The Cross Pull/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII
An hour before daylight Flash slipped up to the den. It was cold and silent. At sunrise of the previous day a rider had passed close to the den. Silver had run true to she-wolf form and departed with the pups as soon as he was out of sight. The day had been hot and had diffused and evaporated the scent of her trail. The night frost had finished blotting it out.
Flash had circled for miles in the effort to pick up the scent but could find no trace and there was no answer to his calls.
Far to the north Silver and the sturdy pups were traveling steadily, headed for the she wolf’s old hunting grounds from which the winter’s famine had driven her. Just at daybreak she turned on the crest of a divide and gazed back along her trail, then loosed one last wail for the mate who never came and journeyed on to the north.
Flash too, was starting for his old home—the Bar T range. The third day he spent on the rim of the Wind River hills, awaiting nightfall before venturing down among the familiar scenes of the Greybull. At the upper end of the valley where it was narrowest he crossed to the foothills that flanked the other side and started down to the Bar T ranch.
When thirty miles from his destination, a point of light in a shallow foothill basin caught his eye. He drew near and partly circled the cabin, undecided whether to go on or not. He did not know this place. Moran had never taken him to Brent’s. The lighted window attracted him and he trotted close. Several horses stood saddled in the yard.
Flash slipped to the door and sniffed along the crack. The tobacco smoke drowned the individual scent of each man within but the general air of the place and the murmur of voices was not to his liking. There was something vaguely and unpleasantly familiar about it all; and suddenly the hair rose along his spine as he recalled the night at Two Ocean Pass when he had searched among the bald ridges and heavy spruce for the phantom camp which he never found—the voices and smells that had reminded him of Brent.
He reared to his great height, rested his forepaws on the window ledge and looked inside.
Three men sat there with Brent. A ragged scar lined the face of one from ear to chin and his stubbly red beard sprouted at eccentric angles along the line of it, lending a sinister twist to his face. Another was a dark, slender faced man with a hint of the Oriental in look and manner. The head of the third was wide and flat on top, slanting down abruptly to his pointed chin which gave a fox-like cast to his triangular countenance.
At a sudden move from the man with the scar Flash dropped from the window, and as his feet touched the ground the glass crashed above him and there was a jarring report from within. He ran, and behind him the muffled roar sounded twice again.
The man had leaped suddenly to his feet and at the look in his eyes the others dropped flat to the floor as he shot twice across them at the window. Brent swept the lantern from the table and another, from his prone position, fired through the door, then followed his shot and sprang outside. They scattered through the night and threw themselves flat upon the ground.
Twenty minutes later Brent’s voice broke the silence.
“What the hell started you off that way, Hanlin?” he demanded. “I’ve made a circle around and there’s no one near.”
“He was at the window,” Hanlin said. “Ask Harte. Didn’t Harte open on the door at the same time?”
“Mere presence of mind,” a cool voice answered from the night. “I didn’t see a soul. When you started shooting I took it for granted they had jumped us and cleared the door for a break outside. You're getting spooky, Red.”
“I saw him, I tell you!” Hanlin snapped. “He was looking in at us.”
“We can easy tell,” said Harte. He strode to the window and sheltered a match with his hand while he studied the ground beneath it. The others peered down over his shoulder at the big prints in the dust.
“A stray dog,” Harte said indifferently. “But he evidently looked like a marshal to Red.”
“He makes a track as big as that beast Clark Moran had,” said Brent. He traced a finger along a ridge in his scalp and swore. “I’d like to have got a chance at that big gray brute before the Bar T outfit killed him off.”
“It’s proof of a low order of mentality to let hate stew up the system until the fumes go to the head—especially anything so simple as hate for a dog. You had one fight over him with a man you couldn’t afford to have on your trail; but then you always were more or less of a fool, Brent,” Harte remarked dispassionately. “Let’s go in.”
The fourth man had not spoken a word. Once inside Red Hanlin laughed hoarsely.
“Look at Fox,” he said.
Fox Jarrat’s triangular face still twitched from the recent strain, and his little wide-set eyes glittered dangerously.
“Nerves,” said Harte. “Without brains.” He flipped a coin in the air, caught it deftly on the muzzle of his gun and balanced it with a steady hand.
