Ben lighted match after match until he had absorbed every word.  Then he folded the paper and placed it in his pocket; but the action did not in the least take his eyes from the words.  He could still see them, written in fire.  They were branded on his spirit.

He stood wholly motionless for a space of almost a minute, as if listening.  The heat back of his eyes was more intense now.  The red coals were about to burst into flame.  All the blood of his huge body seemed to be collecting there, searing his brain.

The moon was no longer white in the sky.  It had turned a fiery red.  The stars were red too,—­all of them more red than the Star of War.  “I want you to make them pay,” a voice said clearly in his ears.  “Never stop till you’ve done it.”

And now Ben was no longer pale.  His face was no longer hard and set.  Rather it was dark—­dark as dark earth.  His eyes glowed like coals beneath his black brows.  He was not standing still and lifeless now.  He was shivering all over with the blackest hate, the most deadly fury.

“Make them pay,” he said aloud again, “and never stop till you’ve done it.”

A sudden snarl from the lips of the wolf drew his eyes downward.  Heaven help him; for the moment he had forgotten Fenris!  But he must not forget him again.  They had work to do, the two of them.

Fenris was no longer whining disconsolately.  His master’s fury had passed to him, and Ben looked and saw before him not the docile pet, but the savage beast of the wild.  The hair was erect on his shoulders, his lips were drawn, too; he was crouched as if for battle.  The eyes, sunken in their sockets, were red and terrible to see.  Yet he was still Ben’s servant.  That quality could never pass from him.  The eyes of two met,—­the wolf and the man.

At that instant the little tongue of flame that had been mounting in Ben’s brain burst into a dreadful conflagration.  It was the explosion at last, no less terrible because of its silence—­because the sound of the least, little wind was still discernible in the distant thickets.  He dropped to his knees before the wolf, seizing its head in a terrific grasp.  He half jerked it off its feet, till he held it so that its eyes burned straight into his.

“Fenris, Fenris!” he breathed.  “We’ve got to make them pay.  And we must not stop till we’re done.”

It was more than a command.  It had the quality of a vow.  And now, as they knelt, eyes looking into eyes, it was like a pagan rite in the ancient world.

Their separate identities were no longer greatly pronounced.  They were not man and beast, they were simply the wolves of the forest.  The old qualities most often associated with manhood—­gentleness, forbearance, mercy—­seemed to pass away from Ben as a light passes into darkness.  Only the Wolf was left, the dominant Beast—­that darker, hidden side of himself from which no man can wholly escape and which civilization has only smothered, as fresh fuel smothers a flame.  Not for nothing had his fellows known him as “Wolf” Darby; and now the name was true.