Only a gossoon of the hills could have gone up the face of the rock as Padraig did, and he presently found himself on a ledge about twenty feet up, above the quagmire. It was less than a foot wide at first, but widened toward the left, and seedling trees had formed a growth which appeared to merge into the densely wooded hill beyond. He pushed his way along this insecure foothold until the trees began to thin as if there were an open space beyond. Then directly in front of him sounded the unmistakable snarl of a wolf.
There was no time to think. He braced himself against the cliff, and grasping his pike, awaited the assault of the beast. Either he or the wolf, or both together, would be tumbled into the slough. But there followed only a guttural word of command in Irish. Then a voice that he knew called, “Padraig, my son, is that you?”
Nothing in heaven or earth could have stopped Padraig then. He broke through the thicket into the clearing, and halted, breathless and amazed.
Brother Basil, unharmed and serene, sat upon a rude wooden bench at the entrance of a cave, and around him were gathered wolves and wolf-like human beings clad in wolf-pelts. One, who seemed the leader, stood erect, broad-shouldered and muscular, in a mantle made of the hide of a giant wolf, the head shaped into a helmet to be drawn mask-like down over the face. A fire smoldered in the cave's black throat, and meat—mutton-bones—roasted on a sharpened stake thrust into a crevice of the rock. An old woman, wasted and wrinkled, wrapped in a yellow-gray wolfskin lined with lamb's wool, lay on a pile of leaves near the fire, and savage heads emerging from the undergrowth might have been those of wolves, or of men in the guise of wolves.
In the craziest legends of the chronicles there was no such scene as this. For one whirling moment Padraig believed everything he had heard or read of werewolf or of loup-garou. In the name of Saint Kevin, what could this be but the very lair of the beast? Yet Brother Basil showed neither fear nor aversion. Padraig knelt to kiss the outheld hand.
“Father,” he faltered, “they sent me to find you.”
“It is well that you have come,” the monk answered with his untroubled smile, “you and no one else. I stumbled upon this place,—really stumbled, for a stone rolled under my foot,—and here I had to stay until this troublesome lame knee would permit me to walk.”
“That is not the whole of it,” growled the leader of the wolf-people. “Our dogs winded him, and had he been like any other monk who ever told beads he would have been pulled down. But he spoke to them in our own tongue, and my mother, hearing his voice, would have him come to her, for she had seen no priest for many years. When he heard our story he said that he would be our friend. And so he would, I believe, had we been what the foolish have thought us.”
“Then,” stammered Padraig, “it is not true that—that—”
“That the loup-garou is abroad in the land?” finished Brother Basil with delicate scorn. “No. Wolves are wolves, and men are men,—and some men are thieves.”