ss than a yard from Finn's
ears, and her snarl was the snarl which announces a kill. It was
not for others to kill where Finn led. And yet something--he could
not tell what, since he knew nothing of heredity--something held
the great Wolfhound's muscles relaxed; he could not take the leap
which was wont to precede killing with him. Again Warrigal snarled.
The man was rising to his feet. A great fear of being shamed was
upon Finn. With that snarl in his ears advance was a necessity. He
moved forward quickly, but without a spring. And in that instant
the man, having actually got upon his feet, swung round toward the
pack with his long stick uplifted, and Finn gathered his
hind-quarters under him for the leap which should end this
hunting--this long, strange hunting in a desert of starvation.

The Wolfhound actually did spring. His four feet left the ground.
But, with a shock which jarred every nerve and muscle in his great
frame, they returned to earth again, practically upon the exact
spots they had left. His sense of smell, never remarkable for its
acuteness in detail, had told Finn nothing, save that his quarry in
this strange hunting was man. But the Wolfhound's eyes could not
mislead him, and in the instant of his suddenly arrested
spring--the spring which it had taken every particle of strength in
his great body to check--he had known, with a sudden revulsion of
feeling which positively stopped the beating of his heart, that
this man the pack had trailed was none other than the Man of all
the world for him; the man whose person was as sacred as his will
to Finn; the Master, whose loss had been the beginning and the
cause of all the troubles the Wolfhound had ever known.

There had been the beginning of the killing snarl in Finn's throat
when he sprang, and as he came to earth again at the man's feet,
possessed and almost paralysed by his amazing discovery, that snarl
had ended in as curious a cry as ever left the throat of
four-footed folk since the world began. It was not a bark this cry,
still less a snarl or growl, and it could not have been called a
howl. It was more like human speech than that of the wild people;
and, human or animal, there was no mistaking it for anything less
than soul-speech. It welled up into the morning air from the very
centre of that in Finn which must be called his soul--the something
which differentiated him from every other living thing on earth,
and made him--Finn.

And in that