The bearded man was rising.  He was half on his feet when Alan was at his throat again, and they went down together.  The girl heard blows, then a heavier one, and with an exclamation of triumph Alan stood up.  By chance his hand had come in contact with his fallen pistol.  He clicked the safety down; he was ready to shoot, ready to continue the fight with a gun.

“Come,” he said.

His voice was gasping, strangely unreal and thick.  She came to him and put her hand in his again, and it was wet and sticky with tundra mud from the spring.  Then they climbed to the swell of the plain, away from the pool and the willows.

In the air about them, creeping up from the outer darkness of the strange twilight, were clearer whispers now, and with these sounds of storm, borne from the west, came a hallooing voice.  It was answered from straight ahead.  Alan held the muddied little hand closer in his own and set out for the range-houses, from which direction the last voice had come.  He knew what was happening.  Graham’s men were cleverer than he had supposed; they had encircled the tundra side of the range, and some of them were closing in on the willow pool, from which the triumphant shout of the bearded man’s companion had come.  They were wondering why the call was not repeated, and were hallooing.

Every nerve in Alan’s body was concentrated for swift and terrible action, for the desperateness of their situation had surged upon him like a breath of fire, unbelievable, and yet true.  Back at the willows they would have killed him.  The hands at his throat had sought his life.  Wolves and not men were about them on the plain; wolves headed by two monsters of the human pack, Graham and Rossland.  Murder and lust and mad passion were hidden in the darkness; law and order and civilization were hundreds of miles away.  If Graham won, only the unmapped tundras would remember this night, as the deep, dark kloof remembered in its gloom the other tragedy of more than half a century ago.  And the girl at his side, already disheveled and muddied by their hands—­

His mind could go no farther, and angry protest broke in a low cry from his lips.  The girl thought it was because of the shadows that loomed up suddenly in their path.  There were two of them, and she, too, cried out as voices commanded them to stop.  Alan caught a swift up-movement of an arm, but his own was quicker.  Three spurts of flame darted in lightning flashes from his pistol, and the man who had raised his arm crumpled to the earth, while the other dissolved swiftly into the storm-gloom.  A moment later his wild shouts were assembling the pack, while the detonations of Alan’s pistol continued to roll over the tundra.