Adventure Magazine Cover — page 61: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

oe ete The Last Wolf | 55 dark, fleeting shadow of a thing, an animal like a silhouette against the black snow in the moonlight. They held their breaths. One end was pointed, the other a straight, long tail, and beneath were fast twinkling legs. This thing led straight at the elk which was perhaps going mad. It circled around the elk, started to rush in, backed away, went around the other side and started in again. Suddenly the elk raised its head in a frantic, gasping bawl. It plunged and jumped about, but feebly. The two watchers whispered. “Tt’s—it’s a wolf! Shoot! Shoot!” They pulled their rifles up and shot, emptying their magazines, and yelling words of encouragement to each other. The horses in the haystack enclosure began to gallop in terror. One dashed past the hole in the hay, and a bullet by chance broke its neck. The two men held the fort till morn- ing. Then they scurried away on their horses, leaving their dead pack-horse where it fell. The battle with the pack of wolves was over, and the humans had escaped. People just had to believe now, especially as forty miles away, out over the open prairies, Deputy Sheriff Cubhaus, an old-timer, found a wolf-track in the snow, a wolf which had a crooked paw, and which was traveling for further orders eastward. THE alarm was sent forth to watch yoM out for the infamous old rascal. “ Crook Paw was on the rampage. His insolence knew no bounds! He was raiding the Trans-Missouri Empire! Men who hadn’t seen anything larger than a jack-rabbit in fifteen years thrilled to the call to battle. Old .44s, .45-90s that had the reputation of killing grizzlies, .40-82s, and a .50-110- 540, with which the last antelope had been brought down at eight hundred yards nine years before, were all brought forth, and green-jacketed ammunition was rubbed and polished till it looked like old brass, ready for the wolf that had come back to the stamping-ground of the buffalo, coyote, antelope, cattle-kings and horse-thieves, now given over to peaceful agriculture and the voice of wheat quotations in the tele- phone. Once more the wild spirit of the past stirred in the breasts of old-timers. Crook ~ humans. Paw had come to challenge the supremacy of The Last Gore school house, nine miles east of Rosemary Butte, built of sod and old-fashioned, burning lignite in its stove, with eleven helpless little pupils and a brave school-teacher, Miss Amanda Yon- son, had no idea of figuring in the annals of the prairies. Yet suddenly one of the chil- dren in all innocence and ignorance cried— “Oh, look at that!” The teacher started at this unusual break in discipline, and saw a fearsome, be- draggled, grayish brute, with pointed ears | and wide open mouth, and tongue hanging long and red over a line of gleaming white teeth. She screamed, rushed to the door to double-bar it, seized upon the long iron poker, and, sending the children to the win- dows to repel any attack, held the school- house against the terror of the prairies, which was wise enough to go scurrying on at the first defiant sound. And when that night the people came to investigate they found that the wolf had been there—but in , vain. Crook Paw hadn’t been famished enough to attack the school, to eat anybody. The Empire Clarion gathered and print- ed the story of the coming of the wolf, using the telephone unstintedly and not questioning in the least any of the accounts heard until it was apparent that the report that those parts were being devasted by raging packs of wolves could do the region no good, especially when transmitted Down East, whence prospective settlers were com- ing. Then the editor of The Empire Clarion was told flatly that he’d better tone down, so he did. Crook Paw by some blind luck or instinct went over the brink of the prairie down into the Bad Lands of Clay River. There were a thousand square miles of clay, washes, buttes, coulées, bottoms grown to sparse cottonwood, gullies with buffalo-berry brush, lots of jack-rabbits, some grouse, mice, prairie-dogs, and such like, an occasional nester cabin, and scatterings of cattle that fed on the good bunch grass on the levels. Wind-caves in the clay strata, ancient water-cut caves, and the broken land offered cover which Crook Paw darted into with all the relief of anxiety and dread that had known no cessation for weeks. A bullet had gashed his left hip; he had been set upon and matiled by two collie dogs and a mongrel hound; he had picked up a chicken that the Eomicbooks ? (E@)