Page:The Cross Pull.pdf/75

 gasps; the yellow eyes were set and bloodshot and the savage jaws dripped froth which spattered back and dried on his breast and sides.

He kept ahead across the spur and down the other side. Just at dark Kinney quit the trail at the foot of the slope and stopped at a ranch house overnight. The dim suspicion which had haunted his mind all day as to the identity of the wolf now crystallized into a certainty. The size of the tracks; the fact that no man had ever heard this lobo howl; the sense of familiarity he had felt at each distant glimpse of the big gray shape that had fled before him all that day; the periodical raids dove-tailing with certain absences from home; all these pointed to one thing—Flash.

Five miles away Flash was stretched out in the snow. After raiding all night he had been ruthlessly harried for more than a hundred miles, starting when gorged with meat, a time when a wolf’s endurance is at its lowest ebb.

Before daylight he started on, heading for the fancied safety of the BarT.

Once there he kept his eye on the low ridge half a mile away over which he had come. No wind had sprung up to blot his tracks and late in the