II

Dan felt that at last the wilderness itself was speaking to him. He had

waited a long time to hear its voice. His thought went back to the wise

men of the ancient world, waiting to hear the riddle of the universe

from the lips of the Sphinx, and how he himself--more in his unconscious

self, rather than conscious--had sought the eternal riddle of the

wilderness. It had seemed to him that if once he could make it speak, if

he could make it break for one instant its great, brooding silence, that

the whole mystery and meaning of life would be in a measure revealed. He

had asked questions--never in the form of words but only ineffable

yearnings of his soul--and at last it had responded. The strange rising

and falling song was its own voice, the articulation of the very heart

and soul of the wilderness.

And because it was, it was also the song of life itself,--life in the

raw, life as it is when all the superficialities that blunt the vision

had been struck away. Dan had known that it would be thus. It brought

strange pictures to his mind. He saw the winter snows, the spirits of

Cold and Famine walking over them. He saw Fear in many guises--in the

forest fire, in the landslide, in the lightning cleaving the sky. In the

song were centered and made clear all the many lesser voices with which

the forest had spoken to him these two months and which he had but dimly

understood,--the passion, the exultation, the blood-lust, the strength,

the cruelty, the remorseless, unceasing struggle for existence that

makes the wilderness an eternal battle ground. But over it all was

sadness. He couldn't doubt that. He heard it all too plainly. The wild

was revealed to him as it never had been before.

"It's the wolf pack," Lennox told him softly. "As long as I have been in

the mountains, it always hits me the same. The wolves have just joined

together for the fall rutting. There's not another song like it in the

whole world."

Dan could readily believe it. The two men sat still a long time, hoping

that they might hear the song again. And then they got up and moved

across the cleared field to the ridge beyond. The silence closed deeper

around them.

"Then it means the end of the summer?" Dan asked.

"In a way, but yet we don't count the summer ended until the rains

break. Heavens, I wish they would start! I've never seen the hills so

dry, and I'm afraid that either Bert Cranston or some of his friends

will decide it's time to make a little money fighting forest fires. Dan,

I'm suspicious of that gang. I believe they've got a regular arson ring,

maybe with unscrupulous stockmen behind them, and perhaps just a

penny-winning deal of their own. I suppose you know about Landy

Hildreth,--how he's promised to turn State's evidence that will send

about a dozen of these vipers to the penitentiary?"

"Snowbird told me something about it."

"He's got a cabin over toward the marshes, and it has come to me that

he's going to start to-morrow, or maybe has already started to-day, down

into the valley to give his evidence. Of course, that is deeply

confidential between you and me. If the gang knew about it, he'd never

get through the thickets alive."

But Dan was hardly listening. His attention was caught by the hushed,

intermittent sounds that are always to be heard, if one listens keenly

enough, in the wilderness at night. "I wish the pack would sound again,"

he said. "I suppose it was hunting."

"Of course. And there is no living thing in these woods that can stand

against a wolf pack in its full strength."

"Except man, of course."

"A strong man, with an accurate rifle, of course, and except possibly in

the starving times in winter he'd never have to fight them. All the

beasts of prey are out to-night. You see, Dan, when the moon shines, the

deer feed at night instead of in the twilights and the dawn. And of

course the wolves and the cougars hunt the deer. It may be that they are

running cattle, or even sheep."

But Dan's imagination was afire. He wasn't content yet. "They couldn't

be--hunting man?" he asked.

"No. If it was midwinter and the pack was starving, we'd have to listen

better. It always looked to me as if the wild creatures had a law

against killing men, just as humans have. They've learned it doesn't

pay--something the wolves and bear of Europe and Asia haven't found out.

The naturalists say that the reason is rather simple--that the European

peasant, his soul scared out of him by the government he lived under,

has always fled from wild beasts. They were tillers of the soil, and

they carried hoes instead of guns. They never put the fear of God into

the animals and as a result there are quite a number of true stories

about tigers and wolves that aren't pleasant to listen to. But our own

frontiersmen were not men to stand any nonsense from wolves or cougars.

They had guns, and they knew how to use them. And they were preceded by

as brave and as warlike a race as ever lived on the earth--armed with

bows and arrows. Any animal that hunted men was immediately killed, and

the rest found out it didn't pay."

