the
wolf-heart and the wolf-belly, and against them that queer hunger for the
love and the touch of man. Sheila could not tell if it were hunger or
loyalty that was creeping up to her in the body of the beast. She kept
her gun leveled on him. When he had come to within two feet of her, he
paused. Then, from behind him rose the starved baying of his brothers.
Sheila looked up. They were bounding toward her, all wolf these--but more
dangerous after their taste of human blood than wolves--to the bristling
hair along their backs and the bared fangs. Again she fired. This time
she struck Wreck's paw. He lifted it and howled. She fired again. Brenda
snapped sideways at her shoulder, but was not checked. There was one shot
left. Sheila knew how it must be used. Quickly she turned the muzzle up
toward her own head.

Then behind her came a sharp, loud explosion. Brenda leapt high into
the air and fell at Sheila's feet. At that first rifle-shot, Berg fled
with shadow swiftness through the trees. For the rest, it was as though
a magic wall had stopped them, as though, at a certain point, they fell
upon death. Crack, crack, crack--one after another, they came up,
leapt, and dropped, choking and bleeding on the snow. At the end Sheila
turned blindly. A yard behind her and slightly above her there under
the pines stood Hilliard, very pale, his gun tucked under his arm, the
smoking muzzle lowered. Weakly she felt her way up toward him, groping
with her hands.

He slid down noiselessly on his long skis and she stood clinging to his
arm, looking up dumbly into his strained face.

"I heard your shots," he said breathlessly. "You're within a hundred
yards of my house.... For months I've been trying to make up my mind to
come to you. God forgive me, Sheila, for not coming before!"

Swinging his gun on its strap across his shoulder, he lifted her in his
arms, and, like a child, she was carried through the silence of the
woods, all barred with blood-red glimmers from a setting sun.

CHAPTER XII

THE GOOD OLD WORLD AGAIN

Hilliard carried Sheila into the house that he had built for her and laid
her down in that big bedroom that "got the morning sun." For a while it
seemed to him that she would never open her eyes again, and when she did
regain consciousness she was so prostrate with her long fear and the
shock of Miss Blake's death that she lay there too weak to smile or
speak, too weak almost to breathe. Hilliard turned nurse