"What have you done! You're doing something that I never saw a
tenderfoot do in my life, before. I've known men to hunt for
years--literally years--and not know how to do it. And that is--to place
your feet."
"Place my feet? I'm afraid I don't understand."
"I mean--to walk silently. To stalk, damn it, Dan! This brush is dry.
It's dry as tinder. A cougar can get over it like so much smoke, and a
man who's lived all his life in the hills can usually climb a ridge and
not make any more noise than a young avalanche. Just now I had a feeling
that I wasn't hearing you walk, and I thought my ears must be going back
on me. I stopped to see. You were doing it, Dan. You were
stalking--putting down your feet like a cat. It's the hardest thing to
learn there is, and you're doing it the first half-hour."
Dan laughed, delighted more than he cared to show. "Well, what of it?"
he asked.
"What of it? That's it--what of it. And what caused it, and all about
it. Go on and let me think."
The result of all this thought was at least to hover in the near
vicinity of a certain conclusion. That conclusion was that at least a
few of the characteristics of his grandfather had been passed down to
Dan. It meant that possibly, if time remained, he would not turn out
such a weakling, after all. Of course his courage, his nerve, had yet to
be tested; but the fact remained that long generations of frontiersmen
ancestors had left this influence upon him. The wild was calling to him,
wakening instincts long smothered in cities, but sure and true as ever.
It was the beginning of regeneration. Voices of the long past were
speaking to him, and the Failings once more had begun to run true to
form. Inherited tendencies were in a moment changing this weak, diseased
youth into a frontiersman and wilderness inhabitant such as his
ancestors had been before him.
But before ever Lennox had a chance to think all around the subject, to
actually convince himself that Dan really was a throwback and recurrence
of type, there ensued on that gaunt ridge a curious adventure. The test
of nerve and courage was nearer than either of them had guessed.
They were slipping along over the pine needles, their eyes intent on the
trail ahead. And then Lennox saw a curious thing. He beheld Dan suddenly
stop in the trail and turn his eyes towards a heavy thicket that lay
perhaps one hundred yards to their right. For an instant he looked
almost like a wild creature himself. His head was lowered, as if he were
listening. His muscles were set and ready.
Lennox had prided himself that he had retained all the powers of his
five senses, and that few men in the mountains had keener ears than he.
Yet it was truth that at first he only knew the silence, and the stir
and pulse of his own blood. He assumed then that Dan was watching
something that from his position, twenty feet behind, he could not see.
He tried to probe the thickets with his eyes.
Then Dan whispered. Ever so soft a sound, but yet distinct in the
silence. "There's something living in that thicket."
Then Lennox heard it too. As they stood still, the sound became ever
clearer and more pronounced. Some living creature was advancing toward
them; and twigs were cracking beneath its feet. The sounds were rather
subdued, and yet, as the animal approached, both of them instinctively
knew that they were extremely loud for the usual footsteps of any of the
wild creatures.
"What is it?" Dan asked quietly.
Lennox was so intrigued by the sounds that he was not even observant of
the peculiar, subdued quality in Dan's voice. Otherwise, he would have
wondered at it. "I'm free to confess I don't know," he said. "It's
booming right towards us, like most animals don't care to do. Of course
it may be a human being. You must watch out for that."
They waited. The sound ended. They stood straining for a long moment
without speech.
"That was the dumdest thing!" Lennox went on. "Of course it might have
been a bear--you never know what they're going to do. It might have got
sight of us and turned off. But I can't believe that it was just a
deer--"
But then his words chopped squarely off in his throat. The plodding
advance commenced again. And the next instant a gray form revealed
itself at the edge of the thicket.
It was Graycoat, half-blind with his madness, and desperate in his
agony.
There was no more deadly thing in all the hills than he. Even the bite
of a rattlesnake would have been welcomed beside his. He stood a long
instant, and all his instincts and reflexes that would have ordinarily
made him flee in abject terror were thwarted and twisted by the fever of
his madness. He stared a moment at the two figures, and his red eyes
could not interpret them. They were simply foes, for it was true that
when this racking agony was upon him, even lifeless trees seemed foes
sometimes. He seemed eerie and unreal as he gazed at them out of his
burning eyes; and the white foam gathered at his fangs. And then, wholly
without warning, he charged down at them.
