Part 14 (1/2)
At midday the man placed the sheath-knife in his belt and threw away the pack. Relieved of the burden, his shoulders felt strangely light.
There was a new buoyancy in his stride.
But the relief was temporary, and as the sun sank early behind the pines his brain was again driving his wearied muscles to their work.
The wolves were following close in now, and the silence of their relentless persistence filled the man with a dumb terror which no pandemonium of howling could have inspired.
His advance was halting. Each step was a separate and conscious undertaking, and it was with difficulty that he lifted his moccasins clear of the snow.
Suddenly he stumbled. The leaders were almost upon him as he recovered and faced them there in the white reach of the tote-road. They halted just out of reach of the swing of his axe, and as the man looked into their glaring eyes a frenzy of unreasoning fury seized him.
His nerves could no longer stand the strain. Something seemed to snap in his brain, and through his veins surged the spirit of his fighting ancestors.
A sudden memory flash, as of deeds forgotten through long ages, and with it came strength--the very abandon of fierce, brute strength of a man with the mind to kill.
”Come on!” he cried. ”Fight it out, you fiends! I may die, but I'll be d.a.m.ned if I'll be hounded to death! You may get me, but you'll _fight_!
When a McKim goes down some one pays! And if it is die--By G.o.d!
There'll be fun in the dying!”
With a weird primordial scream, as the first man might have screamed in the face of the first saber-tooth, he hurled his axe among them and sprang forward, flas.h.i.+ng the cold, gray blade of his sheath-knife!
CHAPTER XV
THE WERWOLF
Now, as all men know, Bill Carmody had done a most foolish and insane thing.
But the very audacity of his act--and the G.o.d of chance--favored him, for as the axe whizzed through the air the keen edge of the whirling bit caught one of the larger wolves full on the side of the head.
There followed the peculiar, dull scrunching sound that stands alone among all other sounds, being produced by no other thing than the sudden crush of a living skull.
The front and side of the skull lifted and turned backward upon its hinge of raw scalp and the wolf went down, clawing and biting, and over the snow flowed thick red blood, and a thicker mucus of soft, wet brains.
At the sight and scent of the warm blood, the companions of the stricken brute--the gaunt, tireless leaders, who had traveled beside him in the van, and the rag-tag and bobtail alike--fell upon him tooth and nail, and the silence of the forest was shattered by the blood-cry of the meat-getters.
Not so the great she-wolf, who despised these others that fought among themselves, intent only upon the satisfaction of their hunger.
Her purpose in trailing this man to destruction was of deep vengeance: the a.s.suagement of an abysmal hatred that smoldered in her heart against every individual of the terrible man kind, whose cruel traps of iron, blades of steel, and leaden bullets had made her a monstrous, s.e.xless thing, feared and unsought by mating males, hated of her own breed.
And now, at the moment she had by the cunning of her generals.h.i.+p delivered this man an easy prey to her followers, they deserted her and fell in swinish greed upon the first meat at hand.
So that at the last she faced her enemy alone, and the smoldering fury of her heart blazed green from her wicked eyes. She stood tense as a pointer, every hair of her long white coat bristlingly aquiver.
Suddenly she threw back her head, pointed her sharp muzzle to the sky, and gave voice to the long-drawn ululation which is the battle-cry of wolves.
Yet it was not the wolf-cry, for long ago the malformation of a healing throat-wound had distorted the bell-like cry into a hideous scream like the shriek of a soul fored.a.m.ned, which quavered loud and shrill upon the keen air and ended in a series of quick jerks, like stabs of horrible laughter.