And at that instant his words were drowned out. A strange, formidable cry reached them from behind the house: a long, far-carrying chorus of savage voices. It rang shockingly loud in the silent darkness. It was a symphony of prolonged, deep bays,—a sound as terrifying and menacing as any voice of the wilderness. And an evil glitter came into Fargo’s eyes.
The explosion of sound, blaring out so suddenly in the stillness, had startled José; but he caught himself at once. The cry ceased, the stillness fell again. “Your pack of bear dogs!” he exclaimed.
“Yes. It was as if they heard us talkin’ about sheep. It’s like they was tryin’ to tell us what to do.”
It was true. It might have been the voice of an evil genius, prompting their vicious designs. Fargo was a superstitious man, and now he was tingling all over with hatred and malice, inspired to the depths of his wicked being by the cry in the darkness.
“Yes,” he whispered. “My pack of bear dogs—ten of ’em, savage as wolves—and not to be afraid of no wounded shepherd dog, and tearin’ to pieces any one that tries to stop ’em. They’ve told us how to solve our problem. And I don’t see why I didn’t think of ’em before.”
CHAPTER XIV
It didn’t take Fargo long to perfect his plans. As the dawn emerged he talked them over with the Mexican, José, and the latter was ready with any little suggestions that did not occur to his chief. And the gray, soft, mysterious light of early morning came into that conference—through the stained and cobwebbed windowpane—and found a darkness it could not alleviate.
As they talked, the very atmosphere of the room seemed to change. It was tense, poignant as if with the remembered lusts and passions of an earlier, more savage world. The little sounds of a room in which two men talk together—the stir of moving bodies, the creak of furniture, the soft whisper of easy breathing seemed lacking here. Both were motionless as two serpents that lay in their sunbaths on their ledges, and thus an insidious stillness dropped down in the little intervals between their sentences.
The almost total absence of motion on the part of those two conspirators could not have been ignored. It implied only one thing: that their thoughts were so commanding and engrossing that even the almost unconscious movements of the body were suspended. What motion there was, was mostly only the deepening of the lines on their dark faces.
This tenseness, this silence, these submerged passions pointed to but one end. And the crime would not be outside the pale of the laws of man alone, but the basic laws of the forest as well. The feast of death was to take place after all,—the same delight of which Broken Fang, the puma, was even then dreaming beside the sheep camp on the far headwaters of Silver Creek. But men, not wild beasts, were to be the debauchers.