The Voice of the Pack Part 5

Then all at once Lennox halted in his tracks, evidently with no other purpose than to study the tall form that now was walking up the trail in front of him. And he uttered a little exclamation of amazement.

"Listen, Dan!" he cried suddenly. "Haven't you ever been in the woods before?"

Dan turned, smiling. "No. What have I done now?"

"What have you done! You're doing something that I never saw a tenderfoot do in my life, before. I've known men to hunt for years--literally years--and not know how to do it. And that is--to place your feet."

"Place my feet? I'm afraid I don't understand."

"I mean--to walk silently. To stalk, d.a.m.n it, Dan! This brush is dry.

It's dry as tinder. A cougar can get over it like so much smoke, and a man who's lived all his life in the hills can usually climb a ridge and not make any more noise than a young avalanche. Just now I had a feeling that I wasn't hearing you walk, and I thought my ears must be going back on me. I stopped to see. You were doing it, Dan. You were stalking--putting down your feet like a cat. It's the hardest thing to learn there is, and you're doing it the first half-hour."

Dan laughed, delighted more than he cared to show. "Well, what of it?"

he asked.

"What of it? That's it--what of it. And what caused it, and all about it. Go on and let me think."

The result of all this thought was at least to hover in the near vicinity of a certain conclusion. That conclusion was that at least a few of the characteristics of his grandfather had been pa.s.sed down to Dan. It meant that possibly, if time remained, he would not turn out such a weakling, after all. Of course his courage, his nerve, had yet to be tested; but the fact remained that long generations of frontiersmen ancestors had left this influence upon him. The wild was calling to him, wakening instincts long smothered in cities, but sure and true as ever.

It was the beginning of regeneration. Voices of the long past were speaking to him, and the Failings once more had begun to run true to form. Inherited tendencies were in a moment changing this weak, diseased youth into a frontiersman and wilderness inhabitant such as his ancestors had been before him.

But before ever Lennox had a chance to think all around the subject, to actually convince himself that Dan really was a throwback and recurrence of type, there ensued on that gaunt ridge a curious adventure. The test of nerve and courage was nearer than either of them had guessed.

They were slipping along over the pine needles, their eyes intent on the trail ahead. And then Lennox saw a curious thing. He beheld Dan suddenly stop in the trail and turn his eyes towards a heavy thicket that lay perhaps one hundred yards to their right. For an instant he looked almost like a wild creature himself. His head was lowered, as if he were listening. His muscles were set and ready.

Lennox had prided himself that he had retained all the powers of his five senses, and that few men in the mountains had keener ears than he.

Yet it was truth that at first he only knew the silence, and the stir and pulse of his own blood. He a.s.sumed then that Dan was watching something that from his position, twenty feet behind, he could not see.

He tried to probe the thickets with his eyes.

Then Dan whispered. Ever so soft a sound, but yet distinct in the silence. "There's something living in that thicket."

Then Lennox heard it too. As they stood still, the sound became ever clearer and more p.r.o.nounced. Some living creature was advancing toward them; and twigs were cracking beneath its feet. The sounds were rather subdued, and yet, as the animal approached, both of them instinctively knew that they were extremely loud for the usual footsteps of any of the wild creatures.

"What is it?" Dan asked quietly.

Lennox was so intrigued by the sounds that he was not even observant of the peculiar, subdued quality in Dan's voice. Otherwise, he would have wondered at it. "I'm free to confess I don't know," he said. "It's booming right towards us, like most animals don't care to do. Of course it may be a human being. You must watch out for that."

They waited. The sound ended. They stood straining for a long moment without speech.

"That was the dumdest thing!" Lennox went on. "Of course it might have been a bear--you never know what they're going to do. It might have got sight of us and turned off. But I can't believe that it was just a deer--"

But then his words chopped squarely off in his throat. The plodding advance commenced again. And the next instant a gray form revealed itself at the edge of the thicket.

It was Graycoat, half-blind with his madness, and desperate in his agony.

There was no more deadly thing in all the hills than he. Even the bite of a rattlesnake would have been welcomed beside his. He stood a long instant, and all his instincts and reflexes that would have ordinarily made him flee in abject terror were thwarted and twisted by the fever of his madness. He stared a moment at the two figures, and his red eyes could not interpret them. They were simply foes, for it was true that when this racking agony was upon him, even lifeless trees seemed foes sometimes. He seemed eerie and unreal as he gazed at them out of his burning eyes; and the white foam gathered at his fangs. And then, wholly without warning, he charged down at them.

He came with unbelievable speed. The elder Lennox cried once in warning and cursed himself for venturing forth on the ridge without a gun. He was fully twenty feet distant from Dan; yet he saw in an instant his only course. This was no time to trust their lives to the marksmanship of an amateur. He sprang towards Dan, intending to wrench the weapon from his hand.

