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South and east of Mount Desolation lay the fatter and comparatively well-watered lands. Even Finn knew this, of course; but that way also lay the habitations of men, and the Wolfhound's face was set firmly away from men and all their works. Men had tortured him in a cage, the memory of which their hot irons had burned right into his very soul.
From this point, too, Lupus seemed to have centred all his desires upon the Wolfhound's throat; an underhold was what he sought, and in the pursuit of that he seemed prepared for, and capable of standing, any amount of punishment. The line of watching dingoes was still and silent as a line of statuary; it seemed they hardly drew breath, so intent was their preoccupation.
When Reynard discovered the rabbit, he merely glanced at it, and then quietly took up Finn's trail, to make sure of the Wolfhound's whereabouts. This trail he followed to a point that was as near as he cared to venture to the orchard fence. Then, satisfied that Finn had gone home, he trotted back to where the kill lay, being naturally to windward all the while of Finn's second trail.
As the Master once said, in talking on his homeward way to England of that dog-stealing episode of the wolfhound's salad days: "It would take a tough and wily old thief to tempt Finn across a garden-path nowadays, with the best doctored meat ever prepared.
She whisked out of the room before he could have gone very far with his reply. But he had not cared to reply, apparently. He lay unmoved and unmoving. Phyllis discovered, poising breathless on the threshold, that somehow she had seen his eyes. They had been a little like the wolfhound's, a sort of wistful gold-brown.
While these impressions were sinking into the Wolfhound's mind, the country through which he was travelling was becoming more open, more like a long-neglected park, in which many of the trees were dead, and all had a gaunt and scraggy look, with their thin, pointed grey-green leaves, their curiously tortured-looking limbs, and their long, rustling streamers of decaying bark.
If he had ever heard of such a thing as suicide, it may be that his soul would have known the final humiliation of self-destruction that night. But there is something that strikes a balance, as well in a Wolfhound's life as a man's life.
As Desdemona curveted down past Finn the tip of her gaily-waving tail was allowed once to glance over the Irish wolfhound's wiry coat; the merest suggestion of a touch. But it seemed this was a magic signal, converting the dancing Desdemona into a graven image and transforming the statuesque Finn into a hound of abounding and commanding activity. They made quite a notable picture.
Now, Brian Buidh, death is hard upon you, and neither an easy nor a swift one. Before you die there are two things which I would know from your lips." Brian looked at him, but without speaking. The Dark Master had thrust out his head, his hand still lingering on the wolfhound's neck, and his pallid face, drooping mustache, and high brow were very evil to gaze upon.
The drainage of their chalky soil was such that their surface could not hold much moisture, and outside the Downs the world was as yet a closed book to Finn. But spring asserted itself notably in his veins, and appeared to enter into a partnership with his lusty youth, and wholesome, generous scale of living, to speed the young Wolfhound's growth in wonderful style.
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