r journey's end.

This was all I saw, and it seemed little; but before many days had
passed I knew surely that I had been favored with a view, in broad
daylight, of a rare and wonderful creature, none less than the Winnipeg
Wolf.

His was a strange history--a Wolf that preferred the city to the
country, that passed by the Sheep to kill the Dogs, and that always
hunted alone.

In telling the story of le Garou, as he was called by some, although I
speak of these things as locally familiar, it is very sure that to many
citizens of the town they were quite unknown. The smug shopkeeper on
the main street had scarcely heard of him until the day after the final
scene at the slaughter-house, when his great carcass was carried to
Hine's taxidermist shop and there mounted, to be exhibited later at the
Chicago World's Fair, and to be destroyed, alas! in the fire that
reduced the Mulvey Grammar School to ashes in 1896.

II

It seems that Fiddler Paul, the handsome ne'er-do-well of the
half-breed world, readier to hunt than to work, was prowling with his
gun along the wooded banks of the Red River by Kildonan, one day in the
June of 1880. He saw a Gray-wolf come out of a hole in a bank and fired
a chance shot that killed it. Having made sure, by sending in his Dog,
that no other large Wolf was there, he crawled into the den, and found,
to his utter amazement and delight, eight young Wolves--nine bounties
of ten dollars each. How much is that? A fortune surely. He used a
stick vigorously, and with the assistance of the yellow Cur, all the
little ones were killed but one. There is a superstition about the last
of a brood--it is not lucky to kill it. So Paul set out for town with
the scalp of the old Wolf, the scalps of the seven young, and the last
Cub alive.

The saloon-keeper, who got the dollars for which the scalps were
exchanged, soon got the living Cub. He grew up at the end of a chain,
but developed a chest and jaws that no Hound in town could match. He
was kept in the yard for the amusement of customers, and this amusement
usually took the form of baiting the captive with Dogs. The young Wolf
was bitten and mauled nearly to death on several occasions, but he
recovered, and each month there were fewer Dogs willing to face him.
His life was as hard as it could be. There was but one gleam of
gentleness in it all, and that was the friendship that grew up between
himself and Little Jim, the son of the saloonkeeper.

Jim