Warrigal's
life ebbed quickly from her--pitted against a man wakened to
erectness and hostility, and their own great leader; the great
Wolf, who had slain Lupus, their old fierce master, and even
Tasman, his terrible sire. It is certain that at another time the
pack would not have hesitated for one moment about turning tail and
fleeing that place of strange, unnatural happenings. But this was
no ordinary time. They were mad with hunger. Blood was flowing out
upon the earth before them. One of them had the taste of man's
blood on his foaming lips. This was not a tracking, or a killing in
prospect, but a fight in progress. The pack would never turn tail
alive from that fight.

The man had his back to the withered iron-bark now, and, besides
the long stick in his right hand, he held an open knife in his left
hand, as a long, fierce bitch found to her cost when she leaped for
his throat, fell short, and felt cold steel bite deep in her flank
as she sank to earth. And now the great Wolfhound warmed to his
work, with a fire of zeal which mere hunger itself could not have
lit within him. He was fighting now as never before since his fangs
met in his first kill in far-away Sussex. He was fighting for the
life of the Master, love of whom, long quiescent in him, welled up
in him now; a warm tide of new blood which gave strength to his
gaunt limbs and weight to his emaciated frame, such as they had
never known when he fought, full fed, with Lupus, or with Tasman,
on the rocky side of Mount Desolation. A tiger could hardly have
evaded him. His onslaught was at once terrible, and swift as
forked lightning. It seemed he slashed and tore in five separate
directions at one and the same time. But that was only because his
jaws flashed from one dingo's body to another with such rapidity
that the passage between could not be followed by the eye. This
meant that his fangs could not be driven deep enough for instant
killing. There was not time. But they went deep, none the less; and
blood streamed now from the necks and shoulders of the dingoes that
succeeded one another in springing at the man and the Wolfhound.

Two of the dingoes owed their deaths to the long knife-blade of the
man; but even as the second of them received the steel to the hilt
below his chest-bones, the man sank, utterly exhausted and bleeding
freely, on his knees, and from there to the ground itself. This
drew the attention of the three surviving dingoes from the lea