usion that a certain delicacy of sentiment had
governed the wolves in their strange forbearance, while others
honestly believed that the pack had been specially sent by Providence
to guard the child through the forest on his sacred errand. But all,
whatever their views, agreed in flouting the young schoolteacher's
uninteresting suggestion that perhaps the wolves had not happened, at
the moment, to be hungry.

As it chanced, however, even this very rational explanation of Kane's
was far from the truth. The truth was that the great wolf had profited
by his period of captivity in the hands of a masterful man. Into his
fine sagacity had penetrated the conception--hazy, perhaps, but none
the less effective--that man's vengeance would be irresistible and
inescapable if once fairly aroused. This conception he had enforced
upon the pack. It was enough. For, of course, even to the most
elementary intelligence among the hunting, fighting kindreds of the
wild, it was patent that the surest way to arouse man's vengeance
would be to attack man's young. The intelligence lying behind the
wide-arched skull of the Gray Master was equal to more intricate and
less obvious conclusions than that.

Among all the scattered inhabitants of the Quah-Davic Valley there was
no one who devoted quite so much attention to the wonderful gray wolf
as did the young school-teacher. His life at the Burnt Brook
Cross-Roads, his labors at the little Burnt Brook School, were neither
so exacting nor so exciting but that he had time on his hands. His
preferred expedients for spending that time were hunting, and
studying the life of the wild kindreds. He was a good shot with both
rifle and camera, and would serve himself with one weapon or the other
as the mood seized him. When life, or his dinner, went ill with him,
or he found himself fretting hopelessly for the metropolitan
excitement of the little college city where he had been educated, he
would choose his rifle. And so wide-reaching, so mysterious, are the
ties which enmesh all created beings, that it would seem to even
matters up and relieve his feelings wonderfully just to kill
something, if only a rabbit or a weasel.

But at other times he preferred the camera.

Naturally Kane was interested in the mysterious gray wolf more than in
all the other prowlers of the Quah-Davic put together. He was quite
unreasonably glad when the plans for a concerted campaign against the
marauder so suddenly fell thro