Page:The Cross Pull.pdf/205

 as transparent as the breast. meat of a quail; however, Flash cared less for this kind than for the heavier red meat of larger game, and he did not gorge as hugely as he would have done if his victim had been an elk or deer.

The wind rose to a gale, shrieking along the cliffs and moaning in the timber. There came sudden lulls after which the wind leaped again from some new direction, sometimes completely reversing its course in a space of seconds; gusts drove down from different divides and eddied about the hills, rushing up one canyon while the currents were sucked straight down the next.

Revelling in his freedom, Flash left the cat and rambled on. He chose the ridge which broke away from the parent divide and flanked the north side of the canyon, and followed it to where it ended in a point which fell away abruptly to the narrow floor of the valley at the confluence of the two little streams.

As he stood on the point of this spur there came one of the sudden lulls in the wind. Faint vibrations trembled in his ears; the sound of iron on rocks, and he knew that somewhere far up the slope of the divide a pack outfit was coming down from the Rampart Pass.