Page:The Cross Pull.pdf/12

 that had died fifty years before than in bounty rewards—in some theory that this was not a new species but an almost forgotten kind which had followed the lost herd into the hills and had now come back to the edge of their old range; that the rare lobo of the present was the buffalo gray of the past.

As Moran and Kinney lay rolled in their blankets ten miles apart, they formed two points of a human triangle of which Ash Brent, far up the slope of the hills, formed the third.

In common with most men who live their lives in the open, Kinney and Moran had come to draw a certain sense of companionship from the night sounds of the hills. But there is one note to which a man may listen for a thousand nights and on the next he will inevitably nestle a trifle closer into his bed roll when it sounds and feel the same chilly prickling of the skin along his spine. The far-off note of a lobo always carries an added ache of loneliness to the man in the open.

A lone lobo raised his voice and, as if connected by a mysterious current, the three widely scattered men each felt the same sudden tensing of the muscles and tingling of the skin. In the reaction only did they differ.