ng than other beasts, his strategy outrivaling that
of men. He repays their cruelties against his kind by killing their
sheep and calves in broad daylight and executing a well-covered retreat
before the owners can exact the penalty, then returning at night to
raise his jeering laughter almost under the windows of his enemies.

Collins had no stock, his business being that of killing coyotes, and he
found far more to admire than to despise in the qualities of his prey
and so did not accord coyotes the undying hatred shown them by other
men. In his gruff way he was kind to Shady. Those who came to his cabin
were mainly stockmen and they hated Shady cordially. That she sprang
from a renegade sheep dog, a traitor to her kind, was even more
condemnatory in their eyes than the coyote part of her.

The coyotes, less averse to the proximity of man, had investigated
Shady's case by drawing nearer to the cabin than Breed would go and so
were no longer curious about her. Breed was almost two years old yet he
knew nothing of dogs. His mother had ranged a limited strip of country
in which only two men made their homes and neither had owned dogs. When
north with the wolves he had met none of his domestic cousins except
those renegades or breeds that were of the wild. He had crossed the
trails of others at rare intervals. Therefore he did not know dogs as
allies of men and so enemies to himself; rather Shady seemed some
extra-shy wolf creature yet with sufficient courage to range in close to
men. She seemed a daring adventurer to Breed.

It was partly this curiosity which piqued his interest in her. Then too
he recognized in her a freak type,--as he himself was a freak. Each
stood for the first generation of a new breed, the equally divided
parental strains not yet dulled and blended by further crosses, and so
each of them recognized something outstanding and unusual in the other.

At first their knowledge was confined to what each learned of the other
by ear alone, unaided by the testimony of other senses. Breed never once
caught sight of her, and the trail scent which she left behind told him
little except that she was half coyote and half dog, as he already knew.

For a month he answered her howls, his curiosity unassuaged. And as
Breed puzzled over Shady's voice, so Collins puzzled over Breed's.
Collins had heard him howl more than a hundred times and knew that there
was some slight difference between his voice and the pure wol