As they talked, the very atmosphere of the room seemed to change. It was tense, poignant as if with the remembered lusts and passions of an earlier, more savage world. The little sounds of a room in which two men talk together—the stir of moving bodies, the creak of furniture, the soft whisper of easy breathing seemed lacking here. Both were motionless as two serpents that lay in their sunbaths on their ledges, and thus an insidious stillness dropped down in the little intervals between their sentences. The almost total absence of motion on the part of those two conspirators could not have been ignored. It implied only one thing: that their thoughts were so commanding and engrossing that even the almost unconscious movements of the body were suspended. What motion there was, was mostly only the deepening of the lines on their dark faces. This tenseness, this silence, these submerged passions pointed to but one end. And the crime would not be outside the pale of the laws of man alone, but the basic laws of the forest as well. The feast of death was to take place after all,—the same delight of which Broken Fang, the puma, was even then dreaming beside the sheep camp on the far headwaters of Silver Creek. But men, not wild beasts, were to be the debauchers. “It’s the simplest way yet,” Fargo had whispered. The veins stood out in his brutal hands. “That pack of mine are devils—there’s no other word for ’em—and once they get goin’, they’d sweep through that flock of woollies like lightning. You’ve heard of sheep-killin’ dogs before——” “Yes—but your dogs ain’t never been sheep killers,” the Mexican protested. “What of that? They can learn fast enough. They’d tear a man to pieces just as quick if I didn’t keep ’em chained. I don’t see why I didn’t teach ’em long ago—they’d be worth a thousand coyotes for keepin’ this country clear of sheep. Maybe you don’t know about sheep-killing dogs. You might not have heard that in the sheep country in the East one dog that once got the habit will spoil the business for miles around. You see, José, most animals don’t kill more than they need; it’s an instinct with ’em, for if they did they’d pay for it by going hungry later. Nature has a way of teachin’ the wild varmints what to do. But dogs have been domesticated so long that they’ve forgotten most of their instincts, and once they get started, once the killin’ fever gets a hold of ’em, they don’t know when to quit. There’s many a dog that has slashed a hundred sheep in one night—jumpin’ from one to another, tearing out one throat after another, and runnin’ the rest till they die. It’s kind of a madness that gets a hold of ’em once they get started. True, my dogs ain’t ever got the habit, but one taste will teach ’em. And they’re half-wild already, as any man well knows who seen ’em tear that little black cub-bear to pieces last week. Just tore him to little scraps of black fur.”