The Project Gutenberg EBook of Wolf's Head, by
Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

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Title: Wolf's Head
1911

Author: Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

Release Date: November 19, 2007 [EBook #23549]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOLF'S HEAD ***

Produced by David Widger

WOLF'S HEAD

By Charles Egbert Craddock

1911

It might well be called the country of the outlaw, this vast tract of
dense mountain forests and craggy ravines, this congeries of swirling
torrents and cataracts and rapids. Here wild beasts lurked out their
savage lives, subsisting by fang and prey,--the panther, the bear, the
catamount, the wolf,--and like unto them, ferocious and fugitive, both
fearsome and afraid, the man with a "wolf's head," on which was set a
price, even as the State's bounty for the scalps of the ravening brutes.

One gloomy October afternoon, the zest of a group of sportsmen, who had
pitched their camp in this sequestered wilderness, suffered an abatement
on the discovery of the repute of the region and the possibility of
being summoned to serve on a sheriff's posse in the discharge of the
grimmest of duties.

"But he is no outlaw in the proper sense of the term. The phrase has
survived, but the fact is obsolete," said Seymour, who was both a prig
and a purist, a man of leisure, and bookish, but a good shot, and vain
of his sylvan accomplishments. "Our law places no man beyond the pale
of its protection. He has a constitutional right to plead his case in
court."

"What is the reward offered to hale him forth and force him to enjoy
that privilege--five hundred dollars?" asked Bygrave, who was a
newspaper man and had a habit of easy satire.

"Of course he would never suffer himself to be taken alive." Purcell's
vocation was that of a broker, and he was given to the discrimination
of chances and relative values. "Therefore he is as definitely _caput
lupinum_ as any outlaw of old. Nobody would be held accountable for
cracking his 'wolf's head' off, in the effort to arrest him for the sake
of the five hundred dollars. But,