re again.
She repaired to the spot at once after leaving the cabin and waited for
him to come.

For three nights in succession Shady made her pilgrimage to meet her one
friend among the world of men. Breed could not unravel the mystery of
these visits. He could only know the actual that reached him over the
trails of his physical senses. Sights, scents and sounds were facts to
him. Those senses combined to show him that the unnatural visits were
real,--that Shady actually entered the lair of a man and came back
smelling strong of him. Yet when she was with him Breed felt a sense of
unreality in his memories of those visits, partaking of the same vague
qualities that dreams possessed for him after waking.

But he fathomed it at last, evidence that his brain came from his coyote
mother, a brain that is capable of constructive reasoning, of taking two
facts which the physical senses have verified and evolving a third from
them,--the association of ideas.

His nose told him that there was something in Shady's scent that was
similar to that left by the dog pack. His eyes had proved that those
dogs were the companions of men. Eyes, ears and nose testified that
Shady visited the haunts of men and was accepted as a friend. His nose
further told him that Shady was half coyote, and her voice added proof
of this. From out this fragmentary assortment of facts Breed found a
satisfactory answer. He knew that Shady was of the wild, yet that she
was also linked with the world of men, thus combining two things which
in the past had seemed widely separate, a chasm too wide to span,
dividing the animals of the wild from those belonging to man.

Each recurring visit confirmed this fact. Shady missed two nights, but
on the third she headed for the cabin with the coming of night. The
comparative warmth of early winter had given way to the gripping,
penetrating cold of January. Breed's appetite increased with a
corresponding drop in temperature and he was hungry. But from Shady's
actions he knew that she was seized with one of those queer lapses which
called her back to former ways and he delayed the hunt until she should
return from this trip. The coyotes had all mated and the season for
pack-hunting was past, yet many of them still rallied to his call; but
on this night he lingered in the notch and waited for Shady to come back
to him before summoning the pack.

He prowled uneasily about the narrow saddle, and in his nervousness over