Finn The Wolfhound Part 16

In the morning Bill would hardly take the trouble to prepare a breakfast for himself, and the clothes he wore were not those that Finn had always seen him in before. Bill presently tied up the hanging door of the gunyah and mounted his horse. Jess and Finn followed him as their wont was, but their hearts were sad, and Bill's glowering looks gave them no encouragement. For almost seven miles they followed Bill, and then, after leaping a low "dog-leg"

fence, they found themselves in the one wide street of Nargoola towns.h.i.+p. Bill cantered slowly down the empty road till he came to the "First Nugget Hotel," and there he drew rein and finally hitched his horse's bridle to a verandah post. Then he strode across the verandah and disappeared within the "hotel," and Jess remembered--many things.

Finn remained with Jess, a few yards from the horse, waiting; but whereas the experienced Jess lay down in the dust, Finn stood erect and watchful beside her. He was already rather nearer to the house than he cared about; and the air was heavy with the scent of man and his works. Finn was acutely uncomfortable, and told Jess so as plainly as he could, with a hint as to the advantages of returning to the bush. But Jess urged patience, and tucked her nose under one of her hind-legs.

Presently one or two men came straggling down the street and made overtures to Finn, after standing and gazing upon him with admiring astonishment, and slowly piecing together his connection with Bill and Jess through the horse. Bush folk have a way of arriving at their knowledge of people through horseflesh.

"My oath!" exclaimed one of the men. "He's got a touch of the Tasmanian blood in him, all right. I guess old man Hall's pets have been busy back in the hills there. Wonder how Bill got a-holt o'

_him_!"

And then, with every sign of deferential friendliness, the man endeavoured to approach Finn. But though Jess lay still, showing only pointed indifference where the men were concerned, Finn leaped backward like a stag, and kept a good score of paces between the men-folk and himself.

The man who made the remark about Finn and Tasmanian blood had never seen the zebra wolf, as it is sometimes called, owing to the stripes which often occur in its coat, or he would not have thought of Finn in this connection. The Tasmanian wolf is a heavy, long beast, with a truncated muzzle, short legs, a thin, taper tail, and a very ma.s.sive shoulder and neck. Wolves of this type have been known to keep six hunting-dogs absolutely at bay, and finally to escape from them. Their appearance is more suggestive of the hyaena than of any such symmetrically beautiful lines as those of Finn's graceful, racy build. But, by reason of his great height and size, Finn was strange to the Nargoola man, and he, having heard of old Jacob Hall's strange importations from Tasmania, at once linked the two kinds of strangeness together in his mind, and saw only further reason for so doing in the fact that he was quite unable to get within a dozen paces of touching the Wolfhound.

Out of consideration for the patient Jess, Finn endured the discomfort of waiting beside the "First Nugget" all through that day, though he never ventured to sit down even for a moment; there among the man-smells and the threatening shadows of the houses, each one of which he regarded as the possible headquarters of a circus, the possible home of a "Professor." But when evening set in, and Jess still showed no sign of forsaking her post, Finn could endure it no longer, and told his friend several times over that he must go; that he would return to the camp in the bush and wait there. The nuzzling touches of Jess's nose said plainly, "Wait a bit, yet! What's your hurry?" But Finn was in deadly earnest now.

He refused to be restrained even by a little whimpering appeal, in which Jess made every use she could of the craft of her s.e.x, showing exaggerated signs of weakness and distress. "Well, then, why not come with me?" barked Finn in reply, fidgeting about her on his toes. Jess pleaded for delay, and licked his nose most persuasively. But Finn's mind was made up, and he turned his shoulder coldly upon the b.i.t.c.h, while still waiting for some sign of yielding on her part. But Jess was bound to her post by ties far stronger than any consideration of her own comfort or well-being; and, as a matter of fact, forty Wolfhounds would not have moved her from that verandah--alive. Also, of course, she had not Finn's violent distaste for the neighbourhood of man and his works. She had never been in a circus. She had never been suddenly awakened from complete trust in mankind to knowledge of the existence of mad man-beasts with hot iron bars; so Finn would have told her.

In the end, Finn gave a cold bark of displeasure and trotted off into the gathering twilight, leaping the fence and plunging into the bush the moment he had pa.s.sed the last house of the towns.h.i.+p.