"Just as human beings have found out the same thing--that it doesn't pay

to hunt their fellow men. The laws of life as well as the laws of

nations are against it."

But the words sounded weak and dim under the weight of the throbbing

darkness; and Dan couldn't get away from the idea that the codes of life

by which most men lived were forgotten quickly in the shadows of the

pines. Even as he spoke, man was hunting man on the distant ridge where

Whisperfoot had howled.

* * * * *

Bert Cranston, head of the arson ring that operated on the Umpqua

Divide, was not only beyond the pale in regard to the laws of the

valleys, but he could have learned valuable lessons from the beasts in

regard to keeping the laws of the hills. The forest creatures do not

hunt their own species, nor do they normally hunt men. The moon looked

down to find Bert Cranston waiting on a certain trail that wound down to

the settlements, his rifle loaded and ready for another kind of game

than deer or wolf. He was waiting for Landy Hildreth; and the greeting

he had for him was to destroy all chances of the prosecuting attorney in

the valley below learning certain names that he particularly wanted to

know.

There is always a quality of unreality about a moonlit scene. Just what

causes it isn't easy to explain, unless the soft blend of light and

shadow entirely destroys the perspective. Old ruins will sometimes seem

like great, misty ghosts of long-dead cities; trees will turn to silver;

phantoms will gather in family groups under the cliffs; plain hills and

valleys will become, in an instant, the misty vales of Fairyland. The

scene on that distant ridge of the Divide partook of this quality to an

astounding degree; and it would have made a picture no mortal memory

could have possibly forgotten.

There was no breath of wind. The great pines, tall and dark past belief,

stood absolutely motionless, like strange pillars of ebony. The whole

ridge was splotched with patches of moonlight, and the trail, dimming as

the eyes followed it, wound away into the utter darkness. Bert Cranston

knelt in a brush covert, his rifle loaded and ready in his lean, dark

hands.

No wolf that ran the ridges, no cougar that waited on the deer trails

knew a wilder passion, a more terrible blood-lust than he. It showed in

his eyes, narrow and never resting from their watch of the trail; it was

in his posture; and it revealed itself unmistakably in the curl of his

lips. Something like hot steam was in his brain, blurring his sight and

heating his blood.

The pine needles hung wholly motionless above his head; but yet the dead

leaves on which he knelt crinkled and rustled under him. Only the

keenest ear could have heard the sound; and possibly in his madness,

Cranston himself was not aware of it. And one would have wondered a long

time as to what caused it. It was simply that he was shivering all over

with hate and fury.

A twig cracked, far on the ridge above him. He leaned forward, peering,

and the moonlight showed his face in unsparing detail. It revealed the

deep lines, the terrible, drawn lips, the ugly hair long over the dark

ears. His strong hands tightened upon the breech of the rifle. His wiry

figure grew tense.

Of course it wouldn't do to let his prey come too close. Landy Hildreth

was a good shot too, young as Cranston, and of equal strength; and no

sporting chance could be taken in this hunting. Cranston had no

intention of giving his enemy even the slightest chance to defend

himself. If Hildreth got down into the valley, his testimony would make

short work of the arson ring. He had the goods; he had been a member of

the disreputable crowd himself.

The man's steps were quite distinct by now. Cranston heard him fighting

his way through the brush thickets, and once a flock of grouse,

frightened from their perches by the approaching figure, flew down the

trail in front. Cranston pressed back the hammer of his rifle. The click

sounded loud in the silence. He had grown tense and still, and the

leaves no longer rustled.

His eyes were intent on a little clearing, possibly one hundred yards up

the trail. The trail itself went straight through it. And in an instant

more, Hildreth pushed through the buckbrush and stood revealed in the

moonlight.

If there is one quality that means success in the mountains it is

constant, unceasing self-control. Cranston thought that he had it. He

had known the hard schools of the hills; and he thought no circumstance

could break the rigid discipline in which his mind and nerves held his

muscles. But perhaps he had waited too long for Hildreth to come; and

the strain had told on him. He had sworn to take no false steps; that

every motion he made should be cool and sure. He didn't want to attract

Hildreth's attention by any sudden movement. All must be cautious and

stealthy. But in spite of all these good resolutions, Cranston's gun

simply leaped to his shoulder in one convulsive motion at the first

glimpse of his enemy as he emerged into the moonlight.

