year to
year.

Collins listened to the coyote clamor and knew that they had come to
stay. The concert was suddenly hushed as a long-drawn wolf howl, faint
from distance, drifted far out across the range. Collins turned in his
blankets and peered through the window at the black bulk of the
mountains to the north of him, towering clear and distinct in the
brilliant moonlight.

"If you come down out of those hills I'll stretch your pelt," the wolfer
stated. "I'll pinch your toes in a number four."

The wolf whose howl had occasioned this assertion was even then
considering the possibilities of which Collins spoke. Men called those
of his kind breed-wolves, half coyote and half wolf. He stood on the
high divide which was the roughly separating line between the haunts of
the two tribes whose blood flowed in his veins,--all wolf except for the
yellow fur that marked him for a breed. The coyote voices lifted to him
and Breed read them as the call of kind; for although he had spent the
past ten months with the wolf tribe of his father his first friendships
had been formed among his mother's people on the open range. The acrid
spice of the sage drifted to his nostrils and combined with the coyote
voices to fill him with a homesick urge to revisit the land of his
birth.

But he would not go down. Breed knew well the dangers of the open range;
the devilish riders who made life one long gamble for every wolf that
appeared; he had gruesome recollections of the many coyotes he had seen
in traps. But those things gave him small concern. It was still another
menace--the poison baits put out by wolfers--which held him back. Not
that he feared poison for himself, but coyotes writhing in convulsions
and frothing at the mouth had always filled him with a terrible dread.
It was an epidemic of this sort which had driven him to leave the
sagebrush land of the coyotes for the heavily timbered country of the
wolves. The memory of it lingered with him now. Would he find these
stricken, demented creatures there?

Breed moved down the south slope of the hills at last, the sage scent
luring the coyote in him, but moved slowly and with many halts
occasioned by the wolf suspicion which urged him to turn back. When dawn
lifted the shadows from the low country, Breed was prowling along the
first rim of the hills.

Two dirt-roofed log cabins showed as toy houses, small from distance,
and he could see the slender threads of smoke ascending from o