ves on a wolf or any other foe. There does
not exist, and there never has existed on the wide earth, a more perfect
type of dauntless courage than such a hound. Not Cushing when he
steered his little launch through the black night against the great ram
Albemarle, not Custer dashing into the valley of the Rosebud to die with
all his men, not Farragut himself lashed in the rigging of the Hartford
as she forged past the forts to encounter her iron-clad foe, can stand
as a more perfect type of dauntless valor.

Once I had the good fortune to witness a very exciting hunt of this
character among the foot-hills of the northern Rockies. I was staying
at the house of a friendly cowman, whom I will call Judge Yancy Stump.
Judge Yancy Stump was a Democrat who, as he phrased it, had fought for
his Democracy; that is, he had been in the Confederate Army. He was
at daggers drawn with his nearest neighbor, a cross-grained mountain
farmer, who may be known as old man Prindle. Old man Prindle had been
in the Union Army, and his Republicanism was of the blackest and most
uncompromising type. There was one point, however, on which the two came
together. They were exceedingly fond of hunting with hounds. The
Judge had three or four track-hounds, and four of which he called
swift-hounds, the latter including one pure-bred greyhound bitch of
wonderful speed and temper, a dun-colored yelping animal which was a
cross between a greyhound and a fox-hound, and two others that were
crosses between a greyhound and a wire-haired Scotch deer-hound. Old
man Prindle's contribution to the pack consisted of two immense brindled
mongrels of great strength and ferocious temper. They were unlike any
dogs I have ever seen in this country. Their mother herself was a cross
between a bull mastiff and a Newfoundland, while the father was descried
as being a big dog that belonged to a "Dutch Count." The "Dutch Count"
was an outcast German noble, who had drifted to the West, and, after
failing in the mines and failing in the cattle country, had died in a
squalid log shanty while striving to eke out an existence as a hunter
among the foot-hills. His dog, I presume, from the description given me,
must have been a boar-hound or Ulm dog.

As I was very anxious to see a wolf-hunt the Judge volunteered to get
one up, and asked old man Prindle to assist, for the sake of his two big
fighting dogs; though the very names of the latter, General Grant and
Old Abe, were gall