Page:The Cross Pull.pdf/13

 While Kinney calculated a probable profit, Brent cursed fretfully at the wolf shiver which shook him at the sound, and Moran smiled over a pet theory of his own.

He knew that any beast, when angry or alarmed, bristles his back hair into a roach along the spine. He felt that this was a heritage handed down to him through a thousand generations from the time when his primitive ancestors, garbed in hair instead of cloth, had bristled with a mixture of rage and fear at each call of their enemy the wolf; that this sprouting of goose flesh between his own shoulder blades at the lobo call was but the age-old instinct to bristle the hair where hair had ceased to grow.

As always, the dread cry was followed by a vast, tense quiet, as if each dweller of the open hesitated to shatter the silence with his own voice and thus draw particular attention to himself. This was no paltry wolf—no straggler from the north, but an old dog lobo on his home range.

There was an answering call, and both Kinney and Moran raised on their elbows to better catch the sound. The starting note was a hoarse imitation of her mate’s but seemed to break into the tremolo of the coyote. Both men arrived at al-