out of
the black depths of his heart. Now, a dog snarls from not far down in
its throat, but the noise of an angered wild beast rolls up out of its
very entrails--a passion of hate and defiance. And when she heard that
sound, or when she saw the still more terrible silent rage of the beast,
Kate Cumberland's spirit failed, and she would shrink back again to a
safe distance.

She was not easily discouraged. She had that grim resolution which comes
to the gambler after he has played at the same table night after night,
night after night, and lost, lost, lost, until, playing with the last of
his money, he begins to mutter through his set teeth: "The luck _must_
change!" So it was with Kate Cumberland. For in Black Bart she saw the
only possible clue to Whistling Dan. There was the stallion, to be sure,
but she knew Satan too well. Nothing in the wide world could induce that
wild heart to accept more than one master--more than one friend. For
Satan there was in the animal world Black Bart, and in the world of men,
Dan Barry. These were enough. For all the rest he kept the disdainful
speed of his slender legs or the terror of his teeth and trampling
hoofs. Even if she could have induced the stallion to eat from her hand
she could never have made him willing to trust himself to her guidance.
Some such thing she felt that she must accomplish with Black Bart. To
the wild beast with the scarred and shaggy head she must become a
necessary, an accepted thing.

One repulse did not dishearten her. Again and again she made the trial.
She remembered having read that no animal can resist the thoughtful
patience of thinking man, and hour after hour she was there, until a new
light in the eye of the wolf-dog warned her that the true master was
coming.

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--n