The Way of the Wild (Sass)/Rusty Roustabout
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A HALF hour after dawn Long John Larkin, the engineer, and Philip Lee, the negro deck hand, saw an ugly thing. They had fought a good fight until then—an almost hopeless fight against a furious southwest gale which long ago had smashed the Sea Swallow's rudder and was now driving the thirty-foot launch toward breakers which would annihilate her. Capt. Mat Norman had directed that fight with the coolness and skill which Larkin and Lee had learned to expect of him in all emergencies. Then, as though some nerve within him had snapped, he seemed to go suddenly insane with fear.
He shouted something to Larkin, but his voice was cracked from much yelling against the gale, and the wind whirled his words away unheard. Then he tried to throw Larkin overboard. Long John was the bigger man and shook him off. Next he made for Lee, and the negro, his face the color of ashes, seized a heavy bar of iron and warned him back.
Keeping his footing with difficulty, Norman staggered across the cockpit and into the cabin. In a moment he reappeared, bringing with him Rusty, the little red Irish terrier that for four years had been a member of the Sea Swallow's crew. He flung the dog into the black, raging sea, then sprang at Larkin, his arms outstretched, evidently hoping to push the engineer over the side.
Long John ducked, falling forward into the cockpit, and Norman, unable to check his onset, plunged headlong into the ocean.
So, thirty minutes later, Larkin and Lee went with the Sea Swallow into the white inferno of the breakers, believing that Mat Norman, the coolest man that either of them knew, had gone mad with terror in the storm. Rusty, the little Irish terrier, would have told them if he could that they were mistaken, for he knew the man who was his god better than either Lee or Larkin knew him. Rusty would have told them that what Norman did was the right thing to do—that if they had jumped when Norman tried to make them jump, they might have escaped death even as Rusty himself escaped it.
The launch was driving toward the shoals and sand bars of the inlet. There she must inevitably be smashed to matchwood and every man in her would be pounded to a pulp. To stay with her was certain death. To jump and swim for it before she entered the inlet's shallow mouth was the only chance, and Norman alone had been cool enough to recognize it. Rusty might not have been able to explain all this in detail; but if he had perished in the huge ocean surges into which his master had hurled him, he would have gone down knowing that Norman had done for him all that any man could do. Of this sort was Rusty's love and Rusty's faith.
The sun was two hours high when the little red dog came ashore. A great white-maned comber tossed him on the upper beach and left him there, to all outward seeming stone dead. A long while he lay where the wave had left him, sprawled on his side, limp and motionless. With that wave the storm tide reached its crest; and, magically, when the tide had turned and the ebb had set in, the wind, which had slackened to a stiff breeze, died away altogether, the gray blanket vanished from the face of the sky and the warm May sunshine fell like a blessing upon beach and ocean. Of all this Rusty, inert on the white sand, the flame of life flickering feebly in his brine-soaked body, knew nothing. Nor did he know that the grim storm scavengers of the aerial patrol were abroad and that already their scouts had spied him from the upper air.
From all directions they came, hurrying on wide somber wings to the feast—first one, then another, then a third, then five more arriving all at once. They were black vultures, all of them, cowardly carrion feeders, yet bold enough to pick the eyes from helpless living victims; but not until twelve of them stood on the sands around the spot where Rusty lay did the boldest make a forward move. His first awkward hop was the signal for a general onset. Long hooked beaks backed by hideous naked heads were reaching for Rusty's eyes, scaly, sharp-clawed feet were trampling his body, when with an angry snarl a lithe tawny beast charged into the midst of the mob. For a moment there was a mad confusion of wildly beating black pinions to the accompaniment of hisses and growls. Then, as the vultures scattered in all directions and, running awkwardly to get a start, rose with swift, powerful wing beats, the big wildcat turned to examine his find.
What he saw amazed him. He had expected nothing like this. A dead fish was what he had hoped for, or, failing that, a dead sea bird—titbits which were much to his liking and for which he was accustomed to search the beaches after storms. Generally, these beach hunts of his were conducted by night; but this storm had not ended until well after dawn, and he knew that if he waited until the following evening the vultures and buzzards, marvelously efficient watchers of the sands, would forestall him and take for themselves whatever savory morsels the gale had brought to his island. So the old lynx had compromised with caution, the caution which forbade him to patrol the open beach by day.
