"If I could only snare a good, lively one!" suddenly broke out Stern.
"What for?"
"Why, don't you see?" And with sudden inspiration he expounded. Together, eager as children, they planned. Beatrice clapped her hands with sheer delight.
"But," she added pensively, "it'll be a little hard on the wolf, won't it?"
Stern had to laugh.
"Yes," he assented; "but think how much he'll learn about the new kind of game he tried to hunt!"
Half an hour later a grim old warrior of the pack, deftly and securely caught by one hind leg with the slip-noosed leather cord, dangled inverted from a limb, high out of reach of the others.
Slowly he swung, jerking, writhing, frothing as he fought in vain to snap his jaws upon the cord he could not touch. And night grew horrible with the stridor of his yells.
"Now then," remarked Stern calmly, "to work. The moonlight's good enough to shoot by. No reason I should miss a single target."
Followed a time of frightful tumult as the living ate the dying and the dead, worrying the flesh from bones that had as yet scarcely ceased to move. Beatrice, pale and silent, yet very calm, watched the slaughter. Stern, as quietly methodical as though working out a reaction, sighted, fired, sighted, fired. And the work went on apace. The bag of cartridges grew steadily lighter. The work was done long before all the wolves had died. For the survivors, gorged to repletion, some wounded, others whole, slunk gradually away and disappeared in the dim glades, there to sleep off their cannibal debauch.
At last Stern judged the time was come to descend.
"Bark away, old boy!" he exclaimed. "The louder the better. You're our danger-signal now. As long as those poor, dull anthropoid brains keep sensing you I guess we're safe!"
To Beatrice he added: "Come now, dear. I'll help you down. The quicker we tackle that raft and away, the sooner we'll be home!"
"Home!" she repeated. "Oh, how glad I'll be to see our bungalow again! How I hate the ruins of the city now! Look out, Allan--you'll have to let me take a minute or two to straighten out in. You don't know how awfully cramped I am!"
"Just slide into my arms--there, that's right!" he answered, and swung her down as easily as though she had been a child. Her arms went round his neck; their lips met and thrilled in a long kiss.
But not even the night-breeze and the moon could now beguile them to another. For there was hard, desperate work to do, and time was short.