y listened.

"Quick!" Jimmie's mother screamed. "They're at Jimmie!"

With an axe in his hand, and with merciless wrath in his heart, Jim
Grimm descended upon the dogs. He stretched the uppermost dead. A
second blow broke the back of a wolf. The third sent a dog yelping to
the outhouse with a useless hind leg. The remaining dogs decamped.
Their howls expressed pain in a degree to delight Jim Grimm and to
inspire him with deadly strength and purpose. Tog and the surviving
wolf fled.

"Jimmie!" Jim Grimm called.

Jimmie did not answer.

"They've killed you!" his father sobbed. "Jimmie, b'y, is you dead?
Mother," he moaned to his wife, who had now come panting up with a
broomstick, "they've gone an' killed our Jimmie!"

Jimmie was unconscious when his father carried him into the house. It
was late in the night, and he was lying in his own little bed, and his
mother had dressed his wounds, when he revived. And Tog was then
howling under his window; and there Tog remained until dawn, listening
to the child's cries of agony.

* * * * *

Two days later, Jim Grimm, practicing unscrupulous deception, lured
Tog into captivity. That afternoon the folk of Buccaneer Cove
solemnly hanged him by the neck until he was dead, which is the custom
in that land. I am glad that they disposed of him. He had a noble
body--strong and beautiful, giving delight to the beholder, capable
of splendid usefulness. But he had not one redeeming trait of
character to justify his existence.

"I wonder why Tog was so bad, dad," Jimmie mused, one day, when, as
they mistakenly thought, he was near well again.

"I s'pose," Jim explained, "'twas because his father was a wolf."

Little Jimmie Grimm was not the same after that. For some strange
reason he went lame, and the folk of Buccaneer Cove said that he was
"took with the rheumatiz."

"Wisht I could be cured," the little fellow used to sigh.

CHAPTER III

_In Which Little Jimmie Grimm Goes Lame and His Mother
Discovers the Whereabouts of a Cure_

Little Jimmie Grimm was then ten years old. He had been an active,
merry lad, before the night of the assault of Tog and the two
wolves--inclined to scamper and shout, given to pranks of a kindly
sort. His affectionate, light-hearted disposition had made him the
light of his mother's eyes, and of his father's, too, for, child
though he was, lonely Jim Grimm found him a comforting companio