“Yes,” he promised. “I’ll do it—at the end of the hour. And the dog too.”
It was only fair to include the dog. He was one of the triumvirate. He had kept faith, he had stood the test. The moments were born, passed and died. The tall trees caught, flamed, and fell. The smoke clouds gathered, enfolded the three of them, and passed on.
They were nearly blind from the wood smoke, the heat had become almost too much for living flesh to bear. There was no need of waiting longer, perhaps to fall into unconsciousness from the smoke and then to waken to feel the flames licking at the flesh. The wall of fire was still nearly a mile distant to the west, but its march was swift. Hugh’s terror had gone, and he found himself longing for such cool peace as would follow the third revolver shot.
The girl’s lips pressed his. She knew the progress of his thoughts. “There’s no use of waiting any longer,” she said unwaveringly. “Let me be the first.”
“The dog first,” he told her. He couldn’t get away from an all-engrossing desire to keep her with him to the end, and to spring out of life with his hands in hers. Perhaps it would be kinder to spare her the sight of Shep’s death—yet his spirit lacked the strength.
“The dog first,” the girl repeated. “And don’t—wait—any more.”
The dog’s appealing eyes were upon them. Their own spirit—that of immortality itself which only men seem to possess—had pervaded him, and the dark eyes seemed unafraid. To the beasts, death is a darkness and a fear; but Shep knew that these two masters would have only mercy and kindness for him. Hugh’s hand reached back for the revolver.
But the forest gods had not written that Shep should die so soon. The drama of the flaming forest was not yet over. An interlude strange and startling past all words; three figures—vivid in outline and bathed in the fire’s glow—came speeding toward them from the thickets to the east. A gasp of wonder fell from Hugh’s lips as he beheld them.
Two of the forms were unfamiliar, but one of them was known and beloved of old. Hugh couldn’t mistake the trim figure, the curved undeveloped horns of the first of the three. No break appeared in the fiery wall toward the east, yet Spot—his own unmistakable form and his wool unsinged—ran steadily toward them in plain sight of all three. It was as if he had returned from the shadow world, a ghostly savior in the hour when his old followers hovered at the gulf of death. A great wave of hope swept the man’s frame.
But in an instant he saw the explanation. Spot and his ewes had not come unaccompanied. A tawny form loped swiftly behind them. It was Broken Fang, the monarch of the cougars, and he had simply driven the three bighorn down into his own hunting ground at last.
“If there’s a way in, there must be a way out,” Hugh spoke sharply. “Stand still, so the cougar’ll come in range.”
Suddenly he seemed to know that in some invisible and secret way that he could not trace, the whole issue of life and death had centered down to his war with Broken Fang. He couldn’t have told why. Dimly he knew that after days and hours of desperate pursuit, following still the ancient herd-instinct and perhaps impelled by the memories of certain crises, when he had run with the domestic sheep, Spot had come here for protection from the tawny creature that threatened him. After that desperate foe was conquered, he would pay his debt to Hugh—not through conscious impulse but by the mandates of some great law of the wilderness and life that no man may name or read. Hugh drew his revolver, but its bullet was not for Shep. And the three of them crouched low, waiting for the cat to come in range.
He gave no thought to the fact that a pistol is usually a futile weapon indeed against such a mighty, strong-lived animal as a great cougar. He knew by the animal’s frantic leaps that he was desperate with hunger, stark mad from the long chase that had never seemed to end, and frenzied, perhaps, by the fire. The felines do not often chase their game in open pursuit; but in his madness he had forgotten his hunting cunning. He saw the motionless flock and came at a charge.
Spot hurried around the flank of the flock and, watching the cougar’s advance, Hugh was wholly blind to the fact that every one of those three thousand sheep lifted their lowered heads. The cougar came almost straight toward him, as fast as an African lion in the charge. He had emerged from the brush only a little more than a hundred yards distant, and half of the space between had already been crossed. But still Hugh held his fire. He knew that only at a point-blank range would the little pistol bullet stop that wild charge.
And the calm, sure strength of the wilderness itself came down and sustained him during the stress and fury of the attack. His face was impassive, his hands steady as bars of steel, his eyes were narrow and bright and clear. He raised the revolver. He glanced coolly down its sights. And he fired for the first time when the great cat was hardly forty feet away.
The bullet sped true, inflicting a mortal wound, and the great beast recoiled. But the shocking power of the lead was not enough to destroy wholly the mighty engine of life in Broken Fang’s body. He snarled once in fury and