All morning he had been slinking like a ghost along the fringe of the jungle, keeping carefully under cover, pausing often to peer out from his leafy shelter and search the bare white strand above high-water mark. The wind had driven the tide much higher than usual, though by no means as high as in the great hurricanes that came now and then in late summer and fall. It was scarcely ten yards from the jungle's margin to the strip of soft sand where the waves had deposited whatever storm victims they had brought; and three times the lynx, after making sure that no foeman was in sight, had made a quick dash out into the open, picked up something in his jaws and slunk back to the green covert of the thicket's edge.
His first find was a least tern, a bird so small that it had merely whetted his appetite. Next, the sharply contrasting black-and-white plumage and crimson bill of a dead oyster-catcher caught his eye. This was a more satisfying meal; and after he had also found and devoured a turnstone and a black-breasted plover, which he discovered lying side by side on the slope of a low dune, his hunger was temporarily appeased. Nevertheless, curiosity led him to wander a half mile farther along the jungle edge; and when, just after rounding a little myrtle-grown hillock, he saw the vultures grouped about a reddish object on the upper beach, he Jumped to the conclusion that here at last was the delicacy for which he had been looking—a freshly killed fish, probably a small surf bass. A quick glance showed him that the coast was clear and he charged the vultures instantly.
The discovery that the object which had attracted the scouts of the air patrol was not a bass, but a small red dog, worked a sudden and startling change in the big wildcat. He jumped five feet to the right and crouched close to the sand, tawny body quivering, pale eyes glinting, white fangs gleaming in snarling jaws. Into his brain like specters out of the dim past rushed a host of hateful memories; memories of a day of terror when, as a half-grown cub, he had seen his mother torn to pieces by a pack of dogs and he himself had escaped by a miracle to nurse a long gash on his flank which had tortured him for days.
Since then he had hated and feared dogs above all other enemies, hating them almost as much as he feared them. They seldom came to his lonely barrier island, separated from the mainland by a waste of marsh through which wound many deep tidal creeks; but when they did come, to trail the deer through the dense island thickets and set the green jungle ringing with wild, terrible, fierce music, the lynx always sought his safest refuge and lay there trembling and growling, living again that day of terror long ago and the days of agony that followed it.
Those memories gripped him now. As he crouched on the sand six feet from Rusty's motionless form, the fear which shook his yellow-brown striped and spotted body struggled with the hate glaring out of his savage eyes. He knew instantly that the dog was alive. His first impulse bade him flee; but though his nostrils reeked with the dog scent and his heart was cold with the fear which that scent inspired, his eyes told another story and stirred another emotion.
They told him that this dog was small, little more than half his own size and weight; that it was weak to the point of impotence, utterly powerless to defend itself, unconscious of the lynx's presence, insensible or asleep. Little by little, as he watched, hate triumphed over fear; and little by little, as the minutes passed, the glare of those round unwinking eyes grew more savage and more sinister. Here was an easy victory, a safe and swift revenge. One long leap, one deep thrust of needle teeth meeting point to point in the throat, and the thing was done.
Suddenly all sense of fear vanished. Ears flattened, fangs gleaming, the lynx bunched his sinewy body for the spring.
Rusty, the red Irish terrier, was dreaming—dreaming of old days on the Sea Swallow with Mat Norman, of quiet voyages along the winding marsh creeks behind the barrier islands, of venturesome trips on the open ocean, when fair weather tempted the Sea Swallow's skipper to save time and distance by passing from inlet to inlet outside the island chain. Ona sudden the dream ended. Rusty stirred restlessly and opened his eyes. Slowly and feebly he raised his head and looked about him.
Around the arc of a half-circle his gaze swept a peaceful panorama of sea and sky and sloping, clean-swept strand. Then the movement of his head ceased, his body quivered, the short wiry hair of his nape and back stiffened and stood erect.
Wide, round, pale yellow eyes, stern and cruel as death, glared into his; eyes aglow with fierce fires of hate, yet hard and cold as jewels; eyes set in a broad, bearded face of implacable ferocity. As if by some compelling hypnotic power, they held Rusty spellbound and motionless; and, sudden and swift as the stab of a sword, fear entered Rusty's heart. For a fraction of time his life hung by a thread. The big lynx, poised and tense for the spring, would have launched himself forward instantly at the slightest sign of weakness, and the dog, faint and sick after his battle with the sea, must have perished almost without a struggle.
