep in their throats. And at last, in the little interludes between her screams, she heard the wild hoofbeats of the approaching horse.
Hugh swept up to her, not daring to fire at first. The dogs were too near to her for that. He sprang with incredible strength from the horse’s back, and the butt of his rifle swung high. And there was a strange, half-strangled shriek of a dying hound as the blow struck home.
And that was the first blow of a mighty battle—a fierce conflict to the death that may—for all human beings may know—be cave talk among the beasts until the forests grow old and die. The rifle butt, reinforced with iron, withstood the force of the shock, and he swung it down again. Hugh fought with the fury of a wild creature himself, and behind it was the high purpose and the inner strength that has made man the ruler and master of the earth. But it lasted only a moment. For a time that seemed interminable the animals leaped at the tall figure among them, their fangs tore his flesh and his clothes, and he swung his weapon back and forth like a battle-ax of old. But he was the master, he was of the dominant breed, and more than anything else in the face of this crisis he was not afraid. And the coward that dwells just under the skins of such beasts as these came forth and claimed them.
They broke and fled, one by one, and many were those that lay with broken backs at his feet. The first law of the forest is that it is better to run away than to die; but now they were out of striking range he opened fire upon them with his rifle, and with amazing, deadly accuracy. The air was full of their dying screams. No longer would the pack chase the black bear through the ridges. Their strength was broken and Fargo’s plan had failed.
But the moment meant more than this. To Alice it was deliverance in the last instant of despair. Now she lay fainting among the fallen, but Hugh, bleeding and triumphant, saw that she was uninjured. To Hugh it was almost a justification of life itself. He knew the joy of victory, the glory of strength.
And Hugh’s strength was still upon him when, after certain hours were done, he came back to the prone body of Fargo—consciousness only half returned to it—beside the dying fire at the sheep camp. He had been sleeping peacefully and was not easy to waken.
“You can have your horse now,” Hugh had said, when at last he gained the man’s attention. He spoke quite clearly and distinctly, and all matters returned to Fargo’s consciousness with a rush. “And, of course, you can have your dogs, too. There’s quite a little heap of them for you back there in the forest.”
It seemed to Fargo, when he went to look, that only a laugh followed him out of the firelight. It was to haunt him for months, that laugh. Therewasquite a heap of them,—an impotent heap that Fargo stood by clear into the dawn, strange fumes of rage and hatred in his brain. The buzzards dropped down one by one to see what had interested him.
CHAPTER XVIII
The summer days dragged by, one by one, until they were all gone. Moons waxed and waned, annual plants budded, flowered, and died, the glossy green of the pine needles changed to a dusky blue; and all of these things were as they should be. There was, however, one important and disastrous omission. No rain had fallen since April.
It was bad for all the forest in general and very bad for certain people in particular. Of course, the little underground folk, such as the digger squirrels and gophers, didn’t particularly care. Their small stomachs seemed to be lined with fur; and the dryer the brushwood the easier they could gnaw it. Old Urson, the porcupine, might have found this arid season quite to his liking. But it was more than possible that he didn’t even know it hadn’t rained. For Urson is ever lost in a strange apathy, a mental stupor, and life must be to him an inscrutable mystery without head or tail. He is guileless and stupid and so slow that even a cub-bear can overtake him (although clumsy little Woof, because of certain removable decorations on Urson’s back, would not care to do it a second time) and one of his only two advantages is an utter indifference to the water supply. He can get along very well on the moisture in the tree limbs on which he browses. His other advantage is, of course, a convertible-armor arrangement that he uses for a back. One minute, and Urson looks sleek and almost as handsome as, say, a dromedary seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The next, and he becomes a formidable bundle of bristling spines, a veritable burr that is most painful to touch.