Half an hour later he killed a fat bandicoot, who was engaged at that moment in killing a tiny marsupial mouse. A quarter of an hour after that, Finn lay down beside the ashes of the fire before the gunyah, his kill between his fore-legs. He rested there for a few minutes, and then, tearing off its furry skin in strips, devoured the greater part of the bandicoot before settling down for the night; as much, that is, as he ever did settle down, these days.

His eyes were not often completely closed; less often at night, perhaps, than in the daytime. But he dozed now, out there in the clear patch where the gunyah stood, free of all thoughts of men and cages. And the bush air seemed sweeter than ever to him to-night after his brief stay in the man-haunted towns.h.i.+p.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XXIII

THE OUTCAST

For nine consecutive days and nights Finn continued to regard the empty gunyah in the clear patch as his home, to eat there, and to rest there, beside the ashes of the fire, or in the shadow of the shanty itself. And still Jess and her man came not, and the Wolfhound was left in solitary possession. Once, when the heat of the day was past, Finn trotted down the trail to the towns.h.i.+p, and peered long and earnestly through the dog-leg fence in the direction of the "First Nugget." But he saw no trace of Jess or her man; and, for his part, he was glad to get back to the clear patch again, and to take his ease beside the gunyah.

He had recently struck up a more than bowing acquaintance with the koala that he had once dragged through a quarter of a mile of scrub to the gunyah, and was now in the habit of meeting this quaint little bear nearly every day. For his part, Koala never presumed to make the slightest advance in Finn's direction, but he had come to realize that the great Wolfhound wished him no harm, and, though his conversation seldom went beyond plaintive complainings and lugubrious a.s.sertions of his own complete in offensiveness, Finn liked to sit near the little beast occasionally, and watch his fubsy antics and listen to his plaint. Koala was rather like the Mad Hatter that Alice met in Wonderland; he was "a very poor man,"

by his way of it; and, though in reality rather a contented creature, seemed generally to be upon the extreme verge of shedding tears.

Another of the wild folk that Finn met for the first time in his life during these nine days, and continued to meet on a friendly footing, was a large native porcupine, or echidna. Finn was sniffing one afternoon at what he took to be the opening to a rabbit's burrow, when, greatly to his surprise, Echidna showed up, some three or four yards away, from one of the exits of the same earth. The creature's shock of fretful quills was not inviting, and Finn discovered no inclination to risk touching it with his nose; but, having jumped forward in such a way as to shut Echidna off from his home, they were left perforce face to face for a few moments. During those moments, Finn decided that he had no wish to slay the ant-eating porcupine, and Echidna, for his part, made up his exceedingly rudimentary little mind that Finn was a fairly harmless person. So they sat up looking at one another, and Finn marvelled that the world should contain so curious a creature as his new acquaintance; while Echidna doubtless wondered, in his primitive, p.r.i.c.kly fas.h.i.+on, how much larger dogs were likely to grow in that part of the country. Then the flying tail of a bandicoot caught Finn's attention, and the pa.s.sing that way of an unusually fat bull-dog ant drew Echidna from reflection to business, and the oddly ill-matched couple parted after their first meeting. After this, they frequently exchanged civil greeting when their paths happened to cross in the bush.

But, unlike the large majority of Australia's wild folk, Finn was exclusively a carnivorous animal, and this fact rather placed him out of court in the matter of striking up acquaintances in the bush, since meetings with the Wolfhound were apt, as a general thing, to end in that very close form of intimacy which involves the complete absorption of the lesser personality into the greater, not merely figuratively, but physically. Finn might, and frequently did, ask a stray bandicoot, or rabbit, or kangaroo-rat to dinner; but by the time the meal was ended, the guest was no more; and so the acquaintance could never be pursued further. Finn would have been delighted, really, to make friends with creatures like the bandicoot people, and to enjoy their society at intervals--when he was well fed. But the bandicoots and their kind could never forget that they were, after all, food in the Wolfhound's eyes, and it was not possible to know for certain exactly when his appet.i.te was likely to rise within him and claim attention--and bandicoots.

Therefore, full or empty, hunting or lounging, Finn was a scourge and an enemy in the eyes of these small folk, and, as such, a person to be avoided at all cost, and at all seasons.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Spurring his horse forward.]

