CHAPTER VI
Even though he held himself frigidly aloof from all men Flash was a prime favorite at the Bar T ranch. He was a changed Flash; his former springy alertness had been replaced by a drooping, dispirited air of complete dejection. Moran had gone from his life—and life had lost its tang.
He could not know that Moran would either soon return or send for him; he only knew that he was gone, and the longing for him was like a sickness.
Flash was often missed for a time from the Bar T. Later they found that he had been several times to Harmon’s cabin and had spent a few days at Dad Kinney’s camp. Thereafter when he was absent they knew he was at one of the places which he associated with Moran.
His handling of stock was a marvel of intelligence but it was a mere mechanical following out of the tasks Moran had taught him for he now found no joy in the work.
As he sat on a ridge a few hundred yards from the bunkhouse he distinctly heard some one call his name. He deliberately turned away and trotted off through the darkness. He had investigated every human habitation for miles around, searching vainly for some sign of Moran. Flash was losing hope, and with it his allegiance to the world of men. More and more now he listened to the night sounds that called him, and he spent much of his time alone in the hills.
He rambled aimlessly on until sometime near daylight, when he curled up on a ridge seventy miles from the Bar T range and slept. The air was crisp and cold. Except for the drifts in the gulches the light fall snows had disappeared from the foothills, but even this early the peaks were one solid glare of white. A stiff breeze rose with the sun and whipped his exposed position, and he started to seek a more sheltered spot.
Below him, a rider was gathering some cows from the rough sidehill breaks. As Flash watched, a steer turned and the rider wheeled his horse and plunged across the draw to head him.
Habit was strong in Flash and he dropped down the slope to head the steer. The instant he appeared, the rider jerked his horse back on his haunches and pulled his gun. Flash whirled and snapped at a hot stab of pain which seared across his rump as the report crashed in his ears. He fled and from behind him the sharp reports rang out in quick succession. Spurts of gravel were tossed up about him and there were whining rushes of air close to his head.
Flash knew well the use of firearms. He had often seen Moran and others shoot and after each report there had been a jack rabbit flopping in his death throes or a dying antelope twitching on the ground. He knew that this man, for no reason whatever, had meant to kill him.
Half an hour later as he trotted across the flat there came the sharp crack that a high velocity rifle ball makes when it passes close to the ear. The distant report reached him as he whirled to run. Four hundred yards away a man leaned against the door of a sod house and emptied his gun at the gray form that was running with incredible speed across the flat.
Flash entered the mouth of a long valley. A horseman was plunging down the right hand slope to cut him off. He veered to the left, and as the furiously running horse pulled in behind him the rider’s gun barked six times at the fleeing wolf.
Flash could not know that to all men but those who knew him he was a wolf. He only knew that all men had turned their hands against him and sought his life.
The next man he saw he avoided, and when next he bedded down it was on the crest of a knoll that offered a clear view for miles.
When night came he traveled on, crossing a low range of mountains and descending into the rolling grasslands of the Wind River Valley. Hunger pressed him and he found no living thing but cows. The sense of distance from familiar scenes made the Bar T seem so far behind as to be part of another world. The fast that men had so recently turned against him was bitterly uppermost in his mind—and he was hungry.
Men sought his life. And for the first time he turned his teeth against an animal that belonged to men and singled out a steer. His first snap was half hearted and did not entirely sever the cords of the leg. The steer fled in a panic and the others, crazed by the smell of blood and this silent wolf shape that had appeared among them, crowded around him in a mad stampede. The one taste of warm blood and the clattering roar of hoofs as more scattered cows joined the frantic rush stimulated the wild blood in Flash and he lunged again, this time with all the powerful drive of a killing lobo behind his teeth.
The steer ran on, one hind leg giving under him. Then Flash struck the other leg and the steer went down. Even as he reached the ground a gray shape drove at his throat and slashed it open with savage fangs that cut in like knives.
Flash stood over his kill, listening to the roar of hoofs, and the crazed bawling of cows as the stampede gathered numbers and rolled on down the valley—and he was all wolf, a great gray beast of prey with the tame strain submerged deep beneath the wild.