But Rusty Roustabout II was Irish terrier to the core. He was the son of kings. To Champion Breda Mixer his pedigree went back, and the blood in his veins was the pure blood of those little red dogs of North Ireland which long ago were dubbed "Dare-devils" by men who counted courage the cardinal virtue in dog or man. Only for a moment did cold terror chill his heart and paralyze his faculties. In an instant he threw it off and was himself again—the heedless, reckless, headlong little bravo whose delight in picking fights with dogs too big and heavy for him to handle was a constant source of pride and anxiety to his master whenever the Sea Swallow tied up at the city wharves to discharge or take on freight.
Perhaps it was the habit, characteristic of his breed, of striking first and considering consequences afterward which made him do what he now did. Perhaps some deep-seated instinct guided him; or possibly, in some mysterious way, he read a secret in those glassy savage eyes and knew on the instant that one thing and one thing only could save him. Be that as it may, he did that thing.
Summoning all his strength for the effort, he rose to his feet and with every hair abristle, short stubby tail erect as a flagpole, white teeth gleaming in long strong jaws, he stalked stiffly forward, then charged.
The wildcat, crouched for the leap, his brain on fire with the hate which for the moment had conquered his fear, shot forward and upward as though propelled by a catapult. Set on hair-trigger as he was, nothing could have stopped him; for an infinitesimal fraction of a second it seemed that Rusty's desperate attack had been launched too late. It had, indeed, come too late to forestall the cat's assault; but the terrier's swift and sudden advance cut in half the distance between the two antagonists, and the lynx's muscles had been keyed to drive his body forward that distance and not an inch less. So when he leaped he leaped too high and too far; and at the very instant when the terrier's legs gave way under him and he crumpled on the sand, the long tawny body of the cat flashed over him, one hind claw raking his head.
Slowly the dog, his forehead streaming with blood, struggled to his feet and faced about on tottering legs to meet the furious charge which he expected. Ten yards away across the sands he saw his foe racing with long bounds toward the green wall of jungle beyond the low sand hills of the upper beach. Once and once only the lynx looked back; and Rusty, sitting on his haunches because once more his hind legs had given way, sent after him a bark of triumph and defiance.
This was the first meeting of Rusty, the little red Irish terrier, sometime member of the launch Sea Swallow's crew, and Longclaw, the big bay lynx, who for ten years or more had been king of all the preying beasts of the long narrow barrier island to which Rusty came by the grace of Providence when the Sea Swallow met her end. It was a strange whim of fate which brought the two together, for there was only one man who knew Longclaw the lynx and that one was Mat Norman, Rusty's master and god.
It was Norman who had given Longclaw his name. Woodsman as well as boatman, the Sea Swallow's skipper sometimes stopped at this island between the marshes and sea to spend a half day looking for sea-turtle nests in the sands, if the season was the season of turtles, or to wander in the dense woods of palmetto and pine, gnarled, stunted live oak and evergreen cassena, which covered the island's interior and in which many wild things had their homes. Several times on these trips Norman had noted the tracks of an unusually large wildcat, the largest wildcat tracks that he had ever seen. Because he delighted in studying the wild things, he always left Rusty on the launch when he landed on the island, for the terrier was of too restless and lively a temperament for patient watching in the woods; and because he had a habit of giving names to all the wild creatures with which he became acquainted, Norman dubbed the big bay lynx Longclaw and wove romantic fancies about the velvet-footed, mysterious haunter of the jungle glooms.
A creature of mystery he was, in truth; a ghostly, sinister, uncanny presence; a dim, elusive shape, seeming scarcely more tangible than the darkness through which he moved on feet that made no sound. To Norman he was the very spirit of the wild uncouth island forest, grotesque and inhospitable, bristling with needle-pointed yuccas and long-spined cactuses—a dense, almost impenetrable, palm-shadowed jungle, utterly unlike the beautiful woods of the Low Country mainland, yet alluring with an outlandish tropical enchantment of its own. Norman, on his visits to this fastness, searched often for the big lynx, but not in order to harm him. His tracks in the sand gave the man a thrill of joy whenever he came upon them; and the island wilderness was all the more fascinating, all the more alluring, because somewhere in its hidden depths lurked this secretive spectral follower of the night trails.
