Then she fled, and from a post of vantage in the house she would watch
the two. An intimacy surpassing the friendships and devotions of human
beings existed between them. She had seen the wolf lie with his great
head on the foot of his master and the unchanging eyes fixed on Barry's
face--and so for an hour at a stretch in mute worship. Or she had
watched the master go to the great beast to change the dressing--a thing
which could not be done too often during the day. She had seen the swift
hands remove the bandages and she had seen the cleansing solution
applied. She knew what it was; it stung even the unscratched skin, and
to a wound it must be torture, but the wolf lay and endured--not even
shuddering at the pain.
It had seemed to her that this was the great test. If she could make the
wolf lie like this for her, then, truly, she might feel herself in some
measure admitted to that mystic fellowship of the three--the man, the
stallion, and the wolf. If she could, with her own unaided hands, remove
the bandages and apply that solution, then she could know many things,
and she could feel that she was nearer to Whistling Dan than ever
before.
So she had come, time and again, with the basin and the roll of cloth
in her arm, and she had approached with infinite patience, step by step,
and then inch by inch. Once it had taken a whole hour for her to come
within a yard of the beast. And all that time Black Bart had lain with
closed eyes.
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