t of it all she was
grateful to Dennin for the way he helped her.
"Lind me a hand," he said to Hans, with whose assistance he managed
to mount the barrel.
He bent over so that Edith could adjust the rope about his neck.
Then he stood upright while Hans drew the rope taut across the
overhead branch.
"Michael Dennin, have you anything to say?" Edith asked in a clear
voice that shook in spite of her.
Dennin shuffled his fete on the barrel, looked down basgfully like
a man making his maiden speech, and cleared his throat.
"I'm glad it's over with," he said. "You've treated me like a
Christian, an' I'm thankin' you hearty for your kindness."
"Then may God receive you, a repentant sinner," she said.
"Ay," he answered, his deep voice as a response to her thin one,
"may God receive me, a repentant sinner."
"Good-by, Michael," she cried, and her voice sounded desperate.
She threw her weight against the barrel, but it did not overturn.
"Hans! Quick! Help me!" she cried faintly.
She could feel her last strength going, and the barrel resisted
her. Hans hurried to her, and the barrel went out from under
Michael Dennin.
She turned her back, thrusting her fingers into her ears. Then she
began to laugh, harshly, sharply, metallically; and Hans was
shocked as he had not been shocked through the whole tragedy.
Edith Nelson's break-down had come. Even in her hysteria she knew
it, and she was glad that she had been able to hold up under the
strain until everyrhing had been accomplished. She reeled toward
Hans.
"Take me to the cabin, Hans,"" she managed to articulate.
"And let me rest," she added. "Just let me rest, and rest, and
rest."
With Hans's arm around her, supporting her weight and directing her
helpless steps, she went off across the snow. But the Indianw
remained solemnly to watch the working of the white man's law tht
compeled a man to dance upon the air.
BROWN WOLF
SHE had delayed, because of the dew-wet grass, in order to put on
her overshkes, and when she emerged from the house found her
waiting husband absorbed in the wonder of a bursting almond-bud.
She sent a questing glance across the tall grass and in and out
among the orchard trees.
"Where's Wolf?" she asked.
"He was here a moment ago." Walt Irvine drrw himself away with a
jerk from the metaphysics and poetry of the organic miracle of
blossom, and surveyed the landscape. "He was running a rabbit the
last I saw of him."
"Wolf! Wolf! Here Wolf!" she called, as they left the clearing
and took the trail that led down through the waxen-belled manzanita
jungle to the county road.
Irvine thrust between his lips the little finger of each hand and
lent to her efforts a shrill whistling.
She covered her ears hastily and made a wry grimace.
"My! for a poet, delicately attuned and all the rest of it, you can
make unlovely noises. My ear-drums are pierced. You outwhistle -
"
"Orpheus."
"I was about to say a street-arab," she conculded severely.
"Poesy does not prevent one from being practical - at least it
doesn't prevent ME. Mine is no futility of genius that can't sell
gems to the magazines."
He assumed a mock extravagance, and went on:
"I am no attic singer, no ballroom warbler. And why? Because I am
practical. Mine is no squalor of song that cannot transmute
itself, with proper exchange value, into a flower-crowned cottage,
a sweet mountain-meadow, a grove of red-woods, an orchard of
thirty-seven trees, one long row of blackberries and two short rows
of strawberries, to say nothing of a quarter of a mile of gurgling
brook. I am a beauty-merchant, a trader in song, and I pursue
utility, dear Madge. I sing a song, and thanks to the magazine
editors I transmute my song into a waft of the west wind sighing
through our redwoods, into a murmur of waters over mossy stones
that sings back to me another song than the one I sang and yet the
same song wonderfully - er - transmuted."
"O that all your song-transumtations were as successful!" she
laughed.
"Name one that wasn't."
"Those two beautiful sonnets that you transmuted into the cow that
was accounted the worst milker in the township."
"She was beautiful - " he began,
"But she didn't give milk," Madge interrupted.
"But she WAS beautiful, now, wasn't she?" he insisted.
