n the township."

"She was beautiful----" he began.

"But she didn't give milk," Madge interrupted.

"But she _was_ beautiful, now, wasn't she?" he insisted.

"And here's where beauty and utility fall out," was her reply. "And
there's the Wolf!"

From the thicket-covered hillside came a crashing of underbrush, and
then, forty feet above them, on the edge of the sheer wall of rock,
appeared a wolf's head and shoulders. His braced forepaws dislodged a
pebble, and with sharp-pricked ears and peering eyes he watched the fall
of the pebble till it struck at their feet. Then he transferred his gaze
and with open mouth laughed down at them.

"You Wolf, you!" and "You blessed Wolf!" the man and woman called out to
him. The ears flattened back and down at the sound, and the head seemed
to snuggle under the caress of an invisible hand.

They watched him scramble backward into the thicket, then proceeded on
their way. Several minutes later, rounding a turn in the trail where the
descent was less precipitous, he joined them in the midst of a miniature
avalanche of pebbles and loose soil. He was not demonstrative. A pat and
a rub around the ears from the man, and a more prolonged caressing from
the woman, and he was away down the trail in front of them, gliding
effortlessly over the ground in true wolf fashion.

In build and coat and brush he was a huge timber-wolf; but the lie was
given to his wolf-hood by his color and marking. There the dog
unmistakably advertised itself. No wolf was ever colored like him. He
was brown, deep brown, red-brown, an orgy of browns. Back and shoulders
were a warm brown that paled on the sides and underneath to a yellow
that was dingy because of the brown that lingered in it. The white of
the throat and paws and the spots over the eyes was dirty because of the
persistent and ineradicable brown, while the eyes themselves were twin
topazes, golden and brown.

The man and woman loved the dog very much; perhaps this was because it
had been such a task to win his love. It had been no easy matter when he
first drifted in mysteriously out of nowhere to their little mountain
cottage. Footsore and famished, he had killed a rabbit under their very
noses and under their very windows, and then crawled away and slept by
the spring at the foot of the blackberry bushes. When Walt Irvine went
down to inspect the intruder, he was snarled at for his pains, and Madge
likewise was snarled at when she went down t