Every experience through which Lynette Brooke had gone until now seemed suddenly dwarfed into insignificance by the present. She was so utterly wearied out physically that muscles all over her body, demanding their hour of relaxation and having that relaxation denied them through the nervous stress laid upon her, quivered piteously. Hers was that frame of mind which distorts and magnifies, whipping out of its true semblance all actual conditions or building them up into monstrous, grotesque shapes. She was afraid of that great, staring dog on the threshold; more afraid of him than she had ever been of any man, Thor's master not excepted. For here was a fear which she could not throttle down. She would have sighed in content and have gone to sleep, her turbulent emotions quieted, if only it had been Bruce Standing's hard hand on the chain denying her her liberty instead of a great dog lying across the door-step.... Enough here to make her clinch her teeth to hold back a scream of panic-swept nerves; yet this was not all. For still that cry, heard through the woods, rang in her ears; still she built up in the picture which her quick fancy limned the vision of Mexicali Joe at the mercy of merciless men; Joe, who had lied to them, hoping to deliver them into the hands of one greater than they; Joe, who at the end, with them demanding to see what he had to show them, must be driven to the last extremity to fight for time.... And, blurring everything else at times, there swept over her another picture; that of Timber-Wolf, wounded and white-faced, stalking in that fearless way of his among them, confronting three armed men ... or four?... and then man-killing.... They were all wolves! She
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shuddered. And Thor, watching her, filled the quiet cabin with the sound of his low suspicious growling.
"Thor!" she called him, hardly above a whisper. Her lips were dry. "Good old Thor!"
His throaty rumble of a growl, telling her of his distrust as eloquently as it could have done had Thor the words of man at his command, was her answer.
"Thor!" She called him again, her voice soft, pleading, coaxing. Then she lifted herself a few inches on her elbow; like a flash Thor was up on his haunches, his growl became a snarl, a quick glint of his teeth showing, a sharp-pointed gleam of menace.
Yet Lynette held her position, steady upon her elbow; she had never known a tenser moment. Her throat contracted with her fear; and yet she kept telling herself stubbornly that yonder was but a dog, a thing of only brute intelligence, while she had the human brain to oppose him with; that, some way, she could outwit him. So she did not lie back; to do so would, she felt, show Thor that she was afraid of him. She made no further forward movement but she held what she had been suffered to gain.
And then she set herself to dominate Thor, a wolf-like dog. She spoke to him; but first she waited until she could be sure of her voice. That brute instinct of Thor's would know the slightest quaver of fear when he heard it. She controlled herself and her voice; she made her tones low and soft and gentle; she kept them firm. She told herself: "Thor is but doing his master's bidding because he loves his master! I'll make him love me! He distrusts.... I'll make him trust instead!" And all the while she kept her own eyes steady upon Thor's.
"Thor!" she said quietly. And again: "Thor. Good old Thor. Good old dog!"
... Thor had set her down as an enemy; his master's
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enemy; his master had commanded him: "Watch her, Thor!" Thor's knowledge was not wide; yet what he knew he did know thoroughly. And yet Thor had had no evidence, beyond that offered by a chain, of any open enmity between his master and this captive; master and girl had travelled all day long together and neither had flown at the other's throat. More than that, it had been at the master's own command this very morning that Thor had felt her hand upon his head; a hand as light as a falling leaf. And now she spoke to him in his master's own words, but with such a different voice, calling him Thor, good old dog....
It was a soothing voice, a voice made for tender caresses. She spoke again and again and again. And she was not afraid; Thor could see no flickering sign of fear in her. A voice softer than had been the touch of her hand.
"Thor!" she called him. And his growl was scarcely more growl than whine. For Thor, before Bruce Standing had been gone twenty minutes, was growing uncertain. Lynette had had dogs of her own; she knew the ways of dogs, and in this she had the advantage, since Thor knew nothing of the ways of women nor of their guile. The dog was restless; his eyes, upon hers, were no longer so steady. Now and then Thor shook his head and his eyes wandered.
"Thor," said Lynette, and now, though her voice, as before, was low and gentle, there was the note of command in it, "lie down!"
There was an experiment ... and it failed. Thor was on four feet in a flash; his growl was unmistakable now; the snarling note came back into it threateningly. She thought that he was going to fly at her throat....
Yet already was the lesser intelligence, though coupled with the greater physical power, confused.
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Lynette moved slowly; she put her hands up above her head and stretched out her arms and yawned; Thor growled, but there was little threat in the growl; just suspicion. Again she moved slowly; close enough, in the restricted area embraced by the cabin walls, was the table; on it some morsels of food left from their dinner. Without rising from the bunk, she reached the tin plate; she took it up, all the while moving with unhastening slowness. Thor's eyes followed her straying hand; Thor had been fed, and yet the dog's capacity for food was enormous. He understood the meaning of her gesture; his eyes hungered.
She dropped the plate to the floor but, before it struck, not three feet in front of the dog, she cried out sharply, her voice ringing, her command at last emphatic:
"No, Thor! No! No, I tell you!"