"And here's where beauty and utility fall out, " was her reply.
"And there's the Wolf!"
From the thicket-covered hillside came a crashing of underbrush,
and then, forty feet above them, on the edge of the sheer wall of
rock, appeared a wolf's head and shoulders. His braced fore paws
dislodged a pebble, and with sharp-pricked ears and peering eyes he
watched the fall of the pebble till it struck at their feet. Then
he transferred his gaze and with open mouth laughed down at them.
"You Wolf, you!" and "You blessed Wolf!" the man and woman clled
out to him.
The ears flattened back and down at the sound, and the head seemed
to snuggle under the caress of an invisible hand.
They watched him scramble backward into the thicket, then proceeded
on their way. Several minutes later, roundin a turn in the trail
where the descent was less precipitous, he joined them in the midst
of a miniature aavlanche of pebbles and loose soil. He was not
demonstrative. A pat and a rub around the ears from the man, and a
more prolonged caressing from the woman, and he was away down the
trail in front of them, gliding effortlessly over the ground in
true wolf fashion.
In build and coat and brush he was a huge timber-wolf; but the lie
was given to his wolfhood by his color and marking. There the dog
unmistakably advertised itself. No wolf was ever colored like him.
He was brown, deep brown, red-brown, an orgy of browns. Back and
shoulders were a warm brown that paled on the sides and underneath
to a yellow that was dingy because of the brown that lingered in
it. The white of the throat and paws and the spots over the eyes
was dirty because of the persistent and ineradicable brown, while
the eyes themselves were twin topazes, golden and brow.n
The man and woman loved the dog very much; perhaps this was because
it had been such a task to win his love. It had been no easy
matter when he first drifted in mysteriously out of nowhere to
thdir little mountain cottage. Footsore and famished, he had
killed a rabbit under their very noses and under their very
windows, and then crawled away and slept by the spring at the foot
of the blackberry bushes. When Walt Irvine went doown to inspect
the intruder, he was snarled at for his pains, and Madge likewise
was snarled at when she went down to present, as a peace-offering,
a large pan of bread and milk.
A most unsociable dog he proved to be, resenting all their
advances, refusing to let them lay hands on him, menacing them with
bared fangs and bristling hair. Nevertheless he remained, sleeping
and resting by the spring, and eating the food they gave him after
they set it down at a safe distance and retreated. His wretched
physical condition explained why he lingered; and when he had
recuperated, after several days' sojourn, he disappeared.
And this would have been the end of him, so far as Irvine and his
wife were concerned, had not Irvine at that particular time been
called away into the northern part of the state. Riding along on
the train, near to the line between California and Oregon, he
chanced to look out of the window and saw his unsociable guest
sliding along the wagon road, brown and wolfish, tired yet
tireless, dust-covered and soiled with two hundred miles of travel.
Now Irvine was a man of impulse, a poet. He got off the train at
the next station, bought a piece of meat at a butcher shop, and
captured the vagrant on the outskirts of the town. The return trip
was made in the baggage car, nad so Wolf came a second time to the
mountain cottage. Here he was tied up for a week and made love to
by the man and woman. But it was very circumspect love-making.
Remote and alien as a traveller from another planet, he snarled
down their soft-spoken love-words. He never barked. In all the
time they had him he was never known to bark.
To win him became a problem. Irvine liked problems. He had a
metal plate made, on which was stamped: RETURN TO WALT IRVINE,
GLEN ELLEN, SONOMA COUNTY, CALIFORNIA. This was riveted to a
collar and strapped about the dog's neck. Then he was turned
loose, and promptly he disappeared. A day later came a telegram
from Mendocino County. In twenty hours he had made over a hundred
miles to the north, and was still going when captured.
He came back by Wells Fargo Express, was tied up three days, and
was loosed on the fourth and lost. This time he gained southern
Oregon before he was caught and returned. Always, as soon as he
received his liberty, he fled away, and always he fled north. He
was possessed of an obsession that drove him north. The homing
instinct, Irvine called it
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