The hunting in the neighbourhood of the gunyah was still amply sufficient for Finn's needs; and, as he continually expected the return of Bill and Jess, he did not forage very far from the clear patch. He generally dozed and rested beside the humpy during the afternoon, preparatory to hunting in the dusk for the kill that represented his night meal. It was on the evening of his tenth day of solitude, and rather later than his usual hour for the evening prowl, that Finn woke with a start in his place beside the gunyah to hear the sound of horse's feet entering the clear patch from the direction of the station homestead. There was no sign of Jess that nose or eye or ear could detect, but Finn told himself as he moved away from the gunyah that this was doubtless Bill, and that Jess would be likely to follow. As his custom was, where Bill was concerned, Finn took up his stand about five-and-twenty paces from the humpy, prepared gravely to observe the boundary-rider's evening tasks: the fire-lighting, and so forth. As the new-comer began to dismount, or rather, as he began to think of dismounting, he caught a dim glimpse of Finn's figure through the growing darkness. It was only a dim glimpse the man caught, and he took Finn for a dingo, made wondrous large in appearance, somehow, by the darkness. He was both astonished and exceedingly indignant that a dingo should have the brazen impudence to stand and stare at him, within thirty yards of camp, too. In his hand he carried a stock-whip, with its fifteen-foot fall neatly coiled about its taper end. Swinging this by the head of its fall, he flung it with all his might at Finn, at the same time rising erect in the saddle and spurring his horse forward at the gallop to ride the supposed dingo down.

"G-r-r-r, you thieving swine! I'll teach ye!"

The voice was strange to Finn, and very hoa.r.s.e and harsh. The Wolfhound cantered lightly off, and the rider followed him right into the scrub before wheeling his horse and turning back toward the camp. Before he moved Finn gave one snarling growl; and the reason of that was that the heavy b.u.t.t-end of the stock-whip handle had caught him fairly in the ribs and almost taken his breath away.

From the shelter of the bush, Finn peered for a long while at the camp from which he had been driven; and as he peered his mind held a tumult of conflicting emotions. He saw the man gather twigs and light a fire, just as Bill had been wont to do. But he knew now that the man was not Bill. He heard the man growling and swearing to himself, just as a creature of the wild does sometimes over its meals. As a matter of fact, this particular man had been removed from a post that he liked and sent to this place, because Bill had left the district; and he was irritable and annoyed about it.

Otherwise he probably would not have been so savage in driving Finn off. But the Wolfhound had no means of knowing these things.

All his life long, up till the time of his separation from the Master, Finn had been treated with uniform kindness and consideration, save during one very brief interval in Suss.e.x. Then, for months, he had been treated with what seemed to him utterly purposeless and reasonless cruelty and ferocity. From that long-drawn-out martyrdom had sprung his deep-rooted mistrust of man.

But it had been reserved for Wallaby Bill's successor to implant in Finn's mind the true spirit of the wild creature, by the simple process of driving him forth from the neighbourhood of civilization--such as it was--into the bush. Finn had been cruelly beaten; he had been tortured in the past. He had never until this evening been driven away from the haunts of men.

The writer of these lines remembers having once been driven himself, under a shower of sticks and stones, from a village of mountain-bred Moors who saw through his disguise. This being driven, hunted, shooed out into the open with blows and curses and scornful maledictions, is a singularly cowing sensation, at once humiliating and embittering. It is unlike any other kind of hostile treatment. It affected Finn more deeply and powerfully than any punishment could have affected him. Though infinitely less painful and terrible than the sort of interviews he had had with the Professor in his circus prison, it yet bit deeper into his soul, in a way; it produced an impression at least equally profound. He desired none of man's society, and during all the time that he had regarded the camp in that clearing as his home, he had never sought anything at man's hands, nor approached man more nearly than a distance of a dozen paces or so. But now he was savagely given to understand that even the neighbourhood of the camp was no place for him; that it was forbidden ground for him. He was driven out into the wild with contumely, and with the contemptuous sting of the blow of something flung at him. It was no longer a case of man courting him, while he carefully maintained an att.i.tude of reserve and kept his distance. Man had set the distance, and definitely p.r.o.nounced him an alien; driven him off. Man was actively hostile to him, would fling something at him on sight. Man declared war on him, and drove him out into the wild. Well, and what of the wild?