The end of the barrel struck a branch of the shrubbery as it went up. It

was only a soft sound; but in the utter silence it traveled far. But a

noise in the brush might not have been enough in itself to alarm

Hildreth. A deer springing up in the trail, or even a lesser creature,

might make as pronounced a sound. It was true that even unaccompanied by

any other suspicious circumstances, the man would have become instantly

alert and watchful; but it was extremely doubtful that his muscular

reaction would have been the same. But the gun barrel caught the

moonlight as it leaped, and Hildreth saw its glint in the darkness.

It was only a flash. But yet there is no other object in the material

world that glints exactly like a gun barrel in the light. It has a look

all its own. It is even more distinctive in the sunlight, and now and

again men have owed their lives to a momentary glitter across a

half-mile of forest. Of course the ordinary, peaceful, God-fearing man,

walking down a trail at night, likely would not have given the gleam

more than an instant's thought, a momentary breathlessness in which the

throat closes and the muscles set; and it is more than probable that the

sleeping senses would not have interpreted it at all. But Hildreth was

looking for trouble. He had dreaded this long walk to the settlements

more than any experience of his life. He didn't know why the letter he

had written, asking for an armed escort down to the courts, had not

brought results. But it was wholly possible that Cranston would have

answered this question for him. This same letter had fallen into a

certain soiled, deadly pair of hands which was the last place in the

world that Hildreth would have chosen, and it had been all the evidence

that was needed, at the meeting of the ring the night before, to adjudge

Hildreth a merciless and immediate end. Hildreth would have preferred to

wait in the hills and possibly to write another letter, but a chill that

kept growing at his finger tips forbade it. And all these things

combined to stretch his nerves almost to the breaking point as he stole

along the moonlit trail under the pines.

A moment before the rush and whir of the grouse flock had dried the

roof of his mouth with terror. The tall trees appalled him, the shadows

fell upon his spirit. And when he heard this final sound, when he saw

the glint that might so easily have been a gun-barrel, his nerves and

muscles reacted at once. Not even a fraction of a second intervened. His

gun flashed up, just as a small-game shooter hurls his weapon when a

mallard glints above the decoys, and a little, angry cylinder of flame

darted, as a snake's head darts, from the muzzle.

Hildreth didn't take aim. There wasn't time. The report roared in the

darkness; the bullet sang harmlessly and thudded into the earth; and

both of them were the last things in the world that Cranston had

expected. And they were not a moment too soon. Even at that instant, his

finger was closing down upon the trigger, Hildreth standing clear and

revealed through the sights. The nervous response that few men in the

world would be self-disciplined enough to prevent occurred at the same

instant that he pressed the trigger. His own fire answered, so near to

the other that both of them sounded as one report.

Most hunters can usually tell, even if they cannot see their game fall,

whether they have hit or missed. This was one of the few times in his

life that Cranston could not have told. He knew that as his finger

pressed he had held as accurate a "bead" as at any time in his life. He

did not know still another circumstance,--that in the moonlight he had

overestimated the distance to the clearing, and instead of one hundreds

yards it was scarcely fifty. He had held rather high. And he looked up,

unknowing whether he had succeeded or whether he was face to face with

the prospect of a duel to the death in the darkness.

And all he saw was Hildreth, rocking back and forth in the moonlight,--a

strange picture that he was never entirely to forget. It was a motion

that no man could pretend. And he knew he had not missed.

He waited till he saw the form of his enemy rock down, face half-buried

in the pine needles. It never even occurred to him to approach to see if

he had made a clean kill. He had held on the breast and he had a world

of confidence in his great, shocking, big-game rifle. Besides, the rifle

fire might attract some hunter in the hills; and there would be time in

the morning to return to the body and make certain little investigations

that he had in mind. And running back down the trail, he missed the

sight of Hildreth dragging his wounded body, like an injured hare, into

the shelter of the thickets.