In spite of all his seeking and watching, Norman saw the lynx but once, and then only for an instant. But a time came when Rusty, the Irish terrier, might have told his master much about the great wildcat Longclaw, into whose domain the storm had flung the little red dog to wage a long war with the jungle's tawny mysterious lord. Meanwhile, however, weeks and months were to pass—weeks and months during which Rusty, the castaway, learned to live the new life to which fate had assigned him.
It was a slow process, that learning; yet even at the beginning, Rusty's wits met the first and most important test—the problem of sustenance. Twenty yards from the spot where the dog had been washed ashore, a white-and-gray bird dropped down to the sand on quivering pointed wings and presently ran on long slender legs to a tall clump of beach grass well above high-tide mark. Soon came another and another, while overhead still others circled and called, "Pill-will-willet, pill-will-willet, pill-will-willet." For a half hour after the lynx had disappeared Rusty lay still, exhausted by the brief exertion of that encounter; but after a while strength returned to him and he got to his feet and walked slowly up the beach. Accident rather than design turned his steps toward the grassy area where the willets nested, and one by one they rose before him to fly low over his head, crying and swooping.
He gave them no heed, not knowing the reason for their excitement; but suddenly, as he brushed past a grass clump, something crunched under his forefoot. He had stepped squarely into a willet's nest and had broken two of the buffy, brown-blotched eggs. He ate these ravenously, then broke the two other eggs in the nest and ate them also. Conscious for the first time of his hunger, he nosed about from grass clump to grass clump and found five other nests, each containing eggs, all of which he devoured. Then, suddenly aware of a thirst which exceeded even his hunger, he pushed on across the belt of loose sand between the beach and the jungle's edge.
Luck favored him in his quest. A hundred feet within the dense wall of cassena and myrtle fringing the woods, a chain of ponds and pools extended for a quarter of a mile lengthwise of the island, fed either by rains or by obscure springs hidden amid rank reeds and rushes. As Rusty splashed along the slime-covered margin of one of these pools toward a little cove where the water growths fell away, a great milk-white bird, half as tall as a tall man, startled him as it rose with labored wing beats not more than half a dozen feet in front of him. He drank and drank and drank; then irresistible weariness came over him again and, making his way to a dry spot close to a palmetto trunk, he lay down and slept for hours.
When he awoke dusk had come to the jungle. Where scrubby, stunted live oaks spread their wide branches under the pines it was already black night; and all around him in the gloom the little red dog heard sibilant, mysterious whisperings—the eerie music of the sea winds sifting through acres of palmetto fronds. A chuck-will's-widow cried shrilly in the blackness, another and another answered. Down from the air above the feathery pine tops floated the loud, guttural "quok-quok-quok" of a squadron of black-crowned night herons going forth to their fishing, and presently a homing blue heron sent down his harsh, hoarse call.
Then, as the breeze lulled, fell silence, deep and absolute; and in the grim clutch of it, with the blackness growing ever blacker, fear came into Rusty's heart again—fear and a great longing for Mat Norman, his master.
The longing abode with him, but the fear passed. It was not in his nature to be afraid; and the hunger, which the willet eggs had only temporarily appeased, would not let him lie idle in the darkness, appalled by the jungle's dreadful silences, startled by its inexplicable sounds. Soon his nose gave him tidings which made him forget all other matters in a new quest for food—a quest to which he could bring a ripe experience.
His nose told him—that there were rabbits about and Rusty was an old hand at rabbit hunting. It mattered little that these dwellers in the jungle morasses were short-legged, dark-tailed marsh rabbits and not the cottontails with which he was familiar. Indeed, it was fortunate for him that this was the case, for these marsh rabbits lacked both the wit and the speed of the cottontail. He bungled his first attempt, but the game was plentiful and a quarter of an hour later he had another chance. This time he stalked his prey more skillfully and soon had a supper suited to his needs.
Thus, at the very outset, Rusty solved the primary problem—the problem of food. If there had been nothing else, the sea birds' eggs on the sands—eggs of willet and plover, tern and skimmer—and the sluggish water-loving hares of the island pondedges would have kept him alive for weeks. But there were many other sources of food supply besides these; and little by little—sometimes by accident, sometimes by virtue of his keen nose and sharp wits—the terrier gained knowledge of them and skill in turning them to good account.
