sorry. And if I was you--I'd take him out in a nice quiet place and
shoot him."

He turned, with the intention of securing the gun from an inner room. He
did not even reach the door. It was as if both of them were struck
motionless, frozen in odd, fixed attitudes, by a shrill scream for help
that penetrated like a bullet the thin walls of the house.

Instinctively both of them recognized it, unmistakably, as the piercing
cry of a woman in great distress and terror. It rose surprisingly high,
hovered a ghastly instant, and then was almost drowned out and
obliterated by another sound, such a sound as left Ben only wondering
and appalled.

The sound was in the range between a growl and a bay, instantly
identifying itself as the utterance of an animal, rather than a human
being. And it was savage and ferocious simply beyond power of words to
tell. Ben's first thought was of some enormous, vicious dog, and yet his
wood's sense told him that the utterance was not that of a dog. Rather
it contained that incredible fierceness and savagery that marks the
killing cries of the creatures of the wild.

He heard it even as he leaped through the door in answer to the scream
for aid. His muscles gathered with that mysterious power that had always
sustained him in his moments of crisis. He took the steps in one leap,
Morris immediately behind him.

"Fenris is loose," he heard the man say. "He'll kill some one----!"

Ben could still hear the savage cries of the animal, seemingly from
just behind the adjoining house. A girl's terrified voice still called
for help. And deeply appalled by the sounds, Ben wished that the rifle,
such a weapon as had been his trust since early boyhood, was ready and
loaded in his hands.

He raced about the house; and at once the scene, in every vivid detail,
was revealed to him. Pressed back against the wall of a little woodshed
that stood behind her house a girl stood at bay,--a dark-eyed girl whose
beautiful face was drawn and stark-white with horror. She was screaming
for aid, her fascinated gaze held by a gray-black, houndlike creature
that crouched, snarling, twenty yards distant.

Evidently the creature was stealing toward her in stealthy advance more
like a stalking cat than a frenzied hound. Nor was this creature a
hound, in spite of the similarity of outline. Such fearful, lurid
surface-lights as all of them saw in its fierce eyes are not
characteristic of the soft, brown orbs of the dog, anc