ame upon the skirts of a
cone-shaped mountain, ragged with ancient forest, rising solitary and
supreme out of a measureless expanse of wooded plain. From a jutting
shoulder of rock his keen eyes noted but one straggling settlement,
groups of scattered clearings, wide apart on the skirts of the great
hill. They were too far off to mar the vast seclusion of the height;
and Lone Wolf, finding a cave in the rocks that seemed exactly
designed for his retreat, went no farther. He felt that he had come
into his own domain.

CHAPTER II

The settlers around the skirts of Lost Mountain were puzzled and
indignant. For six weeks their indignation had been growing, and the
mystery seemed no nearer a solution. Something was slaughtering their
sheep--something that knew its business and slaughtered with dreadful
efficiency. Several honest dogs fell under suspicion, not because
there was anything whatever against their reputations, but simply
because they had the misfortune to be big enough and strong enough to
kill a sheep if they wanted to, and the brooding backwoods mind, when
troubled, will go far on the flimsiest evidence.

Of all the wrathful settlers the most furious was Brace Timmins. Not
only had he lost in those six weeks six sheep, but now his dog, a
splendid animal, half deerhound and half collie, had been shot on
suspicion by a neighbor, on no better grounds, apparently, than his
long legs and long killing jaws. Still the slaughtering of the flocks
went on with undiminished vigor. And a few days later Brace Timmins
avenged his favorite by publicly thrashing his too hasty neighbor in
front of the cross-roads store. The neighbor, pounded into exemplary
penitence, apologized, and as far as the murdered dog was concerned,
the score was wiped clean. But the problem of the sheep killing was no
nearer solution. If not Brace Timmins' dog, as every one made prudent
haste to acknowledge, then whose dog was it? The life of every dog in
the settlement, if bigger than a wood-chuck, hung by a thread, which
might, it seemed, at any moment turn into a halter. Brace Timmins
loved dogs; and not wishing that others should suffer the unjust fate
which had overtaken his own, he set his whole woodcraft to the
discovery of the true culprit.

Before he had made any great progress, however, on this trail, a new
thing happened, and suspicion was lifted from the heads of all the
dogs. Joe Anderson's dog, a powerful beast, part sheep-dog