And then, all of a sudden, she was set shivering. For the voice had done with the song and, at the end, with a great unexpected upgathering of sound was poured forth into a long-drawn-out call that was like nothing on earth save the howling of a wolf. The night call throbbed and billowed across the disturbed silences and all of a sudden was gone and the night was again hushed and still.
"There you have one of the two good reasons why men call him Timber-Wolf," said Deveril with a grunt.
She scarcely heard. Somewhere, deep down within her, that golden outpouring, that rush of fierceness at the end, echoed and lived on.
Bruce Standing--Timber-Wolf, as he exulted in being called--was a man of few friends and many enemies. In and about Big Pine men disliked him wholeheartedly; many hated him so that they would have been glad to know that he was dead. And this was chiefly because he jeered at them and overrode them; because at every opportunity, going out of his way to make opportunity more often than not, he thrust them aside and trod his unobstructed path through and over them, setting his heel upon many; because he spat upon their laws and made his own. And he, in his turn, held them in high contempt simply because always they stood aside for him. Those few who did not hate him were the handful of hard men whom, in the working out of his wide, overweening ambitions, he had drawn to him like so many feudal henchmen; they were, in their lesser degrees, of his stamp; they belonged in their hearts to an older day and a wider frontier; there were scores taking his pay whose blood ran hot and lawless.
So to-night he came riding down the winding trail from his mountains, singing. Thus he shot his spirit across the miles ahead of him, to invade Big Pine before his coming, to taunt before he brought his hard eyes to mock at them. He had received his word and his warning, and made his retort in the one way possible to him.
The road in front of the Gallup House, leading on to the pines and the aloof jail where Mexicali Joe glared out, was thronged. Half a dozen bonfires had been started, and in the ruddy light men stirred restlessly. Their talk was becoming purposeful; they gathered in knots about men who were showing impatient signs of initiative; they had murmured and were looking this way and that, over their shoulders, shifting their feet as they gave increasingly free expression to their determination. They were working themselves up to the pitch of defiance of the law, as represented by Sheriff Jim Taggart; as yet no man cared to be first and still they looked frequently at the deputy sheriff with the rifle across his arm, and meant to set Mexicali Joe free. A man broke away from one of these groups and ran back to the Gallup House, to carry warning to Taggart.