and down the coyote scale. One after
another added his voice to the chorus until it seemed that the swelling
volume could be produced by no less than a full thousand musical prairie
wolves scattered through the foothills for a score of miles.

Wild music to the ears of most men, the song of flat wastes and deserts
and limitless horizons, freighted with a loneliness which is
communicated to man in a positive ache for companionship,--and which
carries a wealth of companionship in itself for those who have lived so
long under the open skies that the song of the desert choir comes to
them as a lullaby.

It moved Collins, the wolfer, to quiet mirth. Always it affected him
that way, this first clamorous outburst of the night. He read in it a
note of deep-seated humor, the jeering laughter of the whole coyote
tribe mocking the world of men who had sworn to exterminate their kind.

"The little devils!" Collins chuckled. "The little yellow devils! Men
can't wipe 'em out. There'll be a million coyotes left to howl when the
last man dies."

From this oft-repeated prophecy Collins was known to every stockman in
three States as the Coyote Prophet, the title a jeering one at first,
then bestowed with increasing respect as men saw many of his prophecies
fulfilled. The coyote's larger cousin, the wolf, ranged the continent
over while the coyote himself was strictly a prairie dweller. For twenty
years Collins had predicted that wolves would disappear in settled
districts while the coyote would survive; not only survive but increase
his range to include the hills and spread over the continent from the
Arctic to the Gulf. There were rumors of coyotes turning up in Indiana.
Then came the tale that a strange breed of small yellow wolves had
appeared in Michigan. Those sheepmen who summered their sheep in the
high valleys of the western mountains complained that stray coyotes quit
the flats and followed them into the hills to prey upon the flocks. The
buffalo wolves that had once infested the range country were gone and it
was seldom that any of the big gray killers turned up on the open range
except when the pinch of cold and famine drove a few timber wolves down
from the north. Men saw these things and wondered if all of Collins'
sweeping prophecies would come to pass. In the face of conditions that
had placed a value on the coyote's pelt and a bounty on his scalp, there
was no apparent decrease in the numbers of the yellow horde from