Page:The Cross Pull.pdf/19

 chain and ground his teeth against the steel thing that clamped his foot.

Later they had passed near a steer his father had killed two nights before. Two coyotes lay there, dead and bloated, while a third ran in crazy circles and went into series of horrible convulsions with a rattling cough in his throat before he died. He knew then that it was unsafe even to return to previous kills of their own.

All over the range the wolf family had found tempting bits of meat and fat. Flash had not known that each rider was furnished with strychnine to poison the carcass of every dead steer on the range; that they cut off these bits of meat, filled them with the deadly crystals and scattered them about for the coyotes to pick up.

His parents had known—and a wicked snap warned each pup away from every such tempting morsel that they found. One of his sisters had broken over and swallowed just one tiny scrap, flattening her ears in anticipation of feeling her mother’s teeth at this infraction of the rules.

Instead, agony had clutched her from within. The rest of them had watched her die as the mad coyote had.

From these things Flash had come to know that