“You’re a cold blooded fiend for a fact,” Brent grunted with grudging admiration.
“Warm blooded,” Harte corrected, “but cold headed. Let’s start. We can ride to the snow line and you bring the horses back.”
They left the cabin, riding single file up a gulch that led away into the hills. Ten miles farther down the Greybull, Flash too, was heading for the hills.
The scent around the cabin had carried his mind back to the night at Two Ocean Pass. This in turn awakened a host of half forgotten memories of the Land of Many Rivers. His feet followed the trend of his mind, and he found himself climbing the first range of the mountains. At first he traveled without definite purpose, but the desire to revisit these places gradually shaped in his brain.
The spicy smell of balsam and silver spruce lured him on, and he came to the first straggling groups of limber pine. When he entered the heavy lodge-pole growth he encountered many drifts of snow. Half a mile of climbing and he struck the solid, hard-packed drifts of the dense spruce slopes. Then he angled along the face of the range toward a pass that led across it.
The jar of hoofs, creaking of saddles, and the drone of voices reached him from below, and he stopped to listen. It was not often that men rode at night. The horses breathed heavily as they bucked the drifts. Then all sounds ceased but the undertone of voices. When the horses started again they went back down the way they had come, and Flash heard the crunch of snow as three men climbed toward him on foot.
The spring sunshine had packed the snow until it held a man where the sharp hoofs and heavier weight of horses would break through. Flash waited until they were quite close before slipping on ahead.
He found the high country under a solid blanket of white. When he had been here with Moran there had been little evidence of man, but the hills had been teeming with all varieties of game. This condition was now reversed. He found no signs of game, but near Two Ocean Pass he crossed many trails that had been made by men.
Flash was not constituted to live happily alone. With Moran he had been content, and his life had been full when he traveled with Silver. Companionship he must have, either of his own kind or that of man.
Except for the big gray owls there were now no sounds to entertain him at night. The whole expanse of the hills seemed dead and frozen, and the hollow silence oppressed his spirit with a sense of world wide emptiness.
His memories were sooner dimmed than those of man. Every vivid instance, each great love and hate, had left its imprint and helped to shape his life, but these did not now reveal themselves in definite form. His love for Silver and Moran was no longer a distinct longing for each of them personally, but was manifested only in the absolute need of companionship in some form.
He therefore lingered near Two Ocean Pass. The camp was no longer a phantom camp but very real. He avoided these men by day but when any one of them chanced to be abroad in the hills at night, Flash flanked his trail, testing him with nose and ear, much as a criminologist would have studied his facial characteristics and the shape of his head.
Food was scarce, and Flash foraged a precarious living, a scant half portion of his usual rations. An occasional snow-shoe rabbit or blue grouse were the only living things he found. He grew thin and gaunt, his flanks pinched up in odd contrast to the deep chest, and his eyes were sunk in hollowed sockets.
The days were warm and by the second week in May there were green patches showing through the white in the broad open meadows of the Thoroughfare and the Yellowstone, the hardy new grass peeping through within a few hours after the melting down of the drifts. Flash prepared to leave this country of loneliness and little meat.
He left Two Ocean Pass and when he came to the confluence of the two rivers he followed up the ridge between them. When well up toward the head he looked far across to the main divide. There were many brown specks on the white slopes of the Rampart Pass. They were strung out in scattered bands as far as his eye could reach; they were coming his way, and Flash went to meet them. The famine was broken. A few more hours and the Land of Many Rivers would once more be the land of plenty. The elk herds which wintered in the low valleys of the Shoshone were coming back to the upland meadows of the Yellowstone, the summer paradise of the elk.
Flash met the first few leaders of this migration and pulled down a cow. Great droves streamed down into the bottoms and traveled on toward the Yellowstone. The valley was a veritable thoroughfare for migrating elk—from which fact comes its name.
For a week they came in scattered bands. The big herds that had wintered in Jackson’s Hole were now coming from the south and mingling on the meadows with those from the Shoshone.
There was now food in abundance and in a few days Flash regained his usual fullness of form. The meadows and all exposed slopes were bare of snow. The deer had not yet come back. Less averse to the proximity of man, the blacktail bands descended clear to the foothills each spring when the first shoots of green grass sprouted at the roots of the sage. They would follow the grass line up into the hills and not for another month would they cross the divide and join the elk in the Yellowstone meadows. The mountain sheep go up to winter instead of down, grazing on the highest flat-tops of the peaks where the savage winds that follow each storm keep the bald ridges scoured free of snow. They now came down for their first nip of green grass and for the first time Flash saw these shy animals in the valleys. But all this was not enough.