Of course the poison people did not care. They could swim on demand, of course, but they were not fond of water. If rain came any time during the following winter it would be soon enough for them. They lay in heavy sleep on the rock ledges where the heat waves danced. It isn’t wise, however, to put one’s trust in that slumber and go climbing over those sun-blasted rocks with unprotected ankles. A rattlesnake may look dead as last year’s leaves, he may lie so still that even the buzzard—in the sky—is deceived, and yet he can spring straight out of his dark, wicked dreams and bury his hypodermic needles, filled with as deadly a poison as a scientist can concoct in his laboratory, in the exact spot of man’s flesh he chooses. The heat waves danced and spiraled in the air, the rocks grew too hot to touch, and still the serpents lay in their heat trance, wholly content. And lastly, the buzzards had no complaint with the drought.
For disaster to the forest creatures always means triumph to the buzzards. They are the undertakers, the followers of the dead. Ifallthe streams andallthe springs should dry up, the buzzards would be in their glory. There is a legend, passed down from mother to fledgling among them, that long ago such a drought did happen, and that is what the ancient birds think about when they soar so endlessly in the sky. And there is a prophecy that some time such an hour of glory will come again.
But the deer found poor feeding. The grass was dry as dust, the leaves crinkly and crisp, their favorite saltlicks were hard, dry mud. Most of the springs were dried up, the lesser tributaries of Silver Creek were only successions of stagnant pools in which the silver people were already dying and turning white bellies to the sun. The grubs that the old black bear loved were dried to little flakes, like grease spots, on the dead logs; and the berries withered and dropped off before they ever ripened. The wolves ran their game, and since in the hot, stifling days exhaustion came quickly to their prey, perhaps they benefited, rather than suffered, from the drought. But these gray hunters can always be expected to benefit. “Mercy from Cold-Eye is the season that betrays the wolf,” is one of those strange maxims among the forest people, and it needs, like most of the forest sayings, a certain amount of interpretation. Cold-Eye is the forest name for the rattlesnake, and no man who has seen the evil diamonds in his head can doubt that it is a good one. And mercy is the one thing that can never be expected from the rattler. It is the same as saying that it will be a snowy day in July when the wolf cannot turn the most far-spread disaster to his own account. Everything always turns out all right for the gray rangers. And maybe that is the reason why, in spite of endless centuries of warfare with men, they still fill the autumn woods with their songs.
But Broken Fang, the great tawny king of the pumas, and all his lithe and deadly younger brethren almost starved to death. Their whole hunting success depended on a noiseless stalk upon a breed of creatures with ears sharp enough to hear the predatory beetles utter their kill screams in the air, and even the feline cushioned feet could not step with silence in the dry brush. At first there was only gnawing hunger and distemper, then frantic ferocity, and finally almost a madness wherein blue lights dwelt ever in their eyes and agonized convulsions came to the muscles of their throats. Even the porcupines heard them come in time to climb out to the end of the tree limbs, and by the middle of September Broken Fang was ready and willing to lie in ambush a whole night for the sake of a chipmunk that might venture forth from its nest.
The instinct of all the creatures was to climb ever higher,—into the far, lovely grass slopes of the high peaks. In these places the melting snow, the colder nights and days, the moisture-laden winds that swept across them removed, in some degree, the effect of drought. The rains would certainly come in October, but it began to look as if, unless better hunting were found in these high realms, the starving felines could not survive the few weeks that remained. But there were good prospects in these high trails. Dwelling in the wastes of sliderock and snow field, feeding on the grass slopes and scaling the loftiest cliffs, lived the very monarchs of the mountains, creatures that weighed up to two hundred and fifty pounds, and who even in these starving times were tender and fat.
They were the mountain sheep. Far above timber line, in the land where the great snow banks endured through the centuries, these hardy creatures lived and died and had their being: the finest game, the richest trophies, perhaps the most interesting wild animals in all North American fauna. Here old Surefoot and Argali, the two greatest of the bighorn rams, fought their battles in the fall. There were no heavy thickets for ambush, but Broken Fang could find niches and sharp turns in the trail where he could wait for the ewes to wander by.
