while visiting the
settlement, had died, and left to pay for his board and burial only
his pack and his dog. The dog, so fiercely devoted to him as to have
made the funeral difficult, was a long-legged, long-haired, long-jawed
bitch, apparently a cross between a collie and a Scotch deerhound. So
unusual a beast, making all the other dogs of the settlement look
contemptible, was in demand; but she was deaf, for a time, to all
overtures. For a week she pined for the dead peddler; and then, with
an air of scornful tolerance, consented to take up her abode with the
village shopkeeper. Her choice was made not for any distinction in the
man, but for a certain association, apparently, with the smell of the
contents of her late master's pack. For months she sulked and was
admired, making friends with neither man, woman, nor child, and
keeping all the village curs at a respectful distance.

A few days, however, before the arrival of the journeying wolf, a new
interest had entered into the life of the long-jawed bitch. Her eyes
resumed their old bright alertness, and she grew perceptibly less
ungracious to the loafers gathered around the stove in the back store.
She had entered upon a career which would have ended right speedily
with a bullet in her reckless brain, but for an utterly unlooked-for
freak of fate. She had discovered that, if every night she could hunt,
run down, and kill one sheep, life might again become worth living,
and the coarse-clodded grave in the little lonely cemetery might be
forgotten. It was not the killing, but the chase, that she craved. The
killing was, of course, merely the ecstatic culmination. So she went
about the sport with artistic cunning. To disguise her trail she came
upon the flocks from the side of the forest, as any wild beast would.
Then she would segregate her victim with a skill born of her collie
ancestry, set it running, madden it to the topmost delirium of fear
and flight, and almost let it escape before darting at its throat and
ending the game with the gush of warm blood between her jaws.

Such had been her adventures for three nights: and already the
settlement was concerned, and already glances of half-formed suspicion
had been cast upon the long-legged bitch so innocently asleep by the
stove, when the wandering wolf arrived upon the outskirts of the
settlement. The newcomer was quick to note and examine the tracks of a
peculiarly large dog--a foeman, perhaps, to prove not unwor