Walking the beach one moonlight night, he came upon a raccoon busily digging in the sand twenty feet or so above high-water mark. He tried to stalk the coon, but the latter saw him and, after debating the question for a moment, decided upon flight. Rusty treed him in a young live oak just within the edge of the jungle, then lost him as he made off along an aerial pathway passing from tree to tree. Returning to the spot where the coon had been digging, the terrier took up the work of excavation and in a few minutes unearthed a store of round white eggs, more than a hundred and fifty in all, arranged in layers in a deep cavity in the sand.
He did not know that they were the eggs of a great sea turtle which had come up out of the surf earlier that night and, after lumbering across the beach and laboriously digging a hole in the sand with her flippers, had deposited her treasures therein, covered them up and waddled ponderously back to the ocean. But Rusty found that these eggs were exceedingly good to eat and, tearing open their tough skins with his teeth, he devoured more than a score of them at one sitting.
The discovery of this nest was a stroke of luck, but by using his wits Rusty improved upon it. He had noted the wide, plainly marked trail or crawl leading from the surf to the turtle nest and back to the surf again; and several times that spring and summer he found turtle nests for himself by digging in the sand where an upward trail and a downward trail came together above reach of the tides.
In these and various other ways the little red dog made his living during the first weeks of his long exile. At first he searched often and hopefully for his master, but little by little he realized that his search was vain. Slowly, too, realization came to him that he was a prisoner. On one side of his island lay the sea, on the other a wilderness of salt marsh, boggy and treacherous, an impassable barrier which Rusty tried only once to cross. A house, where an oyster planter had once lived, now stood deserted and desolate, half wrecked by a terrific hurricane. Rusty's ordeal in the storm had filled him with an enduring horror of the surf. For this reason he avoided the front beach as a rule and made no attempt to swim the deep inlet separating his barrier isle from the next island of the chain. But for his fear of the breakers his exile might have been shorter, for fishermen sometimes landed on the island and walked the front beach. But none of these rare human visitors entered the hot, almost impenetrable jungle behind the dunes, teeming with insects in the warm season and inhabited by many snakes.
The heat and the insects Rusty endured as best he could. Deep-seated instinct kept him safe from the ugly, thick-bodied, truculent moccasins. As time passed he grew wiser in the ways of the woods, stronger of body, keener of nose, fleeter of foot. With the advancing summer the sea birds' eggs became fewer and no more turtle trails crossed the sands. But Rusty was so good a hunter now, so well versed in the essential arts of island life, that though he occasionally encountered lean periods when hunger almost drove him to raid the vast armies of the little fiddler crabs, these intervals of ill luck were of short duration. The marsh rabbits were his main reliance, both because of their great abundance and because they were comparatively easily caught; but he varied his fare often enough to escape monotony.
Wood rats were an important source of food supply. Now and again he caught a cottontail. Several times he feasted on minks which abounded in the salt marshes behind the island. With surprising frequency he captured squirrels by taking advantage of their uncontrollable curiosity. The raccoons, however, which he often scented and not infrequently saw, were too much for him. Try as he would, he could not get to close quarters with them—which was, perhaps, just as well. Some of the island coons were fully as big as he was, and, had he managed to close with them, they might have taught him a lesson. More than one big male ringtail seemed half inclined to accept his challenge. But on each of these occasions there happened to be a tree close at hand, and at the last moment the coon, perhaps impressed by the impetuousness of Rusty's attack, decided to avoid the issue.
There was one other island dweller whom Rusty scented sometimes, but for a long while never saw save only that once when he was so near to death—Longclaw, the big bay lynx, whose overlordship even the surliest of the old he-coons grudgingly admitted. Sometimes the red dog knew that his fierceeyed, stealthy enemy was near; sometimes he saw the wildcat's rounded tracks; occasionally the wind brought him a scent which he recognized at once. But though Rusty often followed those tracks and sought to trace that well-remembered scent, for weeks it was Longclaw who hunted Rusty and not Rusty who hunted Longclaw.
An irresistible fascination drove the lynx to shadow the little dog, to trail him wherever he went about the island, to keep him almost constantly under observation. Early in this strange game Longclaw realized that, in spite of its doglike smell, the small, stump-tailed, rough-coated beast which had suddenly appeared upon the island was nothing like so formidable as the big gaunt hounds which the lynx feared even more than he hated them. The little red dog's woodcraft was no match for that of Longclaw. He was a tyro, a bungler, whom the lynx could easily elude; and, bold though he was, he was of insignificant stature compared with the hunting dogs that Longclaw dreaded. Three times during those first weeks the big wildcat, discovering Rusty asleep, crept almost within leaping distance of him; and once he had all but nerved himself for the attack when the terrier awoke.
