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Miss Edgeworth, in a letter printed for the first time in Irish Memories, writes: "I fear our throats will be cut by order of O'Connell and Co. very soon." We know enough to-day about O'Connell to realise how far this estimate lay from the truth of things; yet Miss Somerville herself talks about "Parnell and his wolf-pack."
A vision came to him, unreal and dream-like, of that wonderful night under the stars ages and ages ago, it seemed when he had fought the leader of the wolf-pack, and young Gray Wolf had crept to his side after his victory and had given herself to him for mate. But this mating season there was no running after the doe or the caribou, or mingling with the wild pack.
He was still breathing hard. His massive head, grotesque now with its one antler, was drooping. Flecks of blood dropped from his distended nostrils. Even then, with the old bull weakened by starvation, exhaustion and loss of blood, a wolf-pack would have hung back before attacking. Where they would have hesitated, Kazan leaped in with a snarling cry.
For the long wail that had trembled across the vague spaces of the forest, affronting the majesty and dignity of night and the coming stars with its blood-lusting plaint of famine, had been none other than the summons to the hunt, the news of quarry, the signal of a gathering wolf-pack on their trail. "That's not the truth you're telling me, Allan," said Beatrice very gravely.
He had not heard Croisset go ashore, and for a moment he felt as if he were deliberately placing himself at the mercy of a wolf-pack. Josephine may have guessed the effect of the savage spectacle he had beheld from the canoe, for she was close to the water's edge to meet him. She spoke, and in the pitch darkness he reached out.
In the affrighted eyes of the Hindus Barlow could read their dread of the Pindaris; they would cringe at the roadside and salaam, as fearful were they as if a wolf-pack swept down the highway. The jamadar would laugh in his deep throat, and twist his black moustache with forefinger and thumb, and call the curse of Mahomet upon these worshippers of stone images and foul gods.
Stories of the night-prowling wolf-pack, and the sinister, man-eating loup cervier, crowded her brain. She must build a fire. She felt through her pocket for the glass bottle of matches, only to find that her fingers were too numb to remove the cork. She replaced the vial and, drawing on her mittens, beat her hands together until the blood tingled to her finger-tips.
When his first wife was seized, he had promised to take her down into Hertfordshire, but meanwhile arranged with a nursing-home instead. Helen, too, was ill. And the plan that he sketched out for her capture, clever and well-meaning as it was, drew its ethics from the wolf-pack. "You want to get hold of her?" he said. "That's the problem, isn't it? She has got to see a doctor."
Swiftly they turned toward the blood-stained trail of the old bull, and when they came to it they found it spattered red. Kazan's jaws dripped as the hot scent drove the blood like veins of fire through his weakened body. His eyes were reddened by starvation, and in them there was a light now that they had never known even in the days of the wolf-pack.
His eyes fluttered and went shut. His chin fell forward on his chest. And even as they eased him down upon the blankets his snores were rising on the frosty air. But there was another sound. Far and faint it was, in the remote distance, the cry of the hungry wolf-pack as it took the trail of other meat than the man it had just missed.
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