Wolf Breed

by Jackson Gregory

One thing only did Drennen do which excited mild interest, though the reason for the act was naturally misunderstood. He went to Joe and bought from him two heavy revolvers. Drennen had never been a gun man, had ever relied upon his own hands in time of trouble. But now, Joe figured the matter out, he had money and he meant to guard against a hold-up.

Entire lack of haste was the only thing remarkable about David Drennen to-day and through the days which followed. There was no hesitation, no doubt, no being torn two ways. He had made up his mind what he was going to do. It was settled and not to be reconsidered. But he would not hurry. The very coolness with which his purpose was taken steadied him to a strange deliberateness. He knew that it was folly to expect to come up with Ygerne and the men with her immediately. It would take time; they had fled hastily and they were in a country where pursuit was necessarily slow. Was that not the reason why such people came here? And he told himself grimly that it was an equal folly to desire to come upon them too soon. The punishment he would mete out would be the harder if their flight had seemed crowned with security.

Upon the second day he rode in widening circles about MacLeod's Settlement. He hardly hoped to pick up a trail here where questing hundreds in search of his gold had cut the soft spring ground into a jumble of indecipherable tracks. But, beginning his own quest with a painstaking thoroughness which omitted no chance however remote, he spent the day in seeking.

At night he came again into camp. He saw to the Major's wants before his own. He ate his meal at Joe's and having passed no word with any man came back to his dugout.

The supreme blow which his destiny could give him had been smitten relentlessly. He had received it like the slave who has been beaten so many times that he no longer cries out or strikes back prematurely. Like the tortured bond-man who makes no useless protest but hides in his bosom the knife which one day he will plunge into his master's throat, Drennen merely bided his time.

He saw no good in a world which had had no good to offer him. He no longer looked for the light. New shoots of faith, bursting upward under Ygerne's influence from the dry roots of the old, were in an instant shrivelled and killed. He came to see that in an old world there was no basic law but that law which had held from the first day in the new world. There was no good; bad was only a term coined for fools by other fools. Each man had his life given to him, and he could do with it as he saw fit. Each wild thing in the depths of the North Woods had its life given to it to do with as it saw fit. Each created being, were it not maudlin, strove for itself alone. It took its own food where it could get it, rending it with bared teeth and bloody jaws from the weaker creature that had preyed upon a still weaker. It made its lair where it chose, crushing under its careless body those other still lesser things which had not sense enough or the opportunity to slip out from under it. Love, as man looked upon it or pretended to look upon it, was no real emotion but a poetical illusion. Nor was it so much as truly poetical, since poetry is truth and this thing was a lie. There was no love but the old, primal love of life, a blind, unreasoning instinct. He did not love Ygerne; he had never loved Ygerne because, in the nature of nature, there could be no such thing as such a love.

But hatred was another matter. That was nature. A man, with all of his bluster, cannot get away from nature. Don't the winters freeze and kill him? Doesn't water drown him, fire burn him? Love had no place in nature; hatred was a part of the one law, the primal law. The wolf kills the rabbit in hot rage; the black ant tears down the soft-bodied caterpillar not so much in hunger as in wrath.

The lower order of created beings seemed to Drennen to be the truly higher order. For they did not philosophise; they killed their prey. They did not reason and thus follow a blind goddess; they moved as their swift instincts dictated and made no mistake. Now he did not need to bolster up his purpose with seeking to wander through the thousand lanes of reason's labyrinth; he did not need to seek the fallacies of logic to tell him why he hated Ygerne Bellaire and Marc Lemarc and Sefton and the Mexican. He hated them. There the fact began and ended. One by one he would kill them until he came to Ygerne. And if in her eyes he saw that the terror of death was greater than the terror of the suffering he could inflict upon her living, then he would kill her.

At first he thought only of these four. But after a while in his thoughts there was room for another.… John Harper Drennen, masquerading as Marshall Sothern. Drennen sneered at his old hero. The old man was a fool like so many other fools. He had committed what the world calls a crime and the weight of it had shown upon him. Drennen's sneer was not for the wrong done but for the weakness of allowing suffering to come afterward. The old man had seemed glad, touched almost to tears, when his son had paid off the old score.… And now Drennen's sneer was for himself. Why had he not kept that forty thousand dollars? Money meant power and power was all that he wanted. Power to crush men who would have crushed him had they been able; power to seek his prey where he would and to pull it down.

Ygerne's note he never read the second time. He had had no need to. He burned the paper and washed his hands free of the ashes which he had crumpled in his palm.