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 boulders 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.
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.
The dog’s bark rose to a veritable clamor. Then he came racing back toward Hugh.
He approached within twenty feet of him, barking, then started back toward the river. Still Hugh did not follow. The dog rushed forward again and again turned. He didn’t seem to be able to understand. Always before the men that he knew hurried to his aid at a time like this. Hugh felt a sudden rush of blood to his face.
“Good Lord, Pete,” he exclaimed. “I’ve got to see what’s the matter with that dog.”
He caught up his rifle, then followed the dog to the water’s edge. The river itself was a thing to stir the fancies. The dawn had not yet broken and in the dim, eerie grayness the stream had lost all quality of reality, all semblance to the sheet of sparkling water flowing between green banks that Hugh had beheld the previous night. He felt a sense of deepening awe. Rather, it seemed like some river of a Beyond, a sinister and terrible cataract in a twilight land of souls, a Lethe flowing darkly at the edge of a Hereafter. To a poet it might have seemed the River of Life itself, deep, fretful, full of peril and tragedy, and flowing from the beginning of the world to its end.
When the waters struck the great boulders of the river bed the foam gleamed a curious, pale white in the twilight—otherwise the waters would have seemed like a dark void. The dog raced up and down the bank in excitement, then half-entered the water. Hugh saw his difficulty at once. He could not make headway in that raging torrent, and was trusting to Hugh for aid.
“What is it, old man?” he asked quietly, just loud enough to be heard above the noise of the waters. “What do you want me to do?”
The old ewe brushed close to him, as if she too looked to him for aid. If the light had been better, he could have seen the despair and agony in her quiet eyes. He studied closely the white patches on the river. He did not have the feline’s eyes, to see plain in the half-dark, and the dog’s were better able to penetrate the gloom than his. But slowly he grew accustomed to the half-darkness, and he knew the truth.
The lamb still struggled in the driftwood. And for one fraction of a second he thought that he saw something else.
It seemed to him that two strange, sinister lights suddenly glowed from the thickets on the opposite bank; then went out. They were close together, and they were round, and they were just alike. They were not twinkling lights: but rather were a strange blue-green like the flame that plays about an alcohol burner. No human being could have seen those dreadful blue disks and ignored them: their terror went too deep for that. Man knows the terror of lightning, the dread