He came with unbelievable speed. The elder Lennox cried once in warning
and cursed himself for venturing forth on the ridge without a gun. He
was fully twenty feet distant from Dan; yet he saw in an instant his
only course. This was no time to trust their lives to the marksmanship
of an amateur. He sprang towards Dan, intending to wrench the weapon
from his hand.
But he didn't achieve his purpose. At the first step his foot caught in
a projecting root, and he was shot to his face on the trail. But a long
life in the wilderness had developed Lennox's reflexes to an abnormal
degree; many crises had taught him muscle and nerve control; and only
for a fraction of an instant, a period of time that few instruments are
fine enough to measure, did he lie supinely upon the ground. He rolled
on, into a position of defense. But he knew now he could not reach the
younger man before the mad coyote would be upon them. The matter was out
of his hands. Everything depended on the aim and self-control of the
tenderfoot.
And at the same instant he wondered, so intensely that all other mental
processes were subjugated to it, why he had not heard Dan shoot.
He looked up, and the whole weird picture was thrown upon the retina of
his eyes. The coyote was still racing straight toward Dan, a gray demon
that in his madness was more terrible than any charging bear or elk. For
there is an element of horror about the insane, whether beasts or men,
that cannot be denied. Both men felt it, with a chill that seemed to
penetrate clear to their hearts. The eyes flamed, the white fangs of
Graycoat caught the sunlight. And Dan stood erect in his path, his rifle
half raised to his shoulder; and even in that first frenzied instant in
which Lennox looked at him, he saw there was a strange impassiveness, a
singular imperturbability on his face.
"Shoot, man!" Lennox shouted. "What are you waiting for?"
But Dan didn't shoot. His hand whipped to his face, and he snatched off
his thick-lensed glasses. The eyes that were revealed were narrow and
deeply intent. And by now, the frenzied coyote was not fifty feet
distant.
All that had occurred since the animal charged had possibly taken five
seconds. Sometimes five seconds is just a breath; but as Lennox waited
for Dan to shoot, it seemed like a period wholly without limit. He
wondered if the younger man had fallen into that strange paralysis that
a great terror sometimes imbues. "Shoot!" he screamed again.
But it is doubtful if Dan even heard his shout. At that instant his gun
slid into place, his head lowered, his eyes seemed to burn along the
glittering barrel. His finger pressed back against the trigger, and the
roar of the report rocked through the summer air.
The gun was of large caliber; and no living creature could stand against
the furious, shocking power of the great bullet. The lead went straight
home, full through the neck and slanting down through the breast, and
the coyote recoiled as if an irresistible hand had smitten him. It is
doubtful if there was even a muscular quiver after Graycoat struck the
ground, not twenty feet from where Dan stood. And the rifle report
echoed back to find only silence.
Lennox got up off the ground and moved over toward the dead coyote. He
looked a long time at the gray body. And then he stepped back to where
Dan waited on the trail.
"I take it all back," he said simply.
"You take what back?"
"What I thought about you--that the Failing line had gone to the dogs.
I'll never call you a tenderfoot again."
"You are very kind," Dan answered. He looked rather tired, but was
wholly unshaken. For an instant Lennox looked at his eyes and his steady
hands.
"But tell me one thing," Lennox asked. "I saw the way you looked down
the barrel. I could see how firm you held the rifle--the way you kept
your head. And that is all like your grandfather. But why, when you had
a repeating rifle, did you wait so long to shoot?"
"I just had one cartridge in my gun. I fired nine times back at the
trees and only re-loaded once. I didn't think of it until the coyote
charged."
Lennox's answer was the last thing in the world to be expected. He
opened his straight mouth and uttered a great, boyish yell of joy. His
eyes seemed to light. It is a phenomenon that is ever so much oftener
imagined than really seen; but the sudden, elated sparkle that came in
those gray orbs was past denial. The eyes of the two men met, and Lennox
shook him by the shoulder.
"You're not Dan Failing's grandson--you're Dan Failing himself!" he
shouted. "No one but him would have had the self-control to wait till
the game was almost on top of him--no one but him would have kept his
head in a time like this. You're Dan Failing himself, I tell you, come
back to earth. Grandson nothing! You're a throwback, and now you've got
those glasses off, I can see his eyes looking right out of yours. Step
on 'em, Dan. You'll never need 'em again. And give up that idea of dying
in four months right now; I'm going to make you live. We'll fight that
disease to a finish--and win!"
And that is the way that Dan Failing came into his heritage in the land
of his own people, and in which a new spirit was born in him to
fight--and win--and live.