engulfed him now. Peg and Cripp were as sane as himself, yet a moment past they had been stricken before his very eyes. It had been very real, and Breed started suddenly from the knoll and headed for the base of the hills five miles away, nor did he stop until he was far back among their sheltering ridges.

With the coming of the night he felt the loss of the two old coyotes who had traveled with him for the past three weeks. They had been normal when he saw them last and as this latter impression was the stronger he knew that he would find them untouched by madness; yet the vividness of the dream lingered with him and held him back from the low country. He howled once and started on a solitary hunt through the hills. The cry drifted faintly to the flats below and reached the ears of Cripp and Peg. They started instantly in the direction from which it came.

The chain of hills in which Breed hunted was but an outcropping spur, extending thirty miles eastward at right angles from the main bulk of the hills, and he found no meat. The elk and deer were high up in the parent range and would stay there until heavy snows drove them down to winter in the valleys of the lower hills. Breed worked up the slope until he reached the crest of the divide. He prowled along the bald ridge, undecided which course to take, then whirled and faced back in the direction from which he had come. Five miles below him a coyote had raised his voice; another answered. By traveling steadily Cripp and Peg had covered much ground since Breed's first cry of the night had reached their ears and the two coyotes were ten miles within the first folds of the hills and still seeking the yellow wolf, the leader of the pack.

Breed cupped his lips, his head stretched forth and his muzzle depressed to a line slightly below the peak of his shoulders as he sent forth the hunting cry to summon his loyal band. An hour later Cripp and Peg were with him, the three of them swinging west along the divide toward the rough mass of the main range of hills. Morning found them climbing through a matted jungle of close-growing spruce and down-timber.

Breed chose a ridge that lifted above the trees and there curled up for the day in a clump of stunted sage. Coyotes hunt in the full glare of the noonday sun as readily as at night and Cripp and Peg slept a bare two hours before starting once more on the hunt. They found small game less abundant in the high hills than in the flats and they scoured the surrounding timber without success, returning at last to bed down near Breed on the open ridge. Hunger drove Breed from his bed before the sun had set and he headed deeper into the hills, the two coyotes following, even though they had small liking for this country which seemed devoid of meat.

The yellow wolf sampled the cross currents of air which drifted in from each branching gulch. He crossed the cold trail scent of several deer but was in no mood for following a long trail so passed them by. It was the actual warm body scent he sought. He stopped suddenly with uplifted nose. The shifting breezes had carried the deer scent to his nostrils,—one brief flash and it was gone. Breed tacked back and forth across the wind, caught it again and held it, following the ribbon of scent upwind as easily as a man would follow a blazed trail through the timber. Two hundred yards from the start he sighted his prey, a fork-horn buck grazing slowly along under the trees. Breed turned his eyes to either side to determine the location of Cripp and Peg but they had suddenly vanished from sight.

He crept toward the fork-horn, standing without the moving of a muscle whenever the young buck lifted his head, advancing swiftly when he dropped it again to feed. The wind held steadily from the deer to him and Breed drew up to within fifty feet. The buck lifted his head and looked off in all directions, not from present uneasiness but from his never-failing caution, then reached for another bite of grass, and even as the downward motion was started Breed launched forward in a silent rush.

The fork-horn caught one backward slanting glimpse of him and fled just as the wolf's teeth clashed a bare inch short of his hamstring, and Breed was off in pursuit of an animal whose speed matched his own. This prey was no awkwardly galloping steer but a nimble beast that swept ahead in twenty-foot bounds, and after fifty yards Breed was still ten feet behind. Then a yellow streak darted over a windfall jam and Peg flashed at the buck. The deer turned almost at right angles in his fright, and as he turned Breed's teeth slashed his leg, but not deep enough to cripple, and the chase was on again. Another fifty yards and Cripp leaped from behind a spruce trunk and struck gamely for a leg hold. The flying speed of the buck jerked him clear of the ground, broke the hold of his teeth and threw him end over end. But he had retarded the deer for one half-second and the yellow wolf closed his jaws on a leg with all the force he could throw into the drive. Breed too was thrown, but the deer was turned again and running with less than half his former speed, one hind leg powerless. Peg was angling across to turn him still another time but Breed overhauled him first and slashed at the other leg, and as the deer rolled downhill the three-legged coyote dodged the churning hoofs and fastened on his throat.

Collins had journeyed far into the hills to replenish his supply of meat. It was scarcely dark under the trees when he heard the breed-wolf and two coyotes howl together,—thirty miles back in the heart of the hills!

"There now!" he exclaimed. "I've been telling 'em right along that the coyotes would take to the hills some day. Those breed-wolves—they'll teach 'em to live in the hills."

When Breed had eaten his fill from the deer he headed back for the low country. The effect of the mad dream was waning before the fact that Peg and Cripp were with him in reality, sane and normal in every way. The three of them were sluggish and heavy with meat and they traveled slowly with frequent halts for sleep.

The following night Breed's howl sounded again in the foothills and a score of coyotes answered him from far and near. The coyote tribe had learned that when the yellow wolf prowled the range there would be fresh beef for all. Each night the number of shadowy forms that padded through the sage round his kills increased, waiting until the wolf should leave and they could close in and finish it to the last mouthful. They grew bolder from the fact that two of their own kind fed with Breed, and on the first night after his return from the hills three others found courage to come in and feed upon his kill before he left it. Within a week he was accepted unreservedly as a member of the coyote clan.

Each succeeding evening Breed found more and more coyotes gathering swiftly toward him at the first hunting cry of the night, spreading out over a quarter-mile front and running with him on the chase, knowing there would be meat in plenty at the end of the run.

Collins noted a curious change in the coyote signs in his immediate neighborhood. He still found their tracks singly or in pairs, where they wandered in all directions through the sage in their hunts for jacks, or padded thick round some spot where they had killed a calf, but he soon discovered that whenever he found a track which the breed-wolf had left the night before he had only to swing out to the right or left to find the trails of many coyotes pointing in the same direction,—a general movement of coyotes over a wide front. Collins had heard many tales of late which