He thought that as far as human beings went, he had the mountains all to himself. He supposed that in the camp—now certainly nearing—a dead herder lay face buried in his tree-bough pallet; but Fargo was not the kind of man to whom such a fact as this preys on the mind. He did not dream that the body had already been found, that the herd was guarded, and that even now the daughter of his enemy was waiting for this same moon—to start forth to find the missing members of the flock.
Fargo watched the silver glint in the sky; he saw the white disk roll forth. The light grew, it leaped down between the trees, it worked nebulous magic on the floor of the forest, it enchanted the whole wilderness world. He located his peaks. And all at once he knew his exact position—scarcely three miles from the camp and squarely across the ridge.
He got up and started on with the great hounds. At first they were curiously silent and alert. They did not frisk and run as in the first hour on the trail, and to a casual eye their excitement had died within them. For the moment they seemed perfectly under control. Yet Fargo watched them, wondering. They were moving with a peculiar stealth, and once the man caught the unmistakable glare of their yellow-green wolfine eyes in the moonlight.
At that instant Ben, the old pack leader, spoke in the silence. It was a sharp bay, and momentarily every dog stood lifeless. And then with a wild cry they darted into the shadows.
Fargo whistled frantically, but the pack didn’t seem to hear. Their loud and savage bays obscured all sound. Oaths fell from the man’s lips—sounds scarcely less savage than the bay of the dogs themselves—and at first he could see nothing but failure for his scheme.
It might be, however, that they were right and he was wrong. The dogs were not heading toward the sheep camp. But it was wholly possible that the flock had fed out far that day, had found another drinking place, and thus had not returned to the vicinity of Silver Creek; and the hounds were already on their trail. This theory had to include the death of the wounded shepherd dog, for the first instinct of the animal likely would have been to keep the flock near the tent of his dead master.
His own course was clear. He would cross the ridge to the camp, try to locate the flock, and then attempt to collect his hounds and bring them to it. He believed that if they were on a false scent they would return to him soon.
But the moon looked down and saw that their instincts had told them true. They had crossed the tracks that the flock had made on the outward feeding from the camp that day: they had only to follow it, circle about where Spot, the flock leader, had led, and find the sheep where they had bedded down at night. Yet they seemed to know that certain sport was in store for them before ever they made the long loop around to the sheep camp. For somewhere between was huddled a little group of a hundred stragglers—the band that Hugh had lost during the day’s grazing and which even now Alice had gone forth to find.
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 goodbye 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
