Two of the forms were unfamiliar, but one of them was known and beloved of old. Hugh couldn’t mistake the trim figure, the curved undeveloped horns of the first of the three. No break appeared in the fiery wall toward the east, yet Spot—his own unmistakable form and his wool unsinged—ran steadily toward them in plain sight of all three. It was as if he had returned from the shadow world, a ghostly savior in the hour when his old followers hovered at the gulf of death. A great wave of hope swept the man’s frame. But in an instant he saw the explanation. Spot and his ewes had not come unaccompanied. A tawny form loped swiftly behind them. It was Broken Fang, the monarch of the cougars, and he had simply driven the three bighorn down into his own hunting ground at last. “If there’s a way in, there must be a way out,” Hugh spoke sharply. “Stand still, so the cougar’ll come in range.” Suddenly he seemed to know that in some invisible and secret way that he could not trace, the whole issue of life and death had centered down to his war with Broken Fang. He couldn’t have told why. Dimly he knew that after days and hours of desperate pursuit, following still the ancient herd-instinct and perhaps impelled by the memories of certain crises, when he had run with the domestic sheep, Spot had come here for protection from the tawny creature that threatened him. After that desperate foe was conquered, he would pay his debt to Hugh,—not through conscious impulse but by the mandates of some great law of the wilderness and life that no man may name or read. Hugh drew his revolver, but its bullet was not for Shep. And the three of them crouched low, waiting for the cat to come in range. He gave no thought to the fact that a pistol is usually a futile weapon indeed against such a mighty, strong-lived animal as a great cougar. He knew by the animal’s frantic leaps that he was desperate with hunger, stark mad from the long chase that had never seemed to end, and frenzied, perhaps, by the fire. The felines do not often chase their game in open pursuit; but in his madness he had forgotten his hunting cunning. He saw the motionless flock and came at a charge. Spot hurried around the flank of the flock and, watching the cougar’s advance, Hugh was wholly blind to the fact that every one of those three thousand sheep lifted their lowered heads. The cougar came almost straight toward him, as fast as an African lion in the charge. He had emerged from the brush only a little more than a hundred yards distant, and half of the space between had already been crossed. But still Hugh held his fire. He knew that only at a point-blank range would the little pistol bullet stop that wild charge.