Shepherds of the Wild/Chapter 30
Chapter XXX
It was more than a reprieve,—the little hour that they would have together before their own island was submerged. They were three shepherds, and in their united strength they were not so fearful of such stars as would be borne into their sky. Here was comradeship instead of loneliness, courage instead of terror, and the deathless joy of love instead of despair.
They went, the three of them, back to the motionless flock. In the first place the sheep were fairly in the center of the space of unburned forest—a brushy hollow where the smoke was least—moving just enough to keep halfway between the steadily advancing fire up-wind and the slow-creeping backfire in the opposite direction. Besides, they were shepherds, and in their own hearts they felt a blind but undeniable satisfaction in being with the flocks at the end.
José and his employer had done their work well. In any direction their victims chose to look the forest was swept with fire. And in the ruby glare the resistless march of the flames was a strange and awful thing to watch. Sweeping fast up the ridges, creeping with almost imperceptible progress down the glades, leaping with indescribable ferocity through the green branches of the ancient trees, slashing through a brush wall and crossing in one pounce the streams and the trails. This last hour was one of weird and terrible beauty, at least. The three of them stood beside the silent flocks, quietly waiting for their fate.
There was no use in trying to drive the sheep. There was no place for them to go. True, to the right and left of the flock the flame-wall was slightly more distant than to the front and rear, but it was as impassable one place as another. Besides, the sheep themselves refused to be driven. They too were quietly waiting for the end.
"One more hour," Hugh whispered. His arms went about her, silently and strongly, as if to shelter her. "It can't be over an hour more. And then we go—some place—together."
The girl shivered in his arms. "I wish it would come soon. It hurts—to breathe."
It was so. The heated air tortured the lungs. There was none of the cool delight that usually precedes the hour of dawn in the mountain realms. Above them the pines stood in their dark watch: silent, somber, noble sentries of the wilderness. But for all their venerable years and their great strength, they could not stand against the enemy that menaced them now. The red tongues would sweep through them, they would shudder and fall, and only black trunks, dismal and ugly, would remain when the red scourge had passed.
The girl suddenly turned entreating eyes to his. There was only the dark shadow of fear in them now, none of the mad panic they had had in the nearby canyon. "Listen, Hugh," she whispered, just in his ear. "I have one thing to ask—the hardest thing of all."
Hugh flinched—ever so slightly—and an immeasurable dread came into his face. "Tell me what it is. I think I know."
"It's going to be hard because—you love me. And you do, don't you? I can't be brave if you don't. I want to keep remembering it "
He nodded, gravely. No words were needed to assure her. This strong shepherd could only speak truth at a time like this.
"But we're mountain people—and you know it will be the best. And it's because you love me—that I know you'll do it for me. To spare me—and then yourself. I'd have done it back there if my hands hadn't been tied."
He understood. Her hand stole around him and touched the butt of his pistol. For a long breath he waged an inward battle, and he called on all the powers of his spirit to give him strength. But it was true that they were of the mountains; and they saw issues straight. This was no hour for emotionalism and folly. The flames swept nearer; but with one press of his finger on the revolver trigger he could save this girl he loved the final horror of a fiery death. One shock, one sweep through the darkness, and then peace: not the slow agony of the enfolding flames. He could not do better service. He was the shepherd still.
"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 sprang forward again. But it was not the hunting charge now. It was the blind, savage rush of a wounded animal, ready to fight to the death.
Again Hugh shot with amazing accuracy, and again the cat went down. But the impetus of his fury could not be overcome. He leaped forward, and the third bullet was a complete miss. The fourth, following quickly upon it, inflicted a flesh wound but halted him not at all. And he crashed down once more at the fifth.
But even then the vital, surging life in the creature still lingered. He came creeping forward, fangs gleaming, long talons bared. An instant more Hugh waited, standing straight and motionless. Only one bullet remained, and no risks must be taken with that. Shep—who had rushed about the flock at Spot's approach—came charging to his master's aid.
One long second dragged away, with a curious effect of silence and immeasurable suspense. It was such a picture that might never be effaced from the memory: the suddenly awakened sheep, the approaching forest fire, the motionless figures, the snarling, creeping feline, and the red glow as of the abyss over all. The creature paused—scarcely ten feet distant—and gathered himself for a final spring. Hugh fired his last bullet.
There was one strange instant more in which the bunched muscles relaxed and the great body wilted in the pine needles. The dog leaped upon it, but it was already impotent. A strength such as but rarely comes to man had held Hugh's hand steady; and the shot had made a clean passage through the creature's brain.
Broken Fang's trail of rapine and carnage had come to an end at last. He typified all that was most deadly and terrible in the wilderness, and he had fallen in fair battle with the breed whose strength—in such regions where they venture—has conquered the wilderness. He was a forest monarch; but his foe was the shepherd. Talon and fang and supple strength had not been availing.
He would linger no more about the white flocks, and the Little People along the game trails had seen him steal by for the last time. No more would the deer know his long, shuddering scream as the night came down. He lay as if fallen in battle against the flocks,—a token of man's dominance of the wild.
Hugh turned from him to find a strange stir and excitement among the sheep. It seemed to him that in those invisible ways no man may trace, a knowledge and a message was being passed from one to another; and a new hope and spirit was sweeping the flock. There was no concerted movement as yet. Still the sheep stood motionless, but their heads were raised. The only moving forms were those of Spot and his ewes, running along the flank of the flock. And suddenly Spot turned back in the direction that he had come.
And every animal in that flock of three thousand leaped after him in pursuit. The whole expanse of white lurched forward like an avalanche starting from the high peaks. Hugh cried out in irrepressible wonder, and thrill after thrill coursed like electricity through his frame. An unspeakable rapture flooded his being; and he whirled about to find a white flame—no less miraculous than this sudden sweeping-forward of the flocks—mounting in Alice's face. The dog raced forward, barking.
By instinct rather than reason the shepherds understood. Their old leader had for the moment at least returned to the sheep; they rallied as instinctively as soldiers at the sight of their beloved general, and they were ready to follow him even into the flame. It made no difference that he was leading straight toward the flaming wall to the east, a dreadful region where the fire raged fiercely and whence without his leadership they would have been afraid to go. They ran as if with renewed spirit.
Perhaps they remembered him of old and gave him their trust. Perhaps he brought them word of some new hope that lay even in the jaws of death. Swiftly the flock fell into its old formation, the strongest in front, every black marker in its place. They swept like a foam-covered sheet of water into the red dusk of the distant forest.
"Come!" Hugh shouted. "Spot's showing us the way."