hat came with that call of
the blood. And to-night it rode over all his fear and hatred. Out there
was COMPANY. Whence the cry came the wild brethren were running two by
two, and three by three, and there was COMRADESHIP. His body quivered.
An answering cry rose in his throat, dying away in a whine, and for an
hour after that he heard no more of the wolf-cry in the wind. The pack
had swung to the west--so far away that their voices were lost. And it
passed--with the moon straight over them--close to the shack of
Pierrot, the halfbreed.

In Pierrot's cabin was a white man, on his way to Fort O' God. He saw
that Pierrot crossed himself, and muttered.

"It is the mad pack," explained Pierrot then. "M'sieu, they have been
KESKWAO since the beginning of the new moon. In them are the spirits of
devils."

He opened the cabin door a little, so that the mad cry of the beasts
came to them plainly. When he closed it there was in his eyes a look of
strange fear.

"Now and then wolves go like that--KESKWAO (stark mad)--in the dead of
winter," he shuddered. "Three days ago there were twenty of them,
m'sieu, for I saw them with my own eyes, and counted their tracks in
the snow. Since then they been murdered and torn into strings by the
others of the pack. Listen to them ravin'! Can you tell me why, m'sieu?
Can you tell me why wolves sometimes go mad in the heart of winter when
there is no heat or rotten meat to turn them sick? NON? But I can tell
you. They are the loups-garous; in their bodies ride the spirits of
devils, and there they will ride until the bodies die. For the wolves
that go mad in the deep snows always die, m'sieu. That is the strange
part of it. THEY DIE!"

And then it was, swinging eastward from the cabin of Pierrot, that the
mad wolves of Jackson's Knee came into the country of the big swamp
wherein trees bore the Double-X blaze of Jacques Le Beau's axe. There
were fourteen of them running in the moonlight. What it is that now and
then drives a wolf-pack mad in the dead of winter no man yet has wholly
learned. Possibly it begins with a "bad" wolf; just as a "bad"
sledge-dog, nipping and biting his fellows, will spread his distemper
among them until the team becomes an ugly, quarrelsome horde. Such a
dog the wise driver kills--or turns loose.

The wolves that bore down upon Le Beau's country were red-eyed and
thin. Their bodies were covered with gashes, and the mouths of some
frothed blood. They did not run a