n its back, its eyes half open and glazed,
its jaws parted in a sardonic grin. Ward grinned also as he looked at
it. He gave the carcass a poke with his boot-toe and glanced up the
hill toward the rocks.

"Maybe you were playing lookout for the bunch," he said, "and then
again, maybe you ain't hooked up with a family; though from the looks,
you ain't weaned your pups yet--till just now." Leaving the wolf where
she lay, he climbed to the rocks where he had first seen her. They lay
high piled, but he could see daylight through every open space and so
knew there was no den. The base rested solidly on the yellow earth.

Ward stood and looked at the slope below. To the right and half-way
down was a ten-foot ledge, and below that outcropped a steep bank of
earth. He could not see what lay immediately below, but while he was
still staring, a pointed, gray nose topped by pert, gray ears poked
cautiously over the bank, hovered there sniffing, and dropped back out
of sight.

"You little son-of-a-gun!" he exclaimed and dug in his heels on the
sharp descent. "I've got you right where I want you, now."

The den was tunneled into the earth just over another ledge, which
underlay the bank there, and gave a sheer drop of ten or fifteen feet
to the slope below, where a thick fringe of blossoming cherry bushes
grew close and hid the ledge so completely that the den had been
perfectly concealed from across the gulch. It was a case where the
shovel was needed. Ward "flagged" the den by throwing his coat down
before the opening and went back to where Rattler waited. He was
jubilant over his good luck. With an average litter of pups, and the
old wolf besides, the bounty would make those two calves the most
profitable animals in the bunch, reckoned on the basis of money
invested in them.

With the shovel he enlarged the tunnel, and between strokes he heard
the whimpering of the pups. The sound sobered his face to a pitying
determination. Poor little devils, it was not their fault that they
were born to be a menace rather than a help to mankind. He was sorry
for their terror, while he dug back to where they huddled against the
farthest wall of their nest. He worked fast that he might the sooner
end their discomfort, and his forehead was puckered into a frown at the
harsh law of life that it must preserve its existence at the expense of
some other life. Yet he dug back and back, burrowing into the bank
toward the whimperi