Page:The Cross Pull.pdf/54

 tant bulls when his nose detected the first sign of the proximity of man since the night at Two Ocean Pass, almost three months before.

Twice he trotted a short way into the wind, then came back to Moran.

“You old rascal,” said Moran. “You’re planning a midnight raid. After I’m asleep you’ll slip away and interrupt the courting of some old bull. You’re a queer mixture, Flash, but you’re more wolf than dog after all.”

Two hours later Flash stood in a little valley across a ridge from where Moran was camped. The wind was heavy with the odor of a dead camp fire and living men. He followed it up the valley until he knew that they were less than a hundred yards away.

He shifted back and forth across the wind to catch each different angle from the camp. There was something that was unlike any thing he had chanced across before, and it aroused an intense desire to investigate.

Little by little, shifting silently from tree to tree, he approached to within twenty feet of three sleeping figures. They lay in a little open park with the moonlight streaming down on them.

Flash did not know that when men slept their