Because they had a strong man and a faithful dog to care for them, Crowson’s flock of domestic sheep weathered the drought with little discomfort. It was true that the herbage was dry and tasteless, but the sheep are a breed that has learned to fare well where cattle would die. They nibbled the leaves and twigs; Hugh led them to the greenest glens, the richest meadows, and his weekly change of camp site found them ever higher on the range where the effects of drought were less. And in the last days of September they were so high that the old leader of the bighorn flock could look down and see these tame brethren, like moving fields of snow, on the slopes beneath.
These days had been good to Hugh. Every one had been a fresh delight, every night had fallen to find a greater strength and a higher peace in his spirit. Was not this his destiny? Had he not come to his Lost Land, after many years of wandering on dark and unknown trails? Could his home be elsewhere than on these rugged mountains, the shadow of the forest upon him, and the green glades lying in the beauty of the moon? All his life, it seemed to him, his spirit had gone groping—here and there—for something it could never find; and here, behind the flocks, it had found it at last.
He loved the long days of wandering, the nights of vigil, the cool camps in the forest shadow, the little daily adventures that were all part of the eternal war that the powers of the wilderness waged upon the dominance and works of man. Sometimes these took the form of a wolf, striking like a gray shadow from a clump of underbrush and making his kill before Hugh could raise his weapon, sometimes the measured stalk of a cougar on the fold. The fight was never done. Never the night descended but that the age-old battle cry of the wild—the howl of a wolf or a scream of a cougar in the gloom—would come soaring, eerie and wild past all telling, to his ears. And more than once the leaping flame of his camp was the center of a circle of fire,—twin disks, here and there, wherever the eyes might fall.
The inanimate wild itself menaced the flock. It wasn’t easy to find watering places in these days of drought. There were deep glens—box canyons the mountaineers call them—into which stray bands from the flock would wander and be unable to find the way out. Sometimes arms of the brush thickets cut them off from their fellows, and these were the times when Running Feet and his savage companions were in their glory. Hugh found an ever-increasing delight in testing his own strength and skill against the sinister forces of the wild. It was his joy to give the flock the best possible care: keeping down its casualties, choosing the best feeding grounds, and protecting them from panic or excitement. And as the result of his vigilance, few of his sheep died of sickness, and the lambs grew like weeds.
“You know, Hugh,” the girl told him one day, “you are a wonderful herder. We owe you more than we can ever pay.”
No praise had ever meant so much. “I have to be a good one,” the man replied, glowing. “I have to make up for the years I’ve wasted. Besides—it seems to come naturally to me.”
He had never spoken a truer word. It seemed to him that this was his ordained place,—behind the flocks as they fed through the forest.
He liked the long still nights in which he knew the solace of the fire, and the whispering and the mystery that crept to him from the forest. He felt that he had lost all love of pretentious things. His standards were true at last, and the little, simple joys that came to him now meant more than all the luxury of his former life. His pipe—no longer tasting of varnish but cool and sweet—his simple meals, the little triumphs of his day’s work, his refreshing rest after the day’s fatigue gave him unmeasured joy. He had the lasting satisfaction of work well done, of time profitably spent. Already, he reflected, he had some hundred dollars to show his friends in the Greenwood Club! But that famous organization seemed infinitely distant now. It was as if it had never been real: that all his days he had roamed behind the sheep.
Strangely, he no longer even missed the old days. The love of strong drink was gone from his body. He didn’t look a great deal like the man that the Old Colonel had sent forth from the Greenwood Club. His hands and face had been brown before, now they were almost as dark as those of Pete, his late guide. A fast walk over the ridges did not fatigue him now. He was lean and hard as hickory, the muscles rippled under his toughened skin, the sweet, mountain air rushed deep in his lungs. It was almost recreation: never in his old life had he known the buoyancy, the tireless strength, the simple joy of living vibrant and alive in every nerve. There was a curious change in his eyes, too. The little blood-splotches had quite gone from the whites, and they were a firm, pale blue. The corneas looked slightly more hard and bright, and the lines that dissipation had enscribed were almost gone.
