第40章

The Venture

From the moment Joan gave the name of Daddy Dan, the wolf-dog kept to the trail with arrowy straightness.Whatever the limitations of Bart's rather uncanny intelligence, upon one point he was usually letter-perfect, and even when a stranger mentioned Dan in the hearing of the dog it usually brought a whine or at least an anxious look.He hewed to his line now with that animal sense of direction which men can never wholly understand.

Boulders and trees slipped away on either side of Joan; now on a descent of the mountain-side he broke into a lope that set the flowers fluttering on her bonnet; now he prowled up the ravine beyond, utterly tireless.

He was strictly business.When she slipped a little from her place as he veered around a rock he did not slow up, as usual, that she might regain her seat, but switched his head back with a growl that warned her into position.That surprise was hardly out of her mind when she saw a gay patch of wild-flowers a little from the line of his direction, and she tugged at his ear to swing him towards it.A sharp jerk of his head tossed her hand aside, and again she caught the glint of wild eyes as he looked back at her.Then she grew grave, puzzled.She trusted Black Bart with all her heart, as only a child can trust dumb animals, but now she sensed a change in him.She had guessed at a difference on that night when Dan came home for the last time; and the same thing seemed to be in the dog today.

Before she could make up her mind as to what it might be, Black Bart swung aside up a steep slope, and whisked her into the gloom of a cave.Into the very heart of the darkness he glided and stopped.

"Daddy Dan!" she called.

A faint echo, after a moment, came back to her from the depths of the cave, making her voice strangely deep.Otherwise, there was no answer.

"Bart!" she whispered, suddenly frightened by the last murmur of that echo, "Daddy Dan's not here.Go back!"She tugged at his ear to turn him, but again that jerk of the head freed his ear.He caught her by the cloak, crouched close to the floor, and she found herself all at once sitting on the gravelly floor of the cave with Bart facing her.

"Bad Bart!" she said, scrambling to her feet.

"Naughty dog!"

She was still afraid to raise her voice in that awful silence, and in the dark.When she glanced around her, she made out vague forms through the dimness that might be the uneven walls of the cave, or might be strange and awful forms of night.

"Take me home!"

A growl that went shuddering down the cave stopped her, and now she saw that the eyes of Bart glowed green and yellow.Even then she could not believe that he would harm her, and stretched out a tentative hand.This time she made out the flash of his teeth as he snarled.He was no longer the Bart she had played with around the cabin, but a strange wild thing, and with a scream she darted past him toward the door.Never had those chubby legs flown so fast, but even as the light from the mouth of the cave glimmered around her, she heard a crunching on the gravel from behind, and then a hand, it seemed, caught her cloak and jerked her to a stop.

She fell sprawling, head over heels, and when she looked up, there sat Bart upon his haunches above her, growling terribly, and gripping the end of the cloak.No doubt about it now.Black Bart would have his teeth in her throat if she made another movement toward the entrance.A city child would have either gone mad with terror or else made that fatal struggle to reach the forbidden place, but Joan had learned many things among the mountains, and among others, she knew the difference between the tame and the free.The old dappled cow was tame, for instance; and the Maltese cat, which came too close to Bart the year before and received a broken back for its carelessness, had been tame; and the brown horse with the white face and the dreary eyes was tame.They could be handled, and teased, and petted and bossed about at will.Other creatures were different.For instance, the scream of the hawk always made her shrink a little closer to the ground, or else run helter-skelter for the house, and sometimes, up the gulches, she had heard the wailing of a mountain lion on the trail, hunting swiftly, and very hungry.There was even something about the dead eyes of certain lynxes and coyotes and bobcats which Daddy Dan trapped that made Joan feel these animals belonged to a world where the authority of man was only the strength of his hand or his cunning.Not that she phrased these thoughts in definite words, but Joan was very close to nature, and therefore her instincts gave her a weird little touch of wisdom in suck matters.