But gradually there came a change. More and more often Rusty caught the scent of Longclaw; more and more often he turned aside to follow that scent; more and more often and more and more quickly he forced his velvet-footed, ghostly attendant to beat a hasty retreat. The little dog was learning woodcraft; his nose, his eyes and his ears were serving him better; experience was teaching him the ways and the stratagems of the wild folk of the woods.
A time came when the grim game of hide and seek was no longer a ludicrously unequal contest between a novice and a master. Still, the advantage rested with Longclaw, but he could not now venture to take liberties which formerly involved no risk. At last one day Rusty worked out a scent so quickly that he caught a glimpse of his foe; and a week later he not only saw the lynx again but actually treed him in a small isolated cedar and kept him there for an hour.
This marked the beginning of a new chapter. Thenceforward Rusty was no longer content to leave the initiative with his enemy. Whether he realized in some strange way that the contest between the lynx and himself had to be fought out to a conclusion, or whether he found in the excitement of that contest relief from his gnawing loneliness and his poignant longing for his master, the pursuit of Longclaw became his principal business in life next to the finding of food. He trailed the big wildcat in his sleep, fought with him in his dreams; and once, having driven him to take refuge in one of his dens, a leaning oak, hollow for a distance of twenty feet above the ground, Rusty stood guard within the entrance of the hollow for more than five hours before thirst finally compelled him to abandon his vigil.
Summer reached and passed its zenith. In the fierce August heats, when even the languid herons and the tall black-and-white wood ibises of the island ponds and meres seemed to droop and suffer, Rusty rested perforce. It was a struggle then to keep alive, to endure without madness the incessant attacks of the stinging and biting insects from which, when the breeze dropped, escape was all but impossible. Yet morning and evening often found the terrier on the trail again; and with brief interludes the long duel of wits and of nerve between dog and lynx, between the alien invader of the jungle and the big wildcat who had been the jungle's sovereign, continued and became more bitter and more deadly. It was an odd chance which brought the climax.
Two hours after sunrise of a crisp October morning Rusty followed a possum trail to the edge of a small open glade shaded by tall pines and ringed round by a dense hedge of young live oaks. Almost in the center of the glade stood a large palmetto; and just as the terrier reached the inner margin of the live-oak hedge he saw the possum nosing something in the pine straw near the palmetto trunk. Rusty backed into the thicket, made a short detour, then darted noiselessly into the open, keeping out of sight behind the stout trunk, bristling with the stubs of cast-off lateral fronds. When he was within six feet of the tree he heard a scuffle just beyond it; and a moment later, peering around the trunk, he saw Longclaw standing upon the body of the possum.
The big cat's back was turned to the palmetto. Crouching low on the carcass of his prey, he seemed to be scanning the farther edge of the glade, perhaps trying to discover the meaning of some faint sound which had come from that direction. From behind the tree trunk, first the head, then the wiry, compact body of the little red dog emerged. Inch by inch he moved forward across the pine-straw carpet. Then, with a joyous yelp, he leaped straight for that tawny back.
The struggle was over almost before it had begun. Two seconds after Rusty made his leap he found himself lying against the palmetto trunk a foot above the ground, his bleeding body wedged amid the jagged sword-edged stubs of the broken fronds. Blood streamed across his face and blinded him; the red hair of his throat and chest was streaked and smeared with a more vivid red. A moment he hung dazed and helpless. Then, squirming and writhing, he got himself free and, falling sideways, sprawled for an instant on the pine straw. Scrambling to his feet, although the breath had been all but knocked out of him, he stood swaying unsteadily, brushing his forepaw across his eyes to wipe away the blood.
Fifteen feet away, near the thicket's edge, crouched Longclaw the lynx, back arched, fierce eyes agleam, long teeth bared in a savage snarl. There was no fleck of blood on the fur of his back or flanks; but there was blood on his jaws and on his big hind feet, not his own blood, but that of his foe.
That tawny target at which Rusty had leaped had vanished as if by magic. The charging terrier had uttered his yelp of triumph a fraction of a second too soon. With incredible swiftness Longclaw had thrown himself on his back, and the little red dog had hurled himself into a battery of long, needle-pointed, slashing claws and punishing fangs.
