Page:The Cross Pull.pdf/62

 Far below them they could see tiny green spots that broke the solid brown of the foothills; little cultivated fields of the squatters that were beginning to settle the range.

They made camp in a little side hill meadow.

“I wonder if she was young and pretty,” Moran said as he sat smoking one last pipeful before going to sleep.

“The spell of the Short Blue Moon is working on me too, Flash,” he went on. “After all, a man can live too much alone.

“All this we’ve been listening to—that’s what it means. The bucks polishing their horns on the trees, and all those bugling bulls. That note you listen for every night and don’t know what it is. The wolf season doesn’t start for a few months yet—when it does come you’ll know what all that means. It’s the same way with us all, even men. Every living creature needs one thing to round out his life—a mate.”

Moran slept, and Flash climbed back to the crest of the divide.

A light gleamed from a ridge above the valley where Brent’s pack outfit had halted late in the afternoon. It swayed back and forth as if suspended in the air. Far off among the bald ridges