Shiela had the run of quarters, but her broad-jowled, heavy-shouldered pups were chained in the smithy. Just what to do with them was a problem. Shiela had exhibited no special affection since they were weaned, and it needed only the merest glance to detect the bar sinister. Had only the eyes been visible, there was that in their glint which betrayed the wolf. Yet, in the tawny coats and a certain lithe spring in gathering for a stride, the youngsters favored their mother.
A loafer wolf made a foray from the cañon on a Sunday night, when the range boss and Mit played seven-up and the blacksmith poisoned life with a concertina. He killed a milch-pen calf close to headquarters; yet so silent was the raid that the men heard nothing of it, though Shiela cried protests to be gone and growled at intervals. In the smithy the pups bayed deep-voiced greetings. They leaped and snapped their teeth, and gnawed and raved to be free. Forgetting that O’Donnell had unchained them, Dick went to the door to still the brutes. They hurled themselves over him.
“Here’s where the trouble starts, Shee-la,” observed her master dubiously. She wagged her tail and looked up at him in curiosity, for she had practically forgotten the pups.
It was a bitter winter, and the cattle sickened and died in hundreds. The men rode range in all weathers, setting out oil-cake and salt; but what help could be given to thirty thousand head? Carrion waxed fat. And then, one day in Deadeye, whither he had journeyed for supplies at the first hint of spring, the range boss stumbled on a strange tale. The wolves were out, bolder and stronger than they had been in a generation. They were making no stealthy, lone hunts,--a swift leap from the dark upon a helpless thing, and then the gorge,--but waged an almost systematic war of pillage. The leader was a shaggy veteran of speckled gray that ran with a limp; and with him--the men of Deadeye hoped they might perish horribly were this not so--with him there ran two fawn-colored wolves like no lobo of the west country. They were, perhaps, slightly shorter than a cowhorse; that is, of course, a strong roping horse, not a stunted pony.
“Shee-la, you’ve surely done it now,” O’Donnell told her with a sigh. She thrust her moist muzzle into his hand to be petted.
In less than seven days’ time Padden reported from a division camp that he had come on the carcass of a freshly killed heifer near a salt trough. The wolves had hamstrung the poor brute and had fallen to their grim feast before life was extinct, he thought; which is not unusual. O’Donnell vowed a war of extermination.
The mail-carrier came upon the pack casting about beside the trail, at fault in running an antelope. They let him approach within two hundred yards, gazing insolently, then flitted swiftly through a jungle of mesquite trees. His story was that beside the wily gray scoundrel that led, raced two tall creatures, half wolf, half dog, which ran with a long, springy stride foreign to lobo locomotion.
“It’s Shiela’s pups,” the blacksmith exclaimed venomously, when the mail-carrier related this experience at dinner.
“Yes, they’re Shee-la’s pups,” O’Donnell admitted; and, “Poor Shee-la!” he said. Then raising his voice with decision:
“Johnson, you tell them in Deadeye that I’ll give fifty dollars each for those pups, and fifty for the old gray fellow. Put up a notice in the post-office. Or--wait, I’ll write one for you.”