Hugh turned from him to find a strange stir and excitement among the sheep. It seemed to him that in those invisible ways no man may trace, a knowledge and a message was being passed from one to another; and a new hope and spirit was sweeping the flock. There was no concerted movement as yet. Still the sheep stood motionless, but their heads were raised. The only moving forms were those of Spot and his ewes, running along the flank of the flock. And suddenly Spot turned back in the direction that he had come. And every animal in that flock of three thousand leaped after him in pursuit. The whole expanse of white lurched forward like an avalanche starting from the high peaks. Hugh cried out in irrepressible wonder, and thrill after thrill coursed like electricity through his frame. An unspeakable rapture flooded his being; and he whirled about to find a white flame—no less miraculous than this sudden sweeping-forward of the flocks—mounting in Alice’s face. The dog raced forward, barking. By instinct rather than reason the shepherds understood. Their old leader had for the moment at least returned to the sheep; they rallied as instinctively as soldiers at the sight of their beloved general, and they were ready to follow him even into the flame. It made no difference that he was leading straight toward the flaming wall to the east, a dreadful region where the fire raged fiercely and whence without his leadership they would have been afraid to go. They ran as if with renewed spirit. Perhaps they remembered him of old and gave him their trust. Perhaps he brought them word of some new hope that lay even in the jaws of death. Swiftly the flock fell into its old formation, the strongest in front, every black marker in its place. They swept like a foam-covered sheet of water into the red dusk of the distant forest. “Come!” Hugh shouted. “Spot’s showing us the way.” CHAPTER XXXI “The Little People show the way,” was the saying of a more credulous race in an older West; and Hugh knew its truth at last. This was no blind lead,—the westward course of the bighorn ram in the van of the sheep flock. He led them straight to a pass that only the wild creatures knew, a course already taken by such of the animals as had been trapped between the converging walls of flame and through which Broken Fang had pursued him. The instincts of the lesser folk had served when Hugh’s own conscious intelligence and knowledge had failed.