same instant, too, recognition came to the Master, and
he knew his huge assailant to be no creature of the wild, no giant
wolf or dingo, but the beloved Wolfhound of his own breeding and
most careful, loving rearing. It was from some central recess of
his own personality that the Master's cry of "Finn, boy!" answered
the strange cry with which the Wolfhound came to earth at his feet.

But behind them was the pack, and in the pack's eyes what had
happened was that their leader had missed his kill; that fear had
broken his spring off short, and that now he was at the mercy of
the man who, a moment before, had been mere food. For a dingo, no
other task, not even the gnawing off of a limb caught in a trap,
could require quite so much sheer courage as the attacking of Man
in the open--man erect and unafraid. But Warrigal had never in her
life lacked courage, and now, behind her courage and her devotion
to her mate, there was hunger, red-toothed and slavering in her
ears; hunger burning like a live coal in her heart; hunger
stretching her jaws for killing, with an eagerness and a ferocity
which could not be denied. In the next instant Warrigal had flown
at the man's right shoulder with a fierce snarl which called those
of her kind who were not cowards to follow her or be for ever
accursed.

Warrigal's white fangs slashed down the man's coat-sleeve, and left
lines of skin and blood where the cloth gave. For one moment Finn
hesitated. Warrigal was his good mate, the mother of his dead
children, his loving companion by day and night, during long months
past. She concentrated in her own person all the best of his
kinship with the wild. There was mateship and comradeship between
them. As against all this, Warrigal's fangs had fastened upon the
sacred flesh of the Master, of the Man of all the world, who stood
for everything that was best in Finn's two-thousand-years-old
inheritance of intercourse with and devotion to human friends.

Next instant, and even as the biggest male dingo of the pack flew
at the man's other side, Finn pinned his mate to earth, and, with
one tremendous crunch of his huge jaws, severed her jugular vein,
and set her life's blood running over the parched earth.

In that moment, the pack awoke to realization of the strange thing
that had befallen them. They had been seven, pitted against a
single man, and he apparently in the act of ceasing to be erect
man, and becoming mere food. Now they were five--for