CHAPTER XVII
THE HOWL OF STRANGE DOGS
Sleep trifled with him—beckoned him on, only to elude him maddeningly. He spoke sternly to himself in language favoured by the cowboys. The fact was that he was frightened, and he knew it. A sense of impending events held his body tense and his ears strained. Reasoning with himself that it was only the result of the night's rapid sequence of mysterious incidents did not calm him.
For minutes he strained away to the west after those strange hoof beats, only to relax, disgusted at himself for yielding to the imaginings of his tingling nerves.
From the direction of the bunk-house he imagined he could hear at intervals Imp's muffled bark—and then the gripping silences of the most silent places in the world.
After a long time the coyotes gave tongue again in their long, shuddering yaps. Strange how reassuring they were that night—that hideous yelping that always before made him shiver! Stamford sank into a sense of momentary security. He slept.
He wakened to find himself seated upright in bed, trembling, straining with eyes and ears. Something terrible was happening outside. Yet there was not a sound. In a flash he knew. His sensitised ears were still echoing with the comforting yelps of the coyotes, but at the moment it was as silent as if not another force but himself existed in all the world. He knew that he had wakened at the moment when a great hand seemed to have gripped a thousand wild throats to silence. A hundred times before he had heard the same uncanny burst of silence. But now——
On his elbow he rested, scarcely breathing.
Outside—in the house—even down in the corrals where several restless bronchos always hitherto in these startling moments of peace had spoken audibly of life, was a breathlessness as strained as his own. The world was waiting—waiting.
Suddenly into the hush burst a solitary howl, a shattering roar that seemed to mass all the wild things of the prairie behind one tremendous throat.
Stamford's blood ran tingling to his scalp. Every muscle was tense against the inclination to shut the awful thing from his ears. And as the howl pulsed through the listening night, a second joined it. Taking a deep breath, Stamford bounded from the bed.