Page:Edison Marshall--The voice of the pack.djvu/125

Rh stories about tigers and wolves that are n't pleasant to listen to. But our own frontiersmen were not men to stand any nonsense from wolves or cougars. They had guns, and they knew how to use them. And they were preceded by as brave and as warlike a race as ever lived on the earth—armed with bows and arrows. Any animal that hunted men was immediately killed, and the rest found out it did n't pay."

"Just as human beings have found out the same thing—that it does n't pay to hunt their fellow men. The laws of life as well as the laws of nations are against it."

But the words sounded weak and dim under the weight of the throbbing darkness; and Dan could n't get away from the idea that the codes of life by which most men lived were forgotten quickly in the shadows of the pines. Even as he spoke, man was hunting man on the distant ridge where Whisperfoot had howled.

Bert Cranston, head of the arson ring that operated on the Umpqua Divide, was not only beyond the pale in regard to the laws of the valleys, but he could have learned valuable lessons from the beasts in regard to keeping the laws of the hills. The forest creatures do not hunt their own species, nor do they normally