rds Kiopo.
The two wolves touched noses. The White Wolf then turned towards Dusty
Star, looking him full in the face, as much as to say: "Are you ready?"

After a moment's pause, he trotted away across the bluff and
disappeared. The rest of the pack, followed him in a body. When the last
wolf had disappeared, Dusty Star found himself alone with Kiopo. The
wolf stood straight in front of him, gazing at him intently.

Dusty Star, looking right into his eyes, read the message there, all too
plainly: "It is time for us to go."

And deep, deep in the West, over a thousand leagues of soundless
prairie, he heard Carboona call.

He wanted to go. All the part of him that was wolf cried out to go. Yet
something held him back. If Carboona sent a voice from the West, so also
the camp of his people called him in the East. The human in him, the
deep, loving, human thing, which had been born with him, and which he
could not understand, refused to let him go.

Yet Kiopo! How could he part with Kiopo--the one creature in the world
which he fully understood? He felt that he would give all he
possessed--his new-found honours, his wealth, his power over his
tribe--if only Kiopo would return with him to the camp. Yet he knew it
could not be. It would be asking Kiopo to come back to a life which,
sooner or later, would prove his doom.

Yes; whether he himself went or stayed, he knew Kiopo must go. That wild
heart, faithful as it was, could never more cabin itself in the cramped
circle of an Indian camp. It, too, had heard Carboona's call.
Carboona--the grim foster-mother had summoned it--and the wolf-heart
obeyed.

In Dusty Star's own heart the fight was terrible. It seemed as if the
Wolf and Human, in a final struggle for victory, were rending it apart.
And yet, in spite of the Wolf within him, tearing him to pieces, the old
mystery of of his race, true to its age-long, world-deep roots, held. He
knew, at last, that Kiopo must return _alone_.

* * * * *

In the clear light of the rising sun, there might have been seen, drawn
sharply against the morning sky on the ridge of Look-out-Bluff, the
figures of an Indian and a wolf. Then the wolf's disappeared, and the
human figure was left standing alone. But although, in the long
clearness of the prairies, sound sometimes carries further than sight,
no listening ears caught the despairing cry, "Kiopo! Kiopo!" which
sobbed itself westward into a silence tha