Silver eyed him calmly.
“I won’t have to point to the knife,” he said. “Frosty will find it.”
Frosty was sniffing the knife sheath that was suspended from the belt of his master. Now, with a shake of his head, he backed away once more and pointed his nose into the wind, his eyes half closed.
Lovell fell silent. Half of his doubt fell away from him in an instant as he saw Frosty shift a bit across the wind and point into it again. But the wind blew from the lower part of the camp. It could not carry the scent of the knife to Frosty in his present position.
He shifted again, falling right back across the clearing to the farther side, close to the trees. He disappeared into the shrubbery.
“He’s gone!” Lovell chuckled. “There’s a trick that he misses, old son!”
Frosty, at that moment, reappeared, trotted straight up to the stump on which the knife was lying, and picked it up gingerly by the handle, his lips writhing away from the detested and terrible nearness of the sharp edge of the steel.
He carried that knife across to his master, laid it cautiously down at his feet, and then sprang back and shook out his mane with a strong shudder of his whole body. He did not need to speak words in order to express his strong detestation for work of this nature.
Lovell stood up and swore in admiration, astonishment, and some regret.
“That’s the damnedest thing I ever saw,” he admitted. “What else had he got in that book of his?”
“Well, here’s Parade,” said Silver. “K he smells this bit of a leather rein, he’ll go out and lead in Parade for me. That saves me a good many steps and a lot of time. I can let Parade range farther when I have Frosty to help me with him. I can let him range out of the distance of my whistle. He gets better grass a lot of the time that way. Want to see him bring in Parade?”
“No,” said Lovell, scowling. “But you said that he’d run deer for you. I might mention that we ain’t got any fresh meat on deck, and there’s deer up there in the woods, or else I’m a liar. Did you say that he’d run in deer for you?”
“Not every time. Sometimes he can’t find ‘em, and sometimes they sprint away too fast for him and turn off to one side or the other, if they suspect that he’s trying to drive them in a distinct direction. A wolf isn’t very fast, you know. Frosty can’t keep close to a stag that’s under full way.”
“Well,” said Lovell, “I’d like to see what Frosty can do with the job. If he shows me one deer out of those woods —well, I’ll eat my hat.”
Silver regarded his companion for a moment out of narrowed eyes. Then he remarked:
“I don’t want you to eat your hat. I’d rather see you eating venison. Come on. Frosty!”
He led the way with the wolf out of the camp to the edge of the woods, from which broad meadows extended toward a distant cloud of forest half a mile away. Now Silver showed Frosty and let him sniff at a strip of fur on the key ring, and waved him straight ahead.
Frosty made off in a line at a wolf’s lope. On the edge of the trees he paused to look back. Silver waved to him again, and the wolf disappeared straightway.
“We’ll get down behind this brush and wait,” said Silver, and dropped down to a comfortable position, with his rifle in hand. Lovell grinned dubiously and took up a position beside his companion, his own Winchester at the ready.
“Kind of hot here,” said Lovell. “But maybe we’ll only be half baked before we get tired of waiting for Frosty to turn up something out of those trees. There! Look there! He’s out in that patch of clearing, running down the slope, not straight ahead through the trees. Now he’s out of sight again!”
“He has to round in behind the wind, you see,” suggested Silver.
“You mean that he’s got brains enough to do that?” exclaimed Lovell almost angrily.
“You see,” said Silver, “he hunted for himself for a long time, and he never came near starvation. I suppose there isn’t much about deer hunting that he doesn’t know. We’ll wait a while and see!”
The minutes went on slowly. And after a time Lovell lifted his nasal but not unmusical voice in a song. It was barely ended before he heard Silver say:
“There you are!”
Looking across toward the opposite trees, he saw a fine stag dash out into the sunshine, slow up, and then bolt straight ahead as Frosty came bounding out in a hot pursuit.
Not straight toward the brush, but a little to the left of the two men the deer was fleeing.
“You take the shot,” said Silver.
Lovell, widely agape, got to his knees. The nearest the deer would come, on its present line of flight, was some hundred yards away from the brush. When it came to about that range, Lovell tried for it. But perhaps his excitement unsteadied his hand. At any rate, he missed. The deer, at the report of the rifle, merely lengthened its strides for the trees which were just ahead. As it reached them. Silver fired in turn, but the deer at once bounded out of view.
“Too bad!” said Lovell. “Too bad that we both missed him so clean. Maybe we had too much wolf in our eyes. Going to call in Frosty? Or will he come in off a blood trail as hot as that one?”
“He’d come in fast enough,” said Silver. “But there’s no need to call him. The deer is dead just inside the trees.”
“Dead?” said Lovell. “It was running faster than ever, the last I seen.”
“The last leap was the death leap,” said Silver. “Come and see.”
It was as he said. His bullet had clipped the stag right through the shoulder and the heart, and the deer lay dead, with lolling tongue and glassy eyes, just within the rim of the trees. Frosty sat panting at the head of the kill; he had not touched the fresh meat.
A new sort of awe came over Lovell.
“Silver,” he said, “no wonder that folks are scared of you. If you can make horses think for you and wolves hunt and fetch and carry for you!”
“You’ll see harder things done in any circus,” answered Silver. “And I have a lot of spare time on my hands for the teaching.”
“Then teach Frosty to like me, and to do what I tell him to do,” suggested Lovell. “Every time I happen to come too close to him he acts as though he wanted to take my leg off!”
Silver shrugged his shoulders.
“I forgot to tell you one thing,” he said. “Frosty learned to trust me against his will. I had the luck to find him down and out, and while he was getting his strength back, I managed to teach him that he could lean on me. Teach him the same thing, Lovell, and he’ll be as good a friend to you as he ever was to me.”
“Otherwise,” said Lovell, “he’s going to keep on looking at me like venison on the hoof?”
“Well,” said Silver, “poor Frosty can only know a man by what he’s seen him do.”
There was enough in that speech to make Lovell suddenly stop talking and mind his business of cutting up the deer.
XII—WAYLAND’S QUEST
High up on Iron Mountain, high above the forests that dwindled to a low wall of green, high above the iron-colored rocks that extended beyond the timber line, high above the little lakes, in the region of perpetual snow, Oliver Wayland had travelled steadily on for several days, searching every recess, patient, enduring cold hunger, doing without sleep by night and with very little food or rest by day.