Had she offered the dog the food she would have but awaked within him a new and violent distrust; he was not so easily to be tricked. But when she tossed before him something that he was slavering for, and then laid her command upon him to hold back, she achieved something over him; he would have held back in any case, but now he held back at her command.
"Watch it, Thor!" she cried out loudly. "Watch it, sir!"
The big dog stared at her; at the fallen morsels; back at her, plainly at loss. And then again, more sharply, she commanded him:
"Watch it, Thor!... Lie down, Thor!"
And Thor, though he growled, lay down.... And his wolfish eyes now were upon the plate and its spilled contents rather than upon her.
"If I can but have time!" Lynette was telling herself excitedly. "If only I can have time ... I can make
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that dog do what I say to do!... God, give me time!"
When Bruce Standing, rushing through the forest land, came upon them ... Taggart and the others ... they were grouped about a despairing, hopeless Mexicali Joe. For Mexicali Joe's amigo, the great Timber-Wolf, in whom next to God he put all trust, had failed him. And Joe had come to the end of his tether, the end of lies and excuses and empty explanations. And now Taggart, as brutal a man as ever wore the badge of the law, was impatient, and meant to make an end of all procrastinations. It was his intention to give Mexicali Joe such a "third degree" as never any man had lived to experience before to-night. Rage, chagrin, disappointment, and natural, innate brutality spurred him on. Even Young Gallup, who was no chicken-hearted man at best, demurred; but Taggart cursed him off and told him to hold his tongue, and planned matters to his own liking.
"Jim Taggart's got Injun blood in him, you know," muttered Gallup uneasily to Cliff Shipton ... as though that might explain anything.
Even to such as Young Gallup, a man of whose humanity little was to be said, explanations were logical requirements. For Jim Taggart was at his evil worst. With cruelly hard fist he had knocked the little Mexican down; before Joe could get to his feet he booted him; when Joe stood, tottering, Taggart knocked him down again, jarring the quivering flame of life within him. And only at that did Jim Taggart, a man of no imagination but of colossal brutality, count that he was beginning. Then it was that Joe cried out; that his scream pierced through the night's stillness; that he pleaded with Taggart, saying:
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"This time, I tell you the true! I tell you ever'thing...."
"You're damned right you will," shouted Taggart, beside himself with his long baffled rage. "When I get good and ready to listen. And I'm not listening now, you Mexico pup! First you go through hell, and then I'll know that you tell the truth! Fool with me, would you; with me, Jim Taggart? You——"
Then Taggart began his third degree, listening to neither Joe's pleadings nor yet to the voice of Young Gallup.
The four men were in Bruce Standing's old cabin; the door was wide open, since here, so far from the world, in the dense outer fringes of Timber-Wolf's isolated wilderness kingdom, no man of them ... saving Joe alone, who had now given up hope ... had a thought of another human eye to see; Shipton, at a curt word from Taggart, had piled the mouth of the fireplace full of dead-wood, for the sole sake of light, and it was hot in the small room. Taggart had bound the Mexican's hands behind him, drawing the thong so tight that it cut cruelly into the flesh.... Taggart had knocked Joe down and had booted him to his heart's content; the swarthy face had turned a sick white. Taggart's eyes were glowing like coals raked out from hell's own sulphurous fires; he was sure of the outcome, sure of swift success, and yet now, in pure fiendishness, more absorbed in his own unleashed deviltry than in the mere matter of raw gold, which he counted securely his as soon as he was ready for it. Whether or not Indian blood ran in his veins, elemental savagery did.
Mexicali Joe, unable to rise, or in fear for his life if he stirred, lay on the floor, his eyes dilated with terror, staring up into Taggart's convulsed face.
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"I tell you the true!" he screamed. "This time, before God, I tell——"
"Shut up, you greaser-dog!" Taggart, a man of full measure, kicked him, and under the driving pain inflicted by that heavy boot, Joe's eyes flickered and closed, and Joe's brain staggered upon the dizzy black verge of unconsciousness. Taggart saw and understood and pitched a dipperful of water in his face. Joe gasped faintly. Taggart stepped to the fireplace, and snatched out a blazing pine branch.
"I've put my brand on more'n one treacherous dog!" he jeered. "You'll find my stock running across the wild places in seven States! Here's where I plant the sign of the cross on you, Mexico! Right square between the eyes!"
Suddenly he thrust the burning brand toward Joe's forehead. Joe cried out in terror:
"For the love of God!..." His two hands were behind him, but, galvanized, he fought the pine fagot with his whole body. He strove to thrust it aside; he fought against his weakness to roll over; Taggart's heavy foot was in his middle, holding him down; the burning branch in Taggart's heavy hands was as steady as a steel rod set in concrete; Joe's threshing panic disturbed it scarcely more than the wind would have done.... Another scream, shrilling through the night; the smell of burnt flesh; a red wound on Joe's forehead; Taggart's ugly laugh; and then suddenly, from just without the open doorway, a terrible shout from Bruce Standing, and then, in two seconds, Bruce Standing's great bulk among them.
"My God!" roared Standing. "My God! ... You, Jim Taggart!..."
Shipton's rifle stood in a corner; Shipton, as lithe as a cat, leaped for it. Gallup's was in his hand; he whipped
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&nbs............