The guide still stood waiting. Hugh’s eyes swept to the flock. The two of them were on guard tonight, 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 tomorrow, 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 tomorrow. 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 wildlife 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