He must have company and here, away from Two Ocean Pass, there were no men, and he could not even experience the vicarious sense of companionship he had drawn from following them at night. He left the green bottoms and traveled up through the spruce. When he came out above timberline he headed straight for the Rampart Pass.
He had not left the tree line two hundred yards behind until he crossed a track that angled back down into the timber.
The track was many hours old, and the scent was faint but the little that was left thrilled him with a strange excitement. He knew it for the woman scent.
He had now no clear cut recollection of the girl he had seen but once. His dreams of her were misty visions of some lovely being—like a child’s dream of a fairy princess. Flash turned and followed along on her trail. Dusk was settling over the hills when he started and night shut down around him as he sped through the trees.
The trail led almost straight down, and he soon dropped to the lower edge of the snow line. The trail grew steadily warmer and at last he could smell smoke and see the glimmer of a camp fire through the trees. The girl was wrapped in a single blanket and sat leaning back against a tree. Flash circled twice around the fire, his pads making no sound on the pine-straw carpet under the trees. As silently as a shadow he drew near until he stood watching her from a distance of ten feet, breathing deeply each time the shifting breeze carried her scent to him.
A sudden shift of wind drove the campfire smoke straight to him and he sneezed loudly twice. The girl started up in sheer terror at this sound just in time to see a gray shape disappear.
“Flash!” she called after him. “Flash! Come, Flash. Come here.”
Flash halted. It had been long since he had heard any one speak his name. From centuries of being sheltered and protected by man, brutality and the lust to kill have been refined out of civilized woman to an extent that is easily apparent to the animal world, and Flash sensed that he had less to fear from the female of the human species than from the male.
Animal estimates of men are not formed by reasoning but through the composite impression they receive from eye, ear and nose; of this impression, the strongest factor is that of scent. Flash’s eyes told him that this girl was the one he had met before. Her tones were stirringly familiar, yet his nose denied all this. She was as alluring as ever but instead of radiating the bubbling vitality and happiness he associated with her he now sensed an air of weariness and mental depression.
This had the effect of adding a fresh pang to his own loneliness and brought an unexpected whine to his throat. The girl, hearing it, knew he was still near and resumed her coaxing.
“I knew it must be you,” she said. “Come, Flash. Come on up to me, Flash,” she begged.
Ancestral strains waged grim conflict for the possession of his soul. The ancient heritage of dog to be the slave of man clashed with the wolf urge to be away from all this and back to the free hills. Lured on by the magic spell of a woman’s voice the spirit of the dog crept forward, dragging with it the protesting flesh of the wolf. Inch by inch he neared her until at last she touched him.
At the touch of her fingers he was once more the dog, the wild in him subservient to the tame, and he fawned upon her, whining with eagerness.
The girl threw her arms about him and drew him close.
“Don’t run off like you did that other time,” she begged, “Stay with me, Flash. I couldn’t live through another night alone. Stay with me, won’t you, Flash?”
The note of appeal in her voice was more urgent than any other sound he had ever heard. His craving for companionship had found an answering need in the girl.
He sensed her helplessness and some vague undertone of fear. The blood of many fighting forebears who had protected man rose to the surface in a feeling of responsibility for the safety of this girl—a desire to fight off that thing she feared.
Even now he was not assured that she was the woman he had met before. Not until a measure of her former buoyancy and high spirits returned with her joy at his presence was he sure. Then all three senses coordinated and definitely identified her as the same.
It was long before she slept, and Flash curled close beside her, his newly aroused protective instincts fully alert. He growled at each far off sound. When a cow elk sounded her yelping bark close at hand he rushed out and drove her off, returning proudly to the girl. He knew the elk was as harmless as a mouse, and all this was more to assure the girl that nothing could harm her now that he was with her.
“It won’t be so bad if you’ll stay with me, Flash,” she told him. “The loneliness won’t be so heavy that it hurts—like it did before I had you.”
Then she slept, and the wolf stood guard.