Those fangs had seared Rusty's face above the eyes; those claws had torn long rips in the hide of his throat and chest. The terrier's teeth, seeking a hold, had closed upon empty air. Nearly twice as large as the dog and in the prime of his powers, the wildcat could have cut his antagonist to pieces in the first half minute of the battle; but in this first phase of the duel in the jungle glade no such purpose had formed itself in Longclaw's brain.
Taken utterly by surprise, he was trying not to kill, but to escape. A moment his claws had ripped and slashed, his fangs had stabbed and torn. Next moment his jaws relaxed their hold, the claws drew back into their sheaths and a mighty thrust of the long, powerful hind legs hurled the little dog upward and backward. In an instant the lynx was on his feet and halfway across the glade.
He halted there because for a half second it seemed that the dog was dead; and he held his ground, because even when Rusty had regained his feet his helplessness was obvious. In that moment the fear in Longclaw's heart faded and vanished and his pent-up hatred of the interloper who had invaded his kingdom took full possession of him. And mingled with this hatred was contempt.
Now at last he knew that this little stub-tailed dog was nothing to be afraid of, a weak and puny creature by comparison with himself, an opponent whose amazing boldness was out of all proportion to his physical strength. Outwardly, he gave no sign; but Longclaw the wildcat was transformed. For months he had fled from this presumptuous intruder, but that chapter was over. He had taken his enemy's measure at last and revenge was near at hand.
Perhaps Rusty, still dazed and half breathless, but steadier on his legs, his eyes freed in a measure from the blood that had blinded them, understood something of this. Possibly he was able to read the changed purpose of the lynx in those cold, steady eyes; possibly he realized, just as a man would have realized in like circumstances, the inevitable consequences of his defeat in this first encounter which was so decisive a revelation of the wildcat's overwhelming physical superiority. At all events, the dog seemed somehow aware that the headlong recklessness which had saved his life on one memorable occasion would not serve him now.
He did not charge Longclaw as he had charged him that first day on the beach. Instead, he lifted his nose high and sniffed the air. Then he began to bark, wildly, shrilly, rapidly—sharp stabs of sound, piercing, incessant, hysterical, as though a frenzy had him.
A woodsman wise in the ways of dogs might have suspected that when Rusty had tried the air with uplifted nose some strangely exciting odor, imperceptible to the lynx's duller sense, had come to him. The average man, looking on at the drama in the glade, would have said that the terrier was beside himself with fear. To Longclaw, apparently, the dog's behavior carried this latter meaning. Those mad shrill cries seemed to the lynx a confession of irresistible, overpowering terror, and they stiffened his resolution and fanned the flame of fury in his heart.
Yet for a while the clamor in the glade confused and worried him. His muscles were taut for the first of the series of bounds which would bring him to grips with his foe; but minute after minute he delayed his charge, exultant over his enemy's obvious panic, yet a trifle nonplused by the volleys of sharp, staccato sound which filled and bewildered his ears, accustomed to the jungle silences.
At last the tumult of barking slackened and ceased. Rusty's nose was testing the air again; his ears were pricked as though to catch some longed-for, eagerly awaited answer to his summons. The big wildcat's head dropped lower, his long back bent like a bow, his four feet drew together under him. Next moment he shot forward, bounding lightly over the soft carpet of the pine straw.
Five feet from the dog he halted, turned sideways to his foe, uttered a strange, wild, long-drawn, indescribably savage cry. Then, as though his legs were steel springs, he bounced high into the air, passed clear over the dog and, closing upon him with the swiftness of light, grappled him from behind.
Rusty Roustabout II, the light of battle in his eyes, the stubby tail which was his battle flag erect and defiant to the last, whirled as he went down under that tawny bulk and clamped his jaws upon a furry forefoot. Then, as long teeth dug into his neck and trenchant claws raked and ripped his back, he released his grip on the wildcat's paw and, writhing and twisting desperately, strove for the throat hold which alone might save him. The weight of the wildcat crushed his body to the ground. After a moment, the little red dog, redder than ever now, had almost ceased to struggle.
Mat Norman, when he landed on the island, told himself for the hundredth time that he was engaged on a fool's errand. The chances were at least ten to one that Rusty had perished in the storm. Over and over again Norman had reviewed the events of that morning, and he knew that the same current which had swept him parallel with the island beach and on into the treacherous bay had probably carried the dog to his death.