But he didn't achieve his purpose. At the first step his foot caught in a projecting root, and he was shot to his face on the trail. But a long life in the wilderness had developed Lennox's reflexes to an abnormal degree; many crises had taught him muscle and nerve control; and only for a fraction of an instant, a period of time that few instruments are fine enough to measure, did he lie supinely upon the ground. He rolled on, into a position of defense. But he knew now he could not reach the younger man before the mad coyote would be upon them. The matter was out of his hands. Everything depended on the aim and self-control of the tenderfoot.

And at the same instant he wondered, so intensely that all other mental processes were subjugated to it, why he had not heard Dan shoot.

He looked up, and the whole weird picture was thrown upon the retina of his eyes. The coyote was still racing straight toward Dan, a gray demon that in his madness was more terrible than any charging bear or elk. For there is an element of horror about the insane, whether beasts or men, that cannot be denied. Both men felt it, with a chill that seemed to penetrate clear to their hearts. The eyes flamed, the white fangs of Graycoat caught the sunlight. And Dan stood erect in his path, his rifle half raised to his shoulder; and even in that first frenzied instant in which Lennox looked at him, he saw there was a strange impa.s.siveness, a singular imperturbability on his face.

"Shoot, man!" Lennox shouted. "What are you waiting for?"

But Dan didn't shoot. His hand whipped to his face, and he s.n.a.t.c.hed off his thick-lensed gla.s.ses. The eyes that were revealed were narrow and deeply intent. And by now, the frenzied coyote was not fifty feet distant.

All that had occurred since the animal charged had possibly taken five seconds. Sometimes five seconds is just a breath; but as Lennox waited for Dan to shoot, it seemed like a period wholly without limit. He wondered if the younger man had fallen into that strange paralysis that a great terror sometimes imbues. "Shoot!" he screamed again.

But it is doubtful if Dan even heard his shout. At that instant his gun slid into place, his head lowered, his eyes seemed to burn along the glittering barrel. His finger pressed back against the trigger, and the roar of the report rocked through the summer air.

The gun was of large caliber; and no living creature could stand against the furious, shocking power of the great bullet. The lead went straight home, full through the neck and slanting down through the breast, and the coyote recoiled as if an irresistible hand had smitten him. It is doubtful if there was even a muscular quiver after Graycoat struck the ground, not twenty feet from where Dan stood. And the rifle report echoed back to find only silence.

Lennox got up off the ground and moved over toward the dead coyote. He looked a long time at the gray body. And then he stepped back to where Dan waited on the trail.

"I take it all back," he said simply.

"You take what back?"

"What I thought about you--that the Failing line had gone to the dogs.

I'll never call you a tenderfoot again."

"You are very kind," Dan answered. He looked rather tired, but was wholly unshaken. For an instant Lennox looked at his eyes and his steady hands.

"But tell me one thing," Lennox asked. "I saw the way you looked down the barrel. I could see how firm you held the rifle--the way you kept your head. And that is all like your grandfather. But why, when you had a repeating rifle, did you wait so long to shoot?"

"I just had one cartridge in my gun. I fired nine times back at the trees and only re-loaded once. I didn't think of it until the coyote charged."

Lennox's answer was the last thing in the world to be expected. He opened his straight mouth and uttered a great, boyish yell of joy. His eyes seemed to light. It is a phenomenon that is ever so much oftener imagined than really seen; but the sudden, elated sparkle that came in those gray orbs was past denial. The eyes of the two men met, and Lennox shook him by the shoulder.

"You're not Dan Failing's grandson--you're Dan Failing himself!" he shouted. "No one but him would have had the self-control to wait till the game was almost on top of him--no one but him would have kept his head in a time like this. You're Dan Failing himself, I tell you, come back to earth. Grandson nothing! You're a throwback, and now you've got those gla.s.ses off, I can see his eyes looking right out of yours. Step on 'em, Dan. You'll never need 'em again. And give up that idea of dying in four months right now; I'm going to make you live. We'll fight that disease to a finish--and win!"

And that is the way that Dan Failing came into his heritage in the land of his own people, and in which a new spirit was born in him to fight--and win--and live.

BOOK TWO

THE DEBT

I

September was at its last days on the Umpqua Divide,--that far wilderness of endless, tree-clad ridges where Dan Failing had gone for his last days. September, in this place, was a season all by itself. It wasn't exactly summer, because already a little silver sheath of ice formed on the lakes in the morning; and the days were clamping down in length so fast that Whisperfoot the cougar had time for a dozen killings in a single night. Fall only begins when the rains start; and there hadn't been a trickle of rain since April. It was rather a cross between the two seasons,--the rag-tail of summer and the prelude of fall.