“That’s true enough,” replied the scout master, always willing to pick up points in woodcraft, for he did not pretend to know everything there was going.
“But listen!” added Amos; “it is much louder now, you see.”
Ned became intensely interested at once.
“You are right,” he remarked, “the sound of that wolfish howling does come three times as loud as in the start, and yet the wind couldn’t be the reason of that. Do you know what makes it, Amos?”
“I could give a guess, mebbe.”
“As how?” continued Ned, while Jack and Jimmy and Harry all stopped their preparations for fixing their blankets to suit their individual wants, in order to hear what the kid puncher would say.
“When I was over there at the wolf ranch,” Amos commenced, “I remember now that I noticed the pen looked old and weak. I asked the hunter about it, and he said it’d hold, he guessed; that wolves, they didn’t have the intelligence of hosses, or even cattle, so as to make a combined rush at a weak place.”
“Well?” Ned remarked, as Amos paused.
“It might be that somethin’ happened to make that weak place in the big pen give way, and the whole pack is loose, acomin’ for the river, hungry as all get-out, and ready to attack anything that walks on two legs, because they are nearly starved!”
When Amos gave this as his opinion, the scouts who had been getting their blankets ready for a quiet night’s sleep seemed suddenly to lose all interest in the proceedings. Instead Jimmy started reaching around him for that new Marlin repeating rifle, which had already proven its worth on several occasions.