of the cutting pain it caused her. The three
dingoes leaped backward, each three paces, like clockwork
machinery. Jess glared out at them from under her thatch of bark,
her fangs uncovered, her nose wrinkled, and her short close hair on
end. The dingoes watched her thoughtfully, pondering upon her
probable reserves of strength. Then, too, there was her shelter;
that was endowed with some of the mysterious atmosphere which
surrounds man. But the biggest of the dingoes had once stolen half
a sheep from a shepherd's humpy, and no disaster had overtaken him.
He advanced three feet before his companions, and that spurred them
to movement. Again Jess essayed a bark; and this time the
predominant note in her cry was so clearly one of anguish that the
three dingoes took it almost as an encouragement, for Nature had
not endowed them with a sense of what we call pity for weakness or
distress. They thought Jess's cry was an appeal for mercy, and
mercy was foreign to their blood. As a fact, poor Jess would rather
have died a dozen deaths than call once upon a dingo for mercy. It
was the pain in her lacerated body, resulting from the attempt to
bark, that had introduced that wailing note into her cry. And now,
as the dingoes drew nearer, inch by inch, the black kangaroo-hound
braced herself to die biting, and to sell her flesh as dearly as
might be.

As the snout of the foremost dingo, the largest of the three,
showed under the eave of Jess's shelter, she managed to hunch her
wounded body a little farther back against the side of the gunyah,
meaning thereby to draw the dingo a little farther in, and give
herself a better chance of catching some part of him between her
jaws. With a desperate effort she drew back her fore-legs a little,
raising herself almost into a sitting position against the side of
the gunyah. The faint groans that the pain of moving forced from
her were of real service to her in a way, for they made the
foremost dingo think she was in her death agony, and gave a sort of
recklessness to his plunge forward under the thatch. He meant to
end the business at once and slake his blood thirst at the hound's
throat. Well he knew that hounds do not groan before a dingo's
onslaught unless their plight is very desperate.

In the instant of the big dingo's plunge for Jess's throat, several
things happened. First, Jess's powerful jaws came together about
the thick part of the dingo's right fore-leg, and took firm hold
the