An exceptionally strong swimmer, Norman had somehow kept himself afloat, and a big seagoing rum-runner, riding out the gale in the lee of the long sand bar at the island's northern end, had taken him from the water more dead than alive. The rum-runner's business was urgent. She put to sea hours before the half-dead man in her captain's bunk had recovered from his stupor. Norman, when he came on deck, learned that he would not see land again until the first of the Bahamas lifted above the horizon.
It happened that for months he had yearned to see the tropics. Fate, it appeared, had given him a free passage in that direction. He had no close kin to bother about and he knew that his dog was dead. From Nassau he wrote home to apprise his friends of his whereabouts. Then for some five months he knocked about the Indies and the Leewards, working his way on various sorts of craft. Presently, he had enough of it, and the end of the sixth month found him at home again on the plantation of his birth, whence he could see, far away across a wilderness of marsh, the purple woods on the barrier island off which he had parted from the doomed Sea Swallow.
Those woods beckoned him. He could not rid himself of the thought that some cross-current might have washed Rusty ashore on the island beach; and he reflected that the dog, provided he could kill game enough to subsist on, might remain for months undiscovered by any human being, because, except in the hunting season, the few persons who visited the island seldom entered the woods. Knowing that he would be laughed at, he said nothing to anyone; but on the third day he borrowed a small boat and set out on the long row down the winding marsh creeks. He camped that night amid low sand dunes close to the surf and by sunrise he was in the island thickets.
Another man engaged in such a quest might have whooped and hallooed, hoping that the dog might hear him. But no sooner had Norman entered the jungle than his hopes died utterly. He told himself again that he had been a fool and he tried to banish Rusty from his mind. He still pushed on; but he went quietly, as was his custom in the woods, thinking thus to renew his acquaintance with some of the island wild folk, scanning the moist places for tracks of raccoon, deer and mink, searching especially for the rounded footprints of the big bay lynx that he had named Longclaw.
He thrilled with pleasure when in a sandy swale under ancient palmettos he found those footprints. It was good to know that Longclaw still lived and ruled his island kingdom, that his shadowy form still moved ghostlike and mysterious through the jungle glooms at night. Norman followed the trail eagerly. Where the sandy area ended he lost it, but he pushed on in the direction in which the tracks had led, moving as quietly as possible, searching the sun-dappled vistas ahead. Scores of times he had followed Longclaw's trail, and only once had he been rewarded with a glimpse of the big wildcat whose presence lent enchantment to those woods. But always Norman was ready to try again on the chance that luck would favor him.
An outburst of sound, straight ahead and near at hand, stopped him in his tracks. He knew instantly that it was Rusty's voice. In the utter unexpectedness of the event there was something shocking and frightening, something deeply uncanny, something which smacked of the supernatural. For an instant Norman was obsessed by the grotesque notion that his dead dog was calling him, and for another half second he thought himself the victim of some fantastic trick of the imagination. Then, as common sense reasserted itself, he listened eagerly, studying the sounds.
It was Rusty's bark, he knew, but never before had he heard Rusty bark like that. He choked off the shout which rose to his lips and ran forward at full speed, ducking under the palmetto fronds, thankful for the pine-straw carpet which deadened the noise of his footfalls.
A dense hedge of young live oaks barred his way. He dropped on hands and knees and began to burrow through. Dead sticks and leaves crackled under him; but the dog's frantic, incessant barking came from just beyond the oak thicket, and Norman hoped that in the clamor the slight sounds of his approach would pass unnoticed. He was halfway through the thicket when the barking ceased. The man halted, every nerve tingling.
A wild, long-drawn cry, unmistakably feline, indescribably savage, galvanized him into action. Head down to shield his eyes from the stiff oak twigs, he wormed his way through the barricade to the thicket's edge.
One glance sufficed. He had no weapon, but as he raced across the glade he snatched a half-rotten stick from the ground. Longclaw the lynx, growling and mauling, his fangs red with the sweetest blood that his lips had ever tasted, saw the man when he was scarcely a dozen feet away.
For a fraction of a second the lynx seemed paralyzed. Then like a ghost he was gone. Norman sensed rather than saw a tawny streak flashing into the thicket. Then he dropped on his knees beside the torn and bleeding form at his feet.
Brown eyes, immeasurably happy, looked up into his face. A stump tail wagged feebly. A small red tongue licked his hand. Norman knew that by a margin of seconds he had come in time.