Page:Edison Marshall--Shepherds of the wild.djvu/196

188 Alice it was deliverance in the last instant of despair. Now she lay fainting among the fallen, but Hugh, bleeding and triumphant, saw that she was uninjured. To Hugh it was almost a justification of life itself. He knew the joy of victory, the glory of strength.

And Hugh's strength was still upon him when, after certain hours were done, he came back to the prone body of Fargo—consciousness only half returned to it—beside the dying fire at the sheep camp. He had been sleeping peacefully and was not easy to waken.

"You can have your horse now," Hugh had said, when at last he gained the man's attention. He spoke quite clearly and distinctly, and all matters returned to Fargo's consciousness with a rush. "And, of course, you can have your dogs, too. There's quite a little heap of them for you back there in the forest."

It seemed to Fargo, when he went to look, that only a laugh followed him out of the firelight. It was to haunt him for months, that laugh. There was quite a heap of them,—an impotent heap that Fargo stood by clear into the dawn, strange fumes of rage and hatred in his brain. The buzzards dropped down one by one to see what had interested him.