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. There was quite 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.
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
