The wild yielded him unlimited food and unlimited interest. The wild was clean and free; it hampered him in no way; it had offered no sort of hostile demonstration against him. Nay, in a sense, the wild had paid court to him, shown him great deference, bowed down before him, and granted him instant lordship. (If Finn thought at all just now of the snake people, it was of the large non-venomous kind, of which he had slain several.) Altogether, it was with a curiously disturbed and divided mind, in which bitterness and resentment were uppermost, that the Wolfhound gazed now at the man sitting in the firelight by Bill's gunyah. And then, while he gazed, there rose up in him kindly thoughts and feelings regarding Jess, when she had played with him beside that fire; regarding Bill, when he had talked at Finn in his own friendly admiring way, and tossed the Wolfhound food, food which Finn had always eaten with an appearance of zest and gratitude (even when not in the least need of food) from an instinctive sense of _noblesse oblige_, and of the courtesy which came to him with the blood of a long line of kingly ancestors. Vague thoughts, too, of the Master drifted through Finn's mind as he watched the stranger at his supper; and, somehow, the circle of firelit grass attracted. Forgiveness came natural to the Wolfhound and, for the moment, he forgot the humiliation and the bitterness of being driven out as a creature of the wild, having no right to trespass upon the human environment. Slowly, not with any particular caution, but with stately, gracious step, Finn moved forