moccasins
clear of the snow.

Suddenly he stumbled. The leaders were almost upon him as he recovered
and faced them there in the white reach of the tote-road. They halted
just out of reach of the swing of his axe, and as the man looked into
their glaring eyes a frenzy of unreasoning fury seized him.

His nerves could no longer stand the strain. Something seemed to snap
in his brain, and through his veins surged the spirit of his fighting
ancestors.

A sudden memory flash, as of deeds forgotten through long ages, and
with it came strength--the very abandon of fierce, brute strength of a
man with the mind to kill.

"Come on!" he cried. "Fight it out, you fiends! I may die, but I'll be
damned if I'll be hounded to death! You may get me, but you'll _fight_!
When a McKim goes down some one pays! And if it is die--By God!
There'll be fun in the dying!"

With a weird primordial scream, as the first man might have screamed in
the face of the first saber-tooth, he hurled his axe among them and
sprang forward, flashing the cold, gray blade of his sheath-knife!

CHAPTER XV

THE WERWOLF

Now, as all men know, Bill Carmody had done a most foolish and insane
thing.

But the very audacity of his act--and the god of chance--favored him,
for as the axe whizzed through the air the keen edge of the whirling
bit caught one of the larger wolves full on the side of the head.

There followed the peculiar, dull scrunching sound that stands alone
among all other sounds, being produced by no other thing than the
sudden crush of a living skull.

The front and side of the skull lifted and turned backward upon its
hinge of raw scalp and the wolf went down, clawing and biting, and over
the snow flowed thick red blood, and a thicker mucus of soft, wet
brains.

At the sight and scent of the warm blood, the companions of the
stricken brute--the gaunt, tireless leaders, who had traveled beside
him in the van, and the rag-tag and bobtail alike--fell upon him tooth
and nail, and the silence of the forest was shattered by the blood-cry
of the meat-getters.

Not so the great she-wolf, who despised these others that fought among
themselves, intent only upon the satisfaction of their hunger.

Her purpose in trailing this man to destruction was of deep vengeance:
the assuagement of an abysmal hatred that smoldered in her heart
against every individual of the terrible man kind, whose cruel traps of
iron, blades of steel, and leaden