t on, and the children were kept close housed at night,
and cool-eyed old woodsmen went armed and vigilant along the lonely
roads. The French _habitant_ crossed himself, and the Saxon cursed his
luck; and no one solved the mystery.

Yet, after all, as Arthur Kane, the young schoolmaster at Burnt Brook
Cross-Roads, began dimly to surmise, the solution was quite simple. A
lucky gold-miner, returning from the Klondike, had brought with him
not only gold and an appetite, but also a lank, implacable, tameless
whelp from the packs that haunt the sweeps of northern timber. The
whelp had gnawed his way to freedom. He had found, fought, thrashed,
and finally adopted, a little pack of his small, Eastern kin. He had
thriven, and grown to the strength and stature that were his rightful
heritage. And "the Gray Master of the Quah-Davic," as Kane had dubbed
him, was no _loup-garou_, no outcast human soul incarcerate in wolf
form, but simply a great Alaskan timber-wolf.

But this, when all is said, is quite enough. A wolf that can break the
back of a full-grown collie at one snap of his jaws, and gallop off
with the carcass as if it were a chipmunk, is about as undesirable a
neighbor, in the night woods, as any _loup-garou_ ever devised by the
_habitant's_ excitable imagination.

All up and down the Quah-Davic Valley the dark spruce woods were full
of game,--moose, deer, hares, and wild birds innumerable,--with roving
caribou herds on the wide barren beyond the hill-ridge. Nevertheless,
the great gray wolf would not spare the possessions of the settlers.
His pack haunted the fringes of the settlements with a needless
tenacity which seemed to hold a challenge in it, a direct and insolent
defiance. And the feeling of resentment throughout the Valley was on
the point of crystallizing into a concerted campaign of vengeance
which would have left even so cunning a strategist as the Gray Master
no choice but to flee or fall, when something took place which quite
changed the course of public sentiment. Folk so disagreed about it
that all concerted action became impossible, and each one was left to
deal with the elusive adversary in his own way.

This was what happened.

In a cabin about three miles from the nearest neighbor lived the Widow
Baisley, alone with her son Paddy, a lad under ten years old, and
little for his age. One midwinter night she was taken desperately ill,
and Paddy, reckless of the terrors of the midnight solitudes, ran