beside him until his companion regained his feet. This the fugitive noted dully, wondering vaguely if the starving tramp-dog was destined to profit by his finish even as he had hoped to profit—to live—by the death of the dog.
It was by accident that the Man's dimming eyes all at once lighted on something that instantly fixed them in a stare of incredulity. On the vagabond's pendulous chops was the purpling stain of fresh blood, and, adhering to the corners of his great mouth, was the unmistakable gray-brown fur of a rabbit. In the Man, unbelief gave way to conviction, and conviction to instant and insane passion.
"Why—damn you!" the one brute arraigned the other, "you've actually caught a rabbit—and sneaked away and eaten every hell-fired bit of it by yourself! ... And—it was the drink I gave you that enabled you to catch it——"
The dog shrank from the Man instinctively as the latter thrust out a trembling forefinger in accusation.
"That rabbit would have meant—would have meant life to me," whined the fugitive despairingly, "and you—a miserable, good-for-nothing tramp-dog whose life ain’t worth a copper—you sneaked off and—ate—a—whole—rabbit!"
The Man's disheartened tone was like a wail of one who faces execution. An odd glitter had suddenly dissipated the listless, lifeless look in his heavy-browed eyes.
The vagabond shrank yet farther away from his accuser, as though he understood and repented. But the Man was obdurate, resolved. He leveled the Winchester evenly at his companion’s head, but, suddenly remembering the value of silence, he lowered the weapon, leaned it conveniently against, a tree and selected a club.
No sooner was the club in the Man's hands than the tramp-dog rose guardedly from his haunches, all fear seemingly having left him. The Man saw this and knew by logic what the brute knew by instinct, but as always the higher animal felt confident of his superiority over the lower one.
"I'd kill you now even if I didn't have to," wheezed the Man.
The tramp-dog’s bloodshot eyes were steadily following the club. His small pointed ears stood forward in a strangely menacing expression and the shaggy hair along his great dark-gray back bristled savagely.
The Man surveyed the dog and comprehended; but already they had begun circling and the rifle was between him and the dog that seemed all of a sudden to have strangely changed.
"Great God!" choked out the Man as a horrible misgiving resolved itself into seeming certainty; "it's a wolf!"
The vagabond advanced a pace and paused, his sharp muzzle pointing, a foreleg raised intently. He might have been some great, disheveled pointer stalking game. The Man stood irresolute, club clenched in hands.
"You were a damn strange looking dog from the first," he muttered, remembering.
A little courage came back to him as the lapsing seconds stayed the crisis and he recalled the vagabond’s wound and his weakened condition. However, he had lately regaled himself with a rabbit, bitterly thought the Man.
Barely two paces separated the outcast from his unwisely discarded Winchester. Holding his club before him as a shield, he gave a sudden spring for the weapon and salvation. It was the crucial moment. His fingers were almost closing upon the rifle when a flash of gray went up from the ground in a diagonal streak that might have been a tongue of lightning.
There was a single half-stifled growl, followed by a sputtering cry of horror, and they went down together, the Man and the dog, the one conscious of a mighty tearing at his whiskery throat and instinctively fumbling for the heavy-bladed knife he carried, the powerful jaws of the other gripping with all the desperation of brute ferocity, as though the tramp-dog comprehended the true life-and-death nature of the contest.
The Man fought as shrewdly and as calculatively as though his adversary were a man and not a brute. He had reason to know the value of a good knife, and at last he got hold of and held the weapon, open-bladed, in his free hand; but because of the precious seconds necessarily lost in bringing it into play, the slashes he finally drove at the wolf-dog's exposed flank were so feeble that they scarcely more than penetrated the tangled mat of the vagabond's shaggy coat.
At midnight the wolf-dog, after swift, noiseless flight came to a standstill before a bush-screened cave in a rugged wood, many miles from the scene of his battle with the outlaw. The pale light of a winter moon, filtering down through naked tree-tops, robed him now as if in a plaid coat of curiously patterned silver and ebony, fantastically outling the sharp angles of his fleshless body and recasting him in a periphery as of some dread werewolf, grim, gaunt and terrible.
One watching him now could not have said with certainty whether he was dog or wolf. Ever and anon he peered back uneasily along his trail and listened, after the wary manner of his late companion. But behind him there was naught but moonlight and silence and distance interminable.
As he stood motionless, gazing away to the rear, something of queer contentment after the day's work seemed to grow into the vagabond's aspect. Something in his very poise, nay, in the way he held his swollen and disfigured head, seemed to announce that with him all was well. Once again he moved forward, then once more he paused and ran his bloodshot eyes back over the moon-silvered trail: Silence, brooding, mysterious.
He lifted his wounded head and contemplated the westering moon with an expression that was somehow not unlike that which depicts the processes of a reasoning human mind. His mouth was a little way open, his snow-white teeth showing between lips that were drawn back in the unmistakable semblance of a wide and exultant grin! After a moment he cast a final glance backward, then trotted forward as silently as a shadow and disappeared in the cave.
In the ragged halfbreed the gentle ancestry of the dooryard dog had fought an all-day fight with the savage strain of the great timber-wolf, but the more fiercely vital of the contending elements had won at last, and the vagabond, guilty now of a tragic and awful thing of which his lingering dog instinct vaguely accused him, had gone back forever to the wary wanderers from which he had descended, and from whose silent lurking places in the shadowy forests he had strayed for the space of a generation.
