gh, and,
though he tried to save himself he fell. As he did so, he drove his
hunting-knife with all his force into the wolf's side.

What happened next was like a thunderbolt from a blue sky.

As the keen blade went home, Lone Wolf yelped and turned furiously on
his fallen foe; but before he could slash a second time, a huge black
body bounded through the air from the tangle of bushes on the right. The
thing was so utterly unexpected that the wolf was completely taken off
his guard. The great body, descending full upon him, bore him to the
ground.

If his assailant could have kept its hold, the reign of the Lone Wolf,
mightily sinewed though he was, would have been over for ever; but the
force of the creature's landing had been so great that it slightly lost
its balance. That slight loss saved the wolf's life. With a snarl of
mingled rage and pain, he tore himself from his enemy's clutch with a
tremendous wrench; then, not daring to face those terrible claws again,
he bounded off across the barren, leaving a trail of blood.

In the first moment of astonishment, Dusty Star had not recognised his
deliverer. Yet Goshmeelee it was, and no other, who now stood before
him, gazing at him reprovingly out of her little pig-like eyes.

It was exactly as if she had said:

"You are out of bounds. You have no business to be here. If I hadn't
happened to come in the nick of time you'd never have escaped to tell
the tale!"

Dusty Star was well aware that all this was perfectly true, even though
Goshmeelee didn't put it into plain Indian speech. Also he could see
that her rescue of him had been at the cost of some damage to herself.
In the brief moment of her grapple with the wolf, his long fangs had
seized. It was not a serious wound, but it bled. Goshmeelee, with her
immense practicalness, instantly produced from her mouth the washing
apparatus dreaded by her cubs, and began to lick the injured spot. Dusty
Star looked at her very solemnly with his big brown eyes.

"I never meant you to get hurt," he said in his throaty Indian voice. He
kept repeating the words over and over again.

If Goshmeelee had ever been examined in the tongues spoken at
Washington, London, Paris, and the other great centres of civilized
gabble, by the learned gentlemen so high up in the educational world
that it must make them dizzy to look down the precipices of their own
minds, she would have been regarded as a perfect "dreadnought" of a
dunce. But