One day the Cub lay on his favorite rock, hidden by a low-sweeping evergreen bough, when he heard shrieks and outcries. Peering over the edge, he saw that in the edge of the woods below, where some women and children were picking up nuts the men had shaken down for them, something was happening. Half a dozen fierce men had rushed upon them and caught up one of the children and run away, so quickly that by the time the fathers and brothers got there no one could say which way they had gone. They joined some others hidden in the woods, and came straight past the rock where the Cub was watching. They were going to keep the child until they got what they wanted. He could hear them talking. The biggest man had the child on his shoulder. Her little face, as he got a glimpse of it, was very white, but she did not cry out.
The boy rose and followed them with his wolf at his heels. He knew a spring some distance above, where he thought they would be likely to stop for a drink. They did. They were far enough away by this time not to fear pursuit, and they had passed a rocky place where they could hold the narrow trail against many times [pg 78]their number. But long before the men could get up there they would have gone on.
The Cub crept up, inch by inch, until he was within a few feet of the savage, careless group by the spring, and behind them, on a bank about six feet high. Only the child was facing him. He showed himself for an instant, and laid a finger on his lips, and beckoned. She struggled free from the man who was holding her, striking at him with her little hands, and he laughed and let her go. Even if she tried to run away, they would catch her. But she only staggered unsteadily toward the bank, as if to gather some bright berries there.
The instant she was clear of the group two figures hurled themselves through the air,—a man and a wolf, or so it seemed in the moment or so before the thing was over. There was a snarling, growling, breathless struggle, and then the two strange figures were gone, and so was the child, and the bandits were nursing half a dozen wolf bites and various cuts on their shoulders and arms. Some they had given each other in the confusion, and some were from the long, keen knife the Cub had ready when he leaped among them.
The lad went straight down the mountainside with his wolf at his heels and the child on his [pg 79]shoulder, and came out on the path that led upward just as the men from the village were coming up. He set down the child, and with a cry of delight she rushed into the arms of her father. A spear hurtled through the air from the hasty hand of one of the men, who had caught a glimpse of a brown shoulder and a sheepskin tunic. The Cub disappeared. He was rather disgusted. If that was the way that the villagers repaid a kindness—
From his rock he watched them returning with the child, all talking at once. It seemed to him a great deal of talk about what could not [pg 80]be helped by talking. He called Pincho, and only silence answered. He slid off the rock and retraced his steps. When he reached the place where he had set down little Emilia, he found the body of his pet, quite dead, with a spear wound straight through the heart. Then he remembered that in the flash of time when the spear was hurled, Pincho had sprung at the man. He had taken the death wound meant for his master.
Pero never saw the boy with the wolf again. When he heard Emilia’s story of her rescue, he was inclined to think that they were gods after all,—Mars himself, for all any one could say. But the Cub, feeling much older, was far away, and it was long before he returned to that countryside.