e. I
said something about being tired and went off to bed. I was tired, right
enough, but I was something else too. All that business about the girl I
meant to find and marry may sound like a child's silly game to you, but
it had been more than a game to me. It had been a solid prop to hold to
in ugly places where a man might slip if he had not clean love and a
girl in his head. And now, at seven-and-twenty, I wanted my child's game
to come true: just my own fire, and my own girl, and a life that held
more than mere slaving for money. And it had come true, as far as the
fire and the welcome home; only the girl was another man's.

I knew what I ought to do was to get out of La Chance, but I could not
screw myself up to the acceptance of the obvious fact that there were
other girls in the world than Paulette Brown. I told myself I was too
dead tired to care. I stumbled to my window to open it--Charliet's lamp
had burned out while I was at supper and the room was stifling--and a
sudden queer sense that some one or something was under my window made
me stand there without raising it. And there was some _thing_, anyway.
The windows in the shack were about a yard above the ground. There was a
glimpse of the moon through the wind-tortured clouds, now on the rough
clearing, now on the thick spruces round the edge of it,--for my window
looked on the bush, not toward the bunk house and the mine. And as the
moonlight flickered back on the clearing I saw my clothes I had worn at
Skunk's Misery and tossed out for Charliet to burn because they
smelled,--and something else that made me stare in pure surprise.

There was a wolf--gaunt, gray, fantastic in the moonlight--rolling on my
clothes; regardless of the human eyes on him and within ten feet of the
house. It was so crazy that I almost forgot the girl Marcia had said was
only "called" Paulette Brown. I jerked up the window and stood waiting
for the wolf to run. And it did not take the least notice of me. I could
have shot it ten times over, but the thing was so incredible that I only
stood staring; and suddenly my chance was gone. The beast picked up my
coat, as a dog does a bone, and disappeared with it like a streak into
the black bush.

"Scott, I never saw a wolf behave like that!" I thought. But one more
impossibility in an impossible day did not matter. I left the window
open and tumbled into bed.

I would have forgotten the thing in the morning, only that when I got up
_a