He struck with all his strength, scarcely in rage but just as a means to an end. He had never fought before, yet the blow came unerringly and with terrific power. There could be only one result to such a blow as that. He dimly heard Fargo grunt—like a beast as it falls below the butcher’s stroke—then saw him reel and fall. He started to swing into the saddle.
It was better, he thought, that this man remain unconscious until he returned. He didn’t forget that he was still shepherd of the flocks and that Fargo was an enemy. Some great test lay before him, and the fewer his foes the better. He leaped down—like a cougar springing from his ambush—and struck once with each fist into the soggy, brutal face.
They were terrific blows, but expedience, rather than cruelty, was the motive behind them. Hugh did not even wonder at himself. He swung lightly on to the horse and lashed it to a gallop.
CHAPTER XVII
These were not wolves. This fact dawned upon Alice Crowson, running her little flock at top speed toward the camp, before ever she saw their savage forms burst forth from the thickets behind and even before she discerned the twitch and leap of their shadows in the distant stretch of moonlit canyon. Only in the starving time of winter had wolves approached with such terrible fearlessness and frenzy. Nor was the cry that long, strange running song of the wolf pack. She knew their breed. They were enormous hounds: such a savage pack as might have started forth from some awful Underworld of fable.
And it would have been better were they wolves. Not for nothing has man waged immemorial centuries of warfare, not only upon wolves but on the great felines as well. They have been taught a wholesome respect for the tall breed that has come to dominate the earth, and much hunger and madness must be upon them before they will dare raise fang or claw against him. But it is not this way with dogs. They have lived among men since the first days of the cave dwellers; they have found men out; they have been willing slaves and faithful servants, and once the impulse comes to attack, there is no ingenerate barrier of instincts to hold them back.
Alice glanced behind, and the Little People that watch with such bright eyes all the dramas of the forest heard her utter an unfamiliar sound. It sprang instinctively to her lips. “Hugh!” she cried to that beetling silence. “Help me, Hugh.” Yet she knew that she cried in vain. She was still more than half a mile from the camp; and Hugh could not hear her, and he could not save.
For the pack had revealed itself. There was a stretch behind her almost bare of underbrush; the great trees laid shadows across it like iron bars across the windows of a cell, and shapeless black shadows were leaping across it. There was a countless number of them, and they seemed to be overtaking her with heart-breaking rapidity. Instantly she knew that she could not hope to reach the camp before they would be upon her.
She must not permit herself to lag behind. Her place was with the sheep. The savage hounds were on their track, and her one hope was that her presence, with the aid of the pistol, might hold them off until she could head the helpless band into the camp. She tried to blind her eyes to another, more dreadful, possibility. This was no time to admit it into her thoughts. But surely, surely they would not attack her. Dogs always barked and menaced, but they rarely really attacked human beings. Yet the thought kept creeping back, haunting her, filling her—in those little seconds of stress in which the pack leaped nearer—with an unnamable horror. It couldn’t be that they were so frantic that they would tear her down in order to get at their prey. Fate did not have that in store for her at least,—their cruel fangs at her tender flesh, their leaping, frenzied bodies lingering just an instant beside her, then racing on after the terrified sheep.
It occurred to her that there might be time, even yet, to spring up a tree and leave the sheep to their fate. Yet was not she the shepherdess, the guardian of the flock? But she saw the issue clearly, and her eyes glanced about for some tree with branches low enough where she could climb to safety. But already that chance was lost. She was in a region of open forest—great trees standing one by one with branches starting fully fifty feet above ground—and even now the dogs were at her heels.