“Go for two weeks,” the Old Colonel had said. “And Lord knows—it might make a man of you.”
Two weeks! Three months had already passed, and whether Alice knew it or not, that remote possibility that the Old Colonel had hoped for had already come true. Hugh had done a man’s work: the degree had been won. For the law that was true in the earth’s young days is true to-day; it endures when scorn has spent itself and false pride is humbled: that by toil and conflict alone shall men find their place, their honor, and their happiness. Hugh knew now, as he watched his sheep, that this was the world of the warrior, not the weakling; of those who gave, not those who took; of those who stood firm and endured, not those who broke and fled from the crash of armor.
He did not doubt but that he had already been forgotten by the members of the Greenwood Club. Three months had he been gone: another played his hand at poker, another occupied his favorite seat in the club dining room. But of course they would forget him! There was no comradeship of arms, no mutual memories of trial and strife and conquest to hold them close to him. He had supposed that he had known them intimately, their natures and their souls, but now he realized that they had been but strangers, after all. Living an artificial life, he had seen only exteriors. He had flattered himself—in his subconscious mind rather than conscious—that they were close and lasting friends. Now he knew that only the fire of conflict and stress can weld a lasting friendship between man and man. Friendship is too dear and precious a thing to find in soft ways. That, like all of the other rewards of life, goes only to the warrior.
He was forgotten: the night life of the club whirled on without him. The talk was the same, the lights glittered as ever, the crowds thronged through the streets without, the same round of gaieties made its lifeless and eternal circuit. By a strange paradox he suddenly knew that if he were remembered at all, it was by those who had shared with him in his debauches. And after all they had been the most vital part of his old life. They were the thing most worth while. At least he hadlivedthen, he had known basic exultations and passions, he had not been soft and dead. There had been stress, wakefulness, vitality. Perhaps their pleasure lay in the fact that they hadsimulatedlife. But by the other clubmen, men he had laughed with and talked to, he was simply one who had been and passed on.
He was stirred to the depths of his being by the contrast here. He laughed at the thought that he might ever be forgotten by the companion beside him now,—the great shepherd dog that muzzled his hands. Had they not fought on the same side in battle? Had they not faced the same enemies, known the same stress, felt the same pinch of cold in the crisp dawns and the same cheering warmth of the fire? Had they not gone together into still and sinister glens after the lost sheep? They had braved the dangers, they had endured the storms, they had fought the same fight for the same reward,—the joy of living and of service. Here was one of whom he did not know merely the exterior. He felt the animal’s heart pounding against his own body, and he knew its strength and its courage. Its fidelity, its love, its true and noble worth could not be put into words. And here was a friend, as long as blood stirred in his veins, who would be faithful.
No artificial lights glittered in these mountains. Rather Hugh knew those known to the shepherds who watched the sky for a sign in olden days,—the peace of the stars and the glory of the moon. The only talk was such as he and the shepherd dog had together, the complaint of the sheep, and the voices of the forest about him. The crowds were far, the gaieties were known at last as the dreams they really were, and in their place was the silence, the inner peace, the joy of conquest, and the white sheep, feeding in the shadow of the high peaks. He was far and alone, but he was content.
But Hugh was not entirely forgotten. Even now the Old Colonel sat in his chair in the lounging room, his factory-tied tie at an angle at his collar, his hands folded, his eyes seeing out and beyond the city that stretched about him. And to him, at least, Hugh was still a reality. Even if he were dead—slain in some great stress in those far Rockies—he was more vital and alive in the Colonel’s eye than he had ever been before. Had he won, or had he failed? Was he standing straight or had he fallen? Had he gone down, or even now was he sitting, redeemed and recreated, beside his camp fire in the Land of Mighty Men?