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Black-tip, followed by three strong young dogs and a bitch, loped off at once, without comment or communication with the rest of the pack, in the direction of the trail of the south-bound Jeff. Warrigal's eyes, as it happened, were fixed upon the shoulders of the other man, and it was his trail that she made for now, after rousing Finn with a touch of her muzzle.
There was more than enough for all, and though, when they left the kill to the lesser carnivora of that quarter, Finn carried a good meal with him between his jaws, it was not that he needed it for himself, but that he wished to place it in the den at Warrigal's disposal; a little attention which earned for him various marks of his mate's cordial approval.
Warrigal's sharp eyes noted everything about the whole turn-out the sergeant's face that drove, the way the gold boxes were counted out and put in a kind of fixed locker underneath the middle of the coach.
In that strange, ghostly light, which gave a certain cloak of mystery even to such common objects as tree-stumps and boulders of rock, Finn saw two unfamiliar figures emerge from the scrub below the spur next that of Warrigal's den, and begin slowly to climb toward Mount Desolation itself.
The big dingo ceased now to think of killing, and concentrated his flagging energies solely upon two points getting away alive and putting up a fight which should not disgrace him in Warrigal's watchful eyes. He achieved his end, partly by virtue of his own pluck and dexterity, and partly because his smell reminded Finn of Warrigal, and so softened the killing lust in the Wolfhound.
Finn had never before been appealed to by the scent of any of the wild people, but there was a subtle atmosphere about Warrigal's thick red-brown coat which drew him to her strongly. Finn knew the life of his own range pretty well, and was more familiar with the life of the wild generally than any other hound of his race has been for very many generations.
He took Warrigal's horse, Bilbah, back with him; he and Starlight was going off to the islands together, and couldn't take horses with them. But he was real sorry to part with the cross-grained varmint; I thought he was going to blubber when he saw father leading him off. Bilbah wouldn't go neither at first; pulled back, and snorted and went on as if he'd never seen only one man afore in his life.
"So long, mate; so long!" Away in the scrub to the northward of the two men a dozen pair of eyes more hungry than their own were watching them; or, to be exact, eleven pairs were watching them. Finn lay stretched still at full length, beside a bush, at Warrigal's feet, while Warrigal peered eagerly through the scrub.
The great Wolfhound realized perhaps that his frame demanded more of nutriment than was necessary for the support of a dingo, and he ate with savage swiftness, growling angrily when any other muzzle than Warrigal's approached his own too nearly.
That gave Finn the most piercing thrill of paternity he had felt up till this time. He dropped his kill, and leaped with one mighty bound clear over two boulders and a bare stretch of track to the ledge outside the den. And, in the moment of his leap, a figure emerged from the mouth of the den bearing between its uncovered, yellow tusks the body of Warrigal's last-born son, limp and bleeding.
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