The wild yielded him unlimited food and unlimited interest. The wild was clean and free; it hampered him in no way; it had offered no sort of hostile demonstration against him. Nay, in a sense, the wild had paid court to him, shown him great deference, bowed down before him, and granted him instant lords.h.i.+p. (If Finn thought at all just now of the snake people, it was of the large non-venomous kind, of which he had slain several.) Altogether, it was with a curiously disturbed and divided mind, in which bitterness and resentment were uppermost, that the Wolfhound gazed now at the man sitting in the firelight by Bill's gunyah. And then, while he gazed, there rose up in him kindly thoughts and feelings regarding Jess, when she had played with him beside that fire; regarding Bill, when he had talked at Finn in his own friendly admiring way, and tossed the Wolfhound food, food which Finn had always eaten with an appearance of zest and grat.i.tude (even when not in the least need of food) from an instinctive sense of _n.o.blesse oblige_, and of the courtesy which came to him with the blood of a long line of kingly ancestors. Vague thoughts, too, of the Master drifted through Finn's mind as he watched the stranger at his supper; and, somehow, the circle of firelit gra.s.s attracted. Forgiveness came natural to the Wolfhound and, for the moment, he forgot the humiliation and the bitterness of being driven out as a creature of the wild, having no right to trespa.s.s upon the human environment.

Slowly, not with any particular caution, but with stately, gracious step, Finn moved forward toward the firelight, intending to take up his old resting-place, perhaps a score of paces from the fire. No sooner had Finn entered the outermost ring of dim firelight than the man looked up and saw, not the whole of him, but the light flickering on his legs.

"Well, I'll be teetotally d.a.m.ned if that ain't the limit!" gasped the man, as he sprang to his feet. He s.n.a.t.c.hed a three-foot length of burning sapling from the fire and, rus.h.i.+ng forward, flung it so truly after the retreating Wolfhound that it fell athwart his neck, singeing his coat and enveloping him from nose to tail in a cloud of glowing sparks. A stone followed the burning wood, and the man himself, shouting and cursing, followed the stone. But he had no need to run. The flying sparks, the smell of burned hair, the horrible suggestion of the red-hot iron bar--these were amply sufficient for Finn, without the added humiliation of the stone, and the curses, and the man's loud, blundering footfalls. The Wolfhound broke into a gallop, shocked, amazed, alarmed, and beyond words embittered. He snarled as he ran, and he ran till the camp was a mile behind him, beyond scent and hearing.

There was no mistaking this for anything but what it was. This was being driven out of the human world into the world of the wild with a vengeance. The burning sapling made a most profound impression upon Finn, and roused bitter hostility and resentment in him. The stock-whip and the stone were as nothing beside this thing--this fire that had been flung at him. From time immemorial men have frightened and chased wolves from their chosen neighbourhood with burning f.a.ggots. The thing is being done to-day in the world's far places; it was being done thousands of years before our era began.

Finn had never before experienced it, and yet, in some vague way, it seemed he had known of such a thing. His ancestors for fifteen hundred years had been the admired companions and champions of the leaders among men. But a thousand years before that--who knows? Our domestic pet dogs of to-day adhere still to a few of the practices (having no bearing upon their present lives) of their forbears of many, many centuries back. Certain it is that nothing else in his life had been quite so full of hostile significance for Finn as this fact of his having been driven out from the camp in the clear patch with a f.a.ggot of burning wood. This was man's message to him; thus, then, he was sent to his place, and his place was the wild.

Well!

The wild folk of that particular section of the Tinnaburra country, though they live to be older than the most aged c.o.c.katoo in all Australia, will never, never forget the strange happenings of that night, which they will always remember as the night of the madness of the Giant Wolf--only they thought of him as the Giant Dingo. For four mortal hours the Irish Wolfhound, who had been driven out from the haunts of men, raged furiously up and down a five-mile belt of Tinnaburra country, slaying and maiming wantonly, and implanting desperate fear in the hearts of every living thing in that countryside.

Once, in the farthest of his gallops, he reached the fringe of the wild, rocky hill country which lies behind this belt; and there, as luck would have it, he met in full flight one of the two dingoes that had escaped him on the day of the attack upon wounded Jess. It was an evil chance for that dingo. A fanged whirlwind smote him, and rended him limb from limb before he realized that the devastating thing had come, scattering his vital parts among the scrub and tearing wildly at his mangled remains. A mother kangaroo was surprised by the ghostly grey fury, at some distance from the rest of her small mob, and, though she fought with the fury of ten males of her species (bitterly conscious of the young thing glued to the teat in her pouch), she was left a torn and trampled ma.s.s of scarcely recognizable fur and flesh, crushed among scrub-roots.

Lesser creatures succ.u.mbed under the blinding stabs of Finn's feet; and once he leaped, like a cat, clear into the lower branches of a b.a.s.t.a.r.d oak tree, and pinned a 'possum into instant death before swinging back to earth on the limb's far side. He killed that night from fury, and not to eat; and when he laid him down to rest at length, on the rocky edge of a gully fully four miles from the camp, there was not a living thing in that district but felt the terror of his presence, and cowered from sight or sound of his flying feet and rending, blood-stained fangs. It was as the night of an earthquake or a bush fire to the wild folk of that range; and the cause and meaning of it all was that Finn, the Irish Wolfhound, had been hunted out of the men-folk's world into the world of the wild people.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XXIV

A LONE BACHELOR

If Finn had deliberately thought out a bad way of beginning his life as one of the wild folk, who have no concern at all with humans, he could have devised nothing much worse, or more disadvantageous to himself, than the indulgence of his wild burst of Berserker-like fury, after being driven out of the clear patch.

And of this he was made aware when he set forth the next morning in quest of a breakfast. Every one of his hunting trails in the neighbourhood of the encampment he ranged with growing thoroughness and care, without finding so much as a mouse with which to satisfy his appet.i.te. Even Koala and Echidna were nowhere to be found. It was as though a blight had descended upon the countryside, and the only living thing Finn saw that morning, besides the crows, was a laughing jacka.s.s on the stump of a blasted stringy-bark tree, who jeered at him hoa.r.s.ely as he pa.s.sed. Disconsolate and rather sore, as the result of his frenzied exertions of the night, Finn curled himself up in the sandy bed of a little gully and slept again, without food. The many small scavengers of the bush had already made away with the remains of the different creatures he had slain during his madness.

Finn did not know it, but hundreds of small bright eyes had watched him as he ranged the trails that morning; and the most of these eyes had in them the light of resentment, as well as fear. Finn had been guilty of real crime according to the standards of the wild; and, had he been a lesser creature, swift punishment would have descended upon him. As it was, he was left to work out his own punishment by finding that his hunting was ruined. These wild folk, who were judging Finn now, tacitly admitted the right of all flesh-eating creatures to kill for food. But wilful slaughter, particularly when accompanied by all the evidences of reckless fury, was a crime not readily to be forgiven, for it struck at the very roots of the wild folk's social system. It was not merely a cruel affliction for those needlessly slain, and their relatives (some of whom depended for life upon their exertions); but it was an affliction for all the rest, in that it spoiled hunting for the carnivorous, rendered feeding extremely difficult for the non-carnivorous, and generally upset the ordered balance of things which made life worth living for the wild people of that range. It was as disturbing to them, and more lastingly so, by reason of the comparative slenderness of their resources, as the pa.s.sage through a town of an armed giant, who was also a thief and a murderer, would be to humans. Finn had been feared and respected in that corner of the Tinnaburra; while, by some of the wild folk who, from one cause or another, were able to afford the indulgence in such an emotion, he had been admired. He was now feared and hated.

Now the hatred of some thousands of living creatures, even though they may all of them be lesser creatures than oneself, is a fearsome thing. Just as the wild people's methods of direct communication are more limited than ours, so their indirect methods are more perfect, more impressive, and swifter than ours. A drawing-room full of men and women have before now shown themselves tolerably capable in the matter of conveying a sense of their dislike for some one person. But humans waste a lot of their telepathic power in speech, and their most offensive method of conveying unspoken hatred to its object and making him feel an outcast, is as nothing by comparison with the wild folk's achievements in this direction. If you have ever studied the life of a kennel of hounds, for example, when the pack has made up its corporate mind that one of its members is for some reason unworthy of its traditions, you will remember what a masterly exposition you saw of the art of freezing out. The offending animal, unless removed in time, will positively wilt away and die under the withering blast of unspoken hatred and scorn with which it is encompa.s.sed. And hounds, from their long intercourse with talkative humans, have lost half their skill in this respect. The wild kindred have a way of making hatred tangible, perceptible in the air, and in inanimate nature. They can almost bewitch the flesh from off the hated creature's bones without ever looking at him, if a sufficient number of them are in agreement in their hating.

When Finn rose from his day sleep it was to realization of the uncomfortable fact that he was stark empty of food. (His first ejection from the camp on the previous evening had occurred before the evening kill, and, after the second ejection, Finn had been too furious to think of eating.) The next thing he realized--and this was before he had walked many hundred yards through the falling light of late afternoon--was the solid atmosphere of hatred which surrounded him in his own range of bush. He did not get the full sting of it at first--that bit into him gradually during the night but he was aware of its existence almost at once. And he found it singularly daunting. True, he was the undisputed lord of that range. No creature lived there that could think of meeting him in single combat. But the concentrated and silent hatred of the entire populace was none the less a thing to chill the heart even of a giant Irish Wolfhound.

The silence of the ghostly bush, in that brief half-light which preceded darkness, spoke loudly and eloquently of this hatred and resentment. The empty run-ways of the little gra.s.s-eating animals were full of it. The still trees thrust it upon Finn as he threaded in and out among their h.o.a.ry trunks. The sightless scrub glared hatred at him till the skin twitched over his shoulders, and he took to flinging swift glances to left and right as he walked--glances but little in keeping with his character as hunter, and more suggestive of the conduct of the lesser hunted peoples. When a long streamer of hanging bark rustled suddenly behind Finn, he wheeled upon it with a snarl; and the humiliation of his discovery of what had startled him partook of the nature of fear, when his gaze met the coldly glittering eyes of a bush-cat (whose body he could not discern in that dim light) that glared down at him from twenty feet above his head.

It was with a sense of genuine humility, and something like grat.i.tude, that Finn met Koala a few minutes later, pa.s.sing hurriedly--for him--between the trunks of the two trees in which he made his home at that time. Koala stopped at once when Finn faced him--not from any desire for conversation, but from fear to move--and waved his queer little hands in an apparent ecstasy of grief and perturbation, while protesting, as usual, what a lamentably poor and wholly inoffensive person he was, and what a tragic and dastardly act it would be if any one should hurt him. Finn whispered through his nose a most friendly a.s.surance that he had too much respect and affection for Koala to think of harming him, and the little bear sat up on his haunches to acknowledge this condescension, tearfully, while reiterating the time-honoured a.s.sertion that there was no more inoffensive or helpless creature living than himself. With a view to establis.h.i.+ng more confidence Finn lay down on his chest, with fore-legs outstretched, and began to pump Koala regarding the chilling att.i.tude of all the people of that range towards himself. In his own dolorous fas.h.i.+on Koala succeeded in conveying to Finn what the Wolfhound already knew quite well in his heart of hearts, that the att.i.tude he complained of was simply the penalty of his running amuck on the previous night. Finn gathered that the native-born wild people would never forgive him or relax their att.i.tude of silently watchful hatred; but that there were some rabbits who were feeding in the open a little farther on, in the neighbourhood of the clear patch.

Finn thanked Koala for his information, with a little forward movement of the muzzle, and walked off in a rather cheerless mood, while the bear wrung his little hands and moaned, preparatory to ascending the trunk of the giant red-gum upon whose younger leaves he meant to sup before retiring for the night in one of its hollow limbs. It was not for any pleasure in hunting, but because he was very empty, that Finn proceeded in the direction indicated by the bear. He had already developed the Australian taste in the matter of rabbits, and regarded their flesh with the sort of cold disfavour which humans reserve for cold mutton on its second appearance at table. Still, he was hungry now, and when he had stalked and killed the fattest of the bunch of rabbits he found furtively grazing a quarter of a mile from the clear patch, he carried it well away into the bush and devoured it steadily, from the hind-quarters to the head, after the fas.h.i.+on of his kind, who always begin at the tail-end of their meals. It was noticeable, by the way, that Finn approached the neighbourhood of the clear patch with reluctance, and got right away from it as quickly as possible.

During a good part of that night Finn strolled about the familiar tract of bush, which he had ranged now for many weeks, observing and taking note of all the many signs which, though plain reading enough for him, would have been quite illegible to the average man.

And he decided that what he saw was not good, that it boded ill for his future comfort and well-being. The simple fact was that he had outraged all the proprieties of the wild in that quarter, and was being severely ostracised in consequence. The lesser creatures were still sharper of scent and hearing than he was, and their senses all made more acute by their fear and indignation, they succeeded in keeping absolutely out of the Wolfhound's sight. It was shortly after midnight when a crow and a flying-fox saw Finn curl down to sleep in his sandy gully, and, by making use of the curious system of animal telepathy, of which even such ingenious humans as Mr. Marconi know nothing, they soon had the news spread all over the range. The lesser marsupials and other groundlings were glad to have this intelligence, and the approach of dawn found them all busily feeding, watchful only with regard to the ordinary enemies among their own kind, the small carnivorous animals and the snake people. Indeed, they fed so busily that a pair of wedge-tailed eagles who descended among them with the first dim approach of the new day, obtained fat breakfasts almost without looking for them, a fact which, unreasonably enough, earned new hatred for Finn among the circle upon which the eagles swooped.