He roamed the valley for a full week, sleeping by day and killing by night. Then the old longing for Moran reasserted itself and called him back to the Bar T range. He covered the hundred miles in a single night and approached the Bar T buildings cautiously just before dawn. There was a light in the bunkhouse; the boys were getting up.
Flash drew near, trying to catch the sound of Moran’s voice in the murmur that came from the bunkhouse. A horrible shock of surprise flooded through him and he wheeled to run as a voice spoke seemingly out of the air and called his name. But the voice was friendly and old habit was strong. Flash stopped.
“Hello, Flash.” From his perch on the windmill platform the early riser had seen the dim form slipping toward the house. “You old rascal, where have you been?”
Flash trotted off to the sheltering gloom of the corral and waited, undecided which course to pursue.
When the windmill fan started to turn, the bunkhouse door opened and the occupants emerged irregularly and started splashing face and hands with the icy water from the tank: Halfway down the ladder, the man above stopped to call out that Flash was back and from the group at the tank there arose an immediate chorus of friendly remarks and whistles for the dog.
Flash trotted near them, his muscles bunched for sudden flight at the first hostile move, but he was greeted as an old friend.
During the next week he reconstructed his ideas of man. Twice he was shot at when far from the ranch. He finally knew that he was safe when with the Bar T boys but that when off his own range men sought his life. He accommodated himself to this.
His two stronger strains were balanced by the coyote intelligence which, except for his eyes, was his sole inheritance from the little yellow prairie wolf grandfather.
The reason coyotes are caught in traps while wolves are not is because wolves avoid all man scent while a coyote believes in himself—he simply cannot resist the call to pit his intelligence against that of man. This curiosity costs many coyote lives, but his kind has survived in numbers on ranges where man has long since exterminated the wolves.
Flash began to lead a strange dual life which accorded well with his opposing strains of blood and in which this coyote brain stood him in good stead.
Stock dogs were scarce on the range. They did not long survive the poison baits which wolfers laid for coyotes. The Bar T men firmly believed Flash to be the best stock dog in the world. There was talk of taking him to the Frontier Day fair in the far off capitol and issuing a free-for-all challenge, backed by a thousand dollar purse, proclaiming him the wide open champion of the world. The Bar T owner had made Moran a standing offer of five hundred for the dog.
The stockmen of Wind River had posted a five hundred dollar reward for the scalp of the most savage lobo that had ever showed up on the range and who made periodical forays among their cows, killing more than the price on his head in a single week.
Thus each of the two extremes in Flash built up a reputation of its own, for the champion stock dog of the Greybull and the famous lobo killer of Wind River were the same.
His absences which were attributed to wandering around in search of Moran, were now spent in raiding. On these trips he was all wild. He bedded down with the wind at his back and a clear field of view in front. He feared men, not with blind, unreasoning terror but with a certain knowledge of their power for harm.
His coyote intelligence saved him from panicky flights in the open at the first whiff of man scent; instead he would flatten out and let them pass or watch his chance to slip away unseen. Then old habit would cry out for the companionship of man, and he would show up innocently at the Bar T ranch.
In the face of all his cleverness the net began to tighten around Flash after two months of this dual existence.
Dad Kinney shifted his camp to Wind River. Winter had crept down the mountains until it was one rough white mass clear down to the base of the hills. A full half of the time there was a tracking snow in the foothills and with a relay string of grain fed horses Kinney commenced his tireless hunt for the five hundred dollar wolf.
The wolfer knew well the one greatest weakness of his prey—that of gorging on warm meat and bedding down. A swift horse can often wear down an overfed wolf. It is established custom for any rider who sees such a race to throw himself into it and press the wolf with a fresh horse. More of the big gray killers of the open range country have been relayed to death on a new snow than by all other methods combined.
Day after day Kinney rode steadily on the trail, his sights set for a thousand yards. Flash learned to watch for the tiny speck that always appeared on his back track and gradually enlarged into a rider on his trail. It was only a question of time.
One morning in mid-December Kinney found a steer that had been killed not two hours before and he swung his horse into a steady trail trot on the big tracks in the fresh light snow.
Flash had bedded down on a slight rise of ground five miles from his kill. He had feasted heavily and was loath to leave his bed; not until the man was within two miles did he start.
When Kinney saw a dark speck trotting across the white snow two miles away he lifted his sorrel into a keen run and Flash started in on the first lap of the most terrible day of his life.
He felt stupid and sluggish, disinclined to travel fast or far but was forced to keep on and on. He ran in a straight-away toward the base of the Wind River hills, seventy miles away. The country was slightly rolling, almost flat. Often he increased his speed and drew away from the man behind. Always his gait slackened when the man was out of sight; then the wiry sorrel would appear over some ridge close behind, running swiftly on his trail. Each time he saw smoke or the low buildings of a ranch ahead he veered slightly to the right or left to miss the spot by at least a mile. After twenty miles as he passed a ranch he missed the man; it seemed that he had shaken off his hunter at last. He was deathly tired and slowed his pace. A few miles farther on he sprawled down in the snow on a little swell of ground. It seemed but a few short minutes until another horse loomed up on his back track.
Kinney had veered off to the ranch and changed mounts, throwing his saddle on the best horse in the corral. This time it was a rangy pinto that was running like a greyhound on his trail. So the desperate race kept up. Another score of miles and Flash had one more brief respite before a tough, smooth-running buckskin was after him,
His powerful muscles seemed to have lost their spring. His body was a leaden weight, almost too heavy for his legs. Only the one ever present knowledge that death lurked close behind forced him to keep ahead. He ran desperately, the mechanical driving of his muscles sending him on and on. From the first roll of the Wind River hills he looked back. A blocky, mountain-climbing bay loped away from the ranch house a mile below and buckled sturdily to his ascent of the hills.
With heaving sides, Flash started across the low divide for home. His breath sounded in leaky gasps; the yellow eyes were set and bloodshot and the savage jaws dripped froth which spattered back and dried on his breast and sides.
He kept ahead across the spur and down the other side. Just at dark Kinney quit the trail at the foot of the slope and stopped at a ranch house overnight. The dim suspicion which had haunted his mind all day as to the identity of the wolf now crystallized into a certainty. The size of the tracks; the fact that no man had ever heard this lobo howl; the sense of familiarity he had felt at each distant glimpse of the big gray shape that had fled before him all that day; the periodical raids dove-tailing with certain absences from home; all these pointed to one thing—Flash.
Five miles away Flash was stretched out in the snow. After raiding all night he had been ruthlessly harried for more than a hundred miles, starting when gorged with meat, a time when a wolf’s endurance is at its lowest ebb.
Before daylight he started on, heading for the fancied safety of the Bar T.
Once there he kept his eye on the low ridge half a mile away over which he had come. No wind had sprung up to blot his tracks and late in the afternoon a horse topped the ridge and Kinney came jogging slowly along to the ranch on the trail of the Wind River wolf.
Flash scratched at the bunkhouse door and the lone occupant let him in. From the window he watched Kinney ride up, and as he entered Flash knew this was the man who had hounded him, and his hair bristled as he backed into a comer, his teeth bared savagely.
“Too bad, Flash,” Kinney said, “I’m sorry it’s got to be done.”
Flash wanted to get out of the bunkhouse but was kept there until the rest of the men came in at dusk.
Kinney’s proof was clear. These were hard men. If a friend turned rustler they regretted it—and led his horse under the fatal tree. Flash was a friend but justice must be done. The wolf dog listened to his trial. He could not understand the words but there was menace in the tones and the looks they cast at him. He knew it was connected with the race and a chill dread of death shook him.
The men drew lots from a hat.
“I’m sorry it fell to me,” said one. “I’ll call him outside and get it over with.” He slowly pulled his gun and opened the door. “Come on, Flash, old fellow,” he said.
With one mighty spring Flash cleared the open door and was off, a swift gray streak in the moonlight with a gun barking spitefully behind him.
“He’s a smart one,” said the man with the gun. “He knew! He almost made it at that, but I got him.”
The men crowded out of the bunkhouse. Fifty yards along the trail Flash had left they found where he had fallen and there was blood in the snow.
“We’ll find him to-morrow,” Kinney said. “He can’t travel far.” But in the morning the trail was blotted under half a foot of new snow. When Moran notified them to ship the dog to him, word was sent back that Flash was dead.