haken voice. "An' shure, now, ye see, Barney, he ain't after bearin'
no grudge."

"But ye'll be takin' back them boots to young Dan, this very day of
our lives," urged Barney. "An' ye'll be after makin' it all right wid
the Widdy Sheedy, afore ye're a day older, now."

"Shure, an' to wanst ain't none too quick for me, an' me receavin' a
hint loike that!" agreed Mike.

As for the Pup, after this shock to his faith in man, he began to
forget the days of his comfortable captivity. His own kind proved
vastly interesting to him, and in a few weeks his reversion was
complete. By that time his journeyings had led him, with his little
herd, far up the coast of Labrador. At last he came to a chain of
rocky islands, lying off a black and desolate coast. The islands were
full of caves, and clamorous with sea-birds, and trodden forever by a
white and shuddering surf. Here old memories stirred dimly but sweetly
within him--and here he brought his wanderers to rest.

LONE WOLF

LONE WOLF

CHAPTER I

Not, like his grim ancestors for a thousand generations, in some dark
cave of the hills was he whelped, but in a narrow iron cage littered
with straw. Two brothers and a sister made at the same time a like
inauspicious entrance upon an alien and fettered existence. And
because their silent, untamable mother loved too savagely the
hereditary freedom of her race to endure the thought of bearing her
young into a life of bondage, she would have killed them mercifully,
even while their blind baby mouths were groping for her breasts. But
the watchful keeper forestalled her. Whelps of the great gray timber
wolf, born in captivity, and therefore likely to be docile, were rare
and precious. The four little sprawlers, helpless and hungrily
whimpering, were given into the care of a foster-mother, a sorrowing
brown spaniel bitch who had just been robbed of her own puppies.

When old enough to be weaned, the two brothers and the sister, sturdy
and sleek as any wolf cubs of the hills, were sold to a dealer in wild
animals, who carried them off to Hamburg. But "Lone Wolf," as Toomey,
the trainer, had already named him, stayed with the circus. He was the
biggest, the most intelligent, and the most teachable cub of the whole
litter, and Toomey, who had an unerring eye for quality in a beast,
expected to make of him a star performer among wolves.

Job Toomey had been a hunter and a trapper in the backwoods of New
Brunswick, where