Page:The Cross Pull.pdf/14

 most the same conclusion but in different ways.

Kinney linked the strange note with a renegade Scotch sheep dog he had seen traveling with the coyotes two years before.

“That she wolf is half coyote and half dog,” he said.

Moran, too, had noted the coyote shrill and also that he experienced no wolf shiver from the sound.

“A cross,” he reflected. “Part coyote and part dog.”

The lobo does not call often, and not until half an hour before dawn did the sound come again. It awakened the three men, and each prepared his breakfast and was off upon his business of the day.

While Kinney and Moran resumed their tireless, systematic search for the wolf den, Brent headed his horses for a far divide. Beyond it lay the Land of Many Rivers, where, for a hundred miles, there was no human habitation known to men; yet Brent had twelve horses packed out with flour and supplies.

Ten days later Moran sat cross-legged on the ground with a third-grown wolf pup between his knees. The lobo pup was wrapped securely in a sack, tied round and round with heavy cord and with only his head protruding from the roll.