Before he had gone two miles, he came out upon an open country of fields, and pastures, and farmyards, and little thickets. Straight on he galloped, through the gardens and the farmyards as well as the open fields. In the pastures the cattle, roused by the glare in the sky, stamped and snorted at him as he passed, and now and then a man’s voice yelled at him angrily as his long form tore through flowerbeds or trellised vines. He had no idea of avoiding the farmhouses, for he had at first no fear of men; but at length an alert farmer got a long shot at him with a fowling-piece, and two or three small leaden pellets caught him in the hind quarters. They did not go deep enough to do him serious harm, but they hurt enough to teach him that men were dangerous. Thereupon he swerved from the uncompromising straight line of his flight, and made for the waste places. When the light of the fire had quite died out behind him, the first of the dawn was creeping up the sky; and by this time he had come to a barren region of low thickets, ragged woods, and rocks thrusting up through a meagre, whitish soil. 249
Till the sun was some hours high Lone Wolf pressed on, his terror of the fire now lost in a sense of delighted freedom. By this time he was growing hungry, and for an instant the impulse seized him to turn back and seek his master. But no, that way lay the scorching of the flames. Instead of turning, he ran on all the faster. Suddenly a rabbit bounded up, almost beneath his nose. Hitherto he had never tasted living prey, but with a sure instinct he sprang after the rabbit. To his fierce disappointment, however, the nimble little beast was so inconsiderate as to take refuge in a dense bramble thicket which he could not penetrate. His muzzle, smarting and tender from the fire, could not endure the harsh prickles, so after prowling about the thicket for a half-hour in the wistful hope that the rabbit might come out, he resumed his journey. He had no idea, of course, where he wanted to go, but he felt that there must be a place somewhere where there were plenty of rabbits and no bramble thickets.
Late in the afternoon he came upon the fringes of a settlement, which he skirted with caution. In a remote pasture field, among rough hillocks and gnarled, fire-scarred stumps, he ran suddenly into a flock of sheep. For 250 a moment he was puzzled at the sight, but the prompt flight of the startled animals suggested pursuit. In a moment he had borne down the hindermost. To reach for its throat was a sure instinct, and he feasted, with a growing zest of savagery, upon the hot flesh. Before he realized it, he was dragging the substantial remnant of his meal to a place of hiding under an overhanging rock. Then, well content with himself, he crept into a dark thicket and slept for several hours.
When he awoke, a new-risen moon was shining, with something in her light which half bewildered him, half stung him to uncomprehended desires. Skulking to the crest of a naked knoll, he saw the landscape spread out all around him, with the few twinkling lights of the straggling village below the slopes of the pasture. But not for lights, or for villages, or for men was his concern. Sitting up very straight on his gaunt haunches, he stretched his muzzle toward the taunting moon, and began to sound that long, dreadful gathering cry of his race.
It was an unknown or a long-forgotten voice in those neighborhoods, but none who heard it needed to have it explained. In half a minute every dog in the settlement was howling, 251 barking, or yelping, in rage or fear. To Lone Wolf all this clamor was as nothing. He paid no more attention to it than as if it had been the twittering of sparrows. Then doors opened, and lights flashed as men came out to see what was the matter. Clearly visible, silhouetted against the low moon, Lone Wolf kept up his sinister chant to the unseen. But presently, out of the corner of his eye, he noted half a dozen men approaching up the pasture, with the noisy dogs at their heels. Men! That was different! Could it be that they wanted him? All at once he experienced a qualm of conscience, so to speak, about the sheep he had killed. It occurred to him that if sheep belonged to men, there might be trouble ahead. Abruptly he stopped his serenading of the moon, slipped over the crest of the knoll, and made off at a long, tireless gallop which before morning had put leagues between himself and the angry villagers.
After this he gave a wide berth to settlements; and having made his first kill, he suddenly found himself an accomplished hunter. It was as if long-buried memories had sprung all at once to life,—memories, indeed, not of his own but of his ancestors’,—and he knew, all at once, how to stalk the shy wild rabbits, to 252 run down and kill the red deer. The country through which he journeyed was well stocked with game, and he fed abundantly as he went, with no more effort than just enough to give zest to his freedom. In this fashion he kept on for many days, working ever northward just because the wild lands stretched in that direction; and at last he came upon the skirts of a cone-shaped mountain, ragged with ancient forest, rising solitary and supreme out of a measureless expanse of wooded plain. From a jutting shoulder of rock his keen eyes noted but one straggling settlement, groups of scattered clearings, wide apart on the skirts of the great hill. They were too far off to mar the vast seclusion of the height; and Lone Wolf, finding a cave in the rocks that seemed exactly designed for his retreat, went no farther. He felt that he had come into his own domain.
CHAPTER II
The settlers around the skirts of Lost Mountain were puzzled and indignant. For six weeks their indignation had been growing, and the mystery seemed no nearer a solution. Something was slaughtering their sheep—something that knew its business and slaughtered with dreadful efficiency. Several honest dogs fell under suspicion, not because there was anything whatever against their reputations, but simply because they had the misfortune to be big enough and strong enough to kill a sheep if they wanted to, and the brooding backwoods mind, when troubled, will go far on the flimsiest evidence.
Of all the wrathful settlers the most furious was Brace Timmins. Not only had he lost in those six weeks six sheep, but now his dog, a splendid animal, half deerhound and half collie, had been shot on suspicion by a neighbor, on no better grounds, apparently, than his long legs and long killing jaws. Still the slaughtering of the flocks went on with undiminished 254 vigor. And a few days later Brace Timmins avenged his favorite by publicly thrashing his too hasty neighbor in front of the cross-roads store. The neighbor, pounded into exemplary penitence, apologized, and as far as the murdered dog was concerned, the score was wiped clean. But the problem of the sheep killing was no nearer solution. If not Brace Timmins’ dog, as every one made prudent haste to acknowledge, then whose dog was it? The life of every dog in the settlement, if bigger than a wood-chuck, hung by a thread, which might, it seemed, at any moment turn into a halter. Brace Timmins loved dogs; and not wishing that others should suffer the unjust fate which had overtaken his own, he set his whole woodcraft to the discovery of the true culprit.