"You fool!" cried another. "He ain't skinny enough to be a wolf.
Besides, whoever heard of a tame wolf comin' into a barroom?"
Nevertheless many a gun was held in readiness, and the men, even the most drunken, fell back to one side and allowed a free passage for the animal. It seemed, indeed, to be a wolf, and a giant of its kind, and it slunk now with soundless step through the silence of the barroom, glancing neither to right nor to left, until it came before the table of Mac Strann. There it halted and slunk back a little, the upper lip lifted away from the long fangs, its eyes glittered upon the face of the giant, and then it swung about and slipped out of the barroom as it had come, in utter silence.
In the utter silence Mac Strann leaned across the table to Haw-Haw
Langley.
"He's come alone this time," he said, "but the next time he'll bring his master with him. We'll wait!"
The Adam's-apple rose and fell in the throat of Haw-Haw.
"We'll wait," he nodded, and he burst into the harsh, unhuman laughter which had given him his name.
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE DISCOVERY OF LIFE
This is the letter which Swinnerton Loughburne received over the signature of Doctor Randall Byrne. It was such a strange letter that between paragraphs Swinnerton Loughburne paced up and down his Gramercy Park studio and stared, baffled, at the heights of the Metropolitan Tower.
"Dear Swinnerton,