On the second night of its stay in their wagon-bed it won their gratitude. By its yelping and its scratching at the canvas it sounded the alarm, "Wolf at the door!"
Even after Mr. Holman had caught up his rifle to drive at the wolf, which was by that time quite out of range, the adopted puppy rushed about the wagon-floor in an ecstasy of usefulness and slept no more that night.
Through the depressing, unfriendly land which the flames had desolated, women and children huddled timidly in the wagons, men doubly armed walked close to their domestic animals for fear of a stampede, scouts forged ahead and sentries brought up the rear. Dust, heat, distant puffs of smoke, dried-out or muddy watercourses, all told of a region suffering in an untoward season and of beasts uncomfortable and dangerous.
Their train was followed, not by a pack as they sometimes feared it might be, but by one of those lone gray timber wolves, whose age or ferocity—or something—finds satisfaction in nothing but the silent stalk and the solitary kill.
At last things came to such a pass, at last the lone wolf—it was a gaunt she-wolf—lurked so near, that panic seized the hearts of the emigrants. For no rifle could hit her. Like the horrid werewolf, in whom some of the superstitious travelers still believed, no bullet touched her, so uncanny was her cleverness in getting beyond range after every depredation.
"I'm glad that pa put ma in another wagon, for the wolf picks our stuff every time, probably because we are the last in the train," worried Doby, who was frankly afraid of the gleaming eyes which had twice slipped past the sentries in the darkness and appeared below him during his turn at watching at the tiny round window in the middle of the back of the wagon-top. He was not ashamed to swing his lighted pine-knot torch vigorously most of the time. "Those teeth looked as sharp as knives."
To the excited puppy he promised, "When you are a little bigger I'll let you out to do battle." But the frantic puppy did not want to wait to grow bigger. It was ready at once. Its new master was full of applause for its vigilance.
On the third night an awful moment came. The ready sentries patrolling near, and his father at the oxen's head, seemed far, far away when Doby turned from a moment's soothing of his growling pet to find himself face to face with the blazing eyes in a great, slavering head thrust through the little round window.
He shrieked and called as he beat at the hideous, threatening thing with his burning pine knot.
Men came running to help him. But in the half-light of flickering torches no one dared to fire into the group who had been surprised into a hand-to-hand fight with the wolf. From that medley of human screams and bestial growls, the flash of knives, the thump of clubbing guns, she escaped as strangely as she had done before.