warm-smelling shed. The
King, lost in his dream, did not notice their going. But suddenly,
feeling himself alone, he started and looked about. The last of the
yearlings, at its mother's heels, was just vanishing through the windy
gloom. He hesitated, started to follow, then stopped abruptly. Let
them go! They would return to him probably. Turning back to his
station on the knoll, he stood with his head held high, his nostrils
drinking the cold, while the winter night closed in upon him, and the
wind out of his own north rushed and roared solemnly in his face.

THE GRAY MASTER

THE GRAY MASTER

CHAPTER I

Why he was so much bigger, more powerful, and more implacably savage
than the other members of the gray, spectral pack, which had appeared
suddenly from the north to terrorize their lone and scattered
clearings, the settlers of the lower Quah-Davic Valley could not
guess. Those who were of French descent among them, and full of the
old Acadian superstitions, explained it simply enough by saying he was
a _loup-garou_, or "wer-wolf," and resigned themselves to the
impossibility of contending against a creature of such supernatural
malignity and power. But their fellows of English speech, having no
such tradition to fall back upon, were mystified and indignant. The
ordinary gray, or "cloudy," wolf of the East they knew, though he was
so rare south of Labrador that few of them had ever seen one. They
dismissed them all, indifferently, as "varmin." But this unaccountable
gray ravager was bigger than any two such wolves, fiercer and more
dauntless than any ten. Though the pack he led numbered no more than
half a dozen, he made it respected and dreaded through all the wild
leagues of the Quah-Davic. To make things worse, this long-flanked,
long-jawed marauder was no less cunning than fierce. When the
settlers, seeking vengeance for sheep, pigs, and cattle slaughtered by
his pack, went forth to hunt him with dogs and guns, it seemed that
there was never a wolf in the country. Nevertheless, either that same
night or the next, it was long odds that one or more of those same
dogs who had been officious in the hunt would disappear. As for traps
and poisoned meat, they proved equally futile. They were always
visited, to be sure, by the pack, at some unexpected and
indeterminable moment, but treated always with a contumelious scorn
which was doubtless all that such clumsy tactics merited. Meanwhile
the ravages wen