“If you don’t know,” retorted Garry, nettled at the inhospitable tone, so rare in that region of roughly eager hospitality, “if you don’t know, then it’s a cinch he didn’t come here. Your herders would have reported him, before now. He—”
“Who?” insisted Fenno, trying to stem the flood of angry garrulity and to glean the facts. “Who’s—?”
“The Killer,” replied Garry. “First one that’s hit the Dos Hermanos valley, since—”
“Killer?” babbled Royce Mack, aghast. “Good Lord, man!”
He and Joel stared at the riders and then at each other, in slack-jawed dismay. Well did they understand, now, the grim look on the faces of Garry and his foreman. Well did they realize what was implied to all sheepmen by that sinister word, “Killer.”
From time to time, throughout the annals of Western shepherding, flocks have been devastated by some predatory dog or wolf; whose murders have been wrought on a wholesale basis and have piled up a cash loss of many thousands of dollars, before he could be destroyed. Not a mere mischievous mongrel, which perhaps managed to kill a sheep or two and then was tracked down and shot; but a genuine Killer.
Such a Killer was the famed “Custer wolf” of the Black Hills country, whose depredations cost more than $25,000 in slaughtered livestock, and whose killing, by Harry Williams, in November, 1920, was greeted by a local celebration which eclipsed that of Armistice Day. Such a Killer was the dread “black greyhound” of Northern California, with his hideous toll of slain and mangled young cattle and sheep.
Killers seem to be inspired by a devilish ingenuity which for a time gives them charmed lives and renders useless the cleverest efforts of ranchers and professional hunters to track and slay them. Tidings that such dog or wolf has begun operations in any particular region is cause for tenfold more alarm than would be the news of a smallpox epidemic. For it means grave loss to the community and to all the community’s stockmen.
Small wonder that Royce and Joel gaped blankly at each other, on hearing Garry’s announcement! Mack was the first to recover his tongue.
“Every time a lamb is missing or a wether gets gouged on a barbed wire,” he said, with an effort at banter, “the yell of ‘Killer’ goes up. Most likely this is—”