at
the stars were the lighted lanterns of a million men searching for him;
and sometimes he lay with his head strained high listening to the
strange silence of the mountains and the night which has a pulse in it
and something whispering, whispering forever in the distance. Hunted men
have heard it and to Alcatraz it was equally filled with charm and
terror. What made it he could not tell. Neither can men understand.
Perhaps it is the calling of the wild animals just beyond ear shot. That
overtone of the mountains troubled and frightened Alcatraz on his first
night; eventually he was to come to love it.

He was up in the first grey of the dawn hunting for food and he found it
in the form of bunchgrass. He had been so entirely a stable-raised horse
that this fodder was new to him. His nose assured him over and over
again that this was nourishment, but his eyes scorned the dusty patches
eight or ten inches across and half of that in height, with a few taller
spears headed out for seed. When he tried it he found it delicious, and
as a matter of fact it is probably the finest grass in the world.

He ate slowly, for he punctuated his cropping of the grass with glances
towards the mountains. The Eagles were growing out of the night, turning
from purple-grey to purple-blue, to daintiest lavender mist in the
hollows and rosy light on the peaks, and last the full morning came over
the sky at a step and the day wind rose and fluffed his mane.

He regarded these changes with a kindly eye, much as one who has never
seen a sunrise before; and just as he had always made the corral into
which he was put his private possession, and dangerous ground for any
other creature, so now he took in the down-sweep of the upper range and
the big knees of the mountains pushing out above the foothills and the
hills themselves modelled softly down towards the plain, and it seemed
to Alcatraz that this was one great corral, his private property. The
horizon was his fence, advancing and receding to attend him; all between
was his proper range. He took his station on a taller hilltop and gave
voice to his lordliness in a neigh that rang and re-rang down a hollow.
Then he canted his head and listened. A bull bellowed an answer fainter
than the whistle of a bird from the distance, and just on the verge of
earshot trembled another sound. Alcatraz did not know it, but it made
him shudder; before long he was to recognize the call of the lofer
wolf, that gr