Page:The Cross Pull.pdf/11

 of the hills and taking heavy toll from the cows on the ranges; wolves of a kind the stockmen had never known, larger even than those of Siberia. Ranchers spoke of a new and savage breed. They distorted the word “logo”—the Shoshone Indian name for the baldface grizzly—to “lobo,” meaning grizzly wolf.

The ranchmen organized a war of extermination against this savage lobo tribe, placing an ever-increasing bounty on each one, until an even hundred was posted as the price on every scalp.

This created a new occupation for men, and soon the professional wolfer was scouring the breaks of the badlands with poison, trap and gun for the last few survivors of a vanishing breed.

Old Dad Kinney was a wolfer and he had reason to believe that a single family of loboes were denned somewhere within forty miles of his spring camp. He knew, too, that Clark Moran was in the badlands on the same quest.

Between them was an agreement whereby Kinney felt there was no possible way for him to lose. If either of them found the den, Moran was to have one pup alive and Kinney was to draw the bounty on the rest.

Moran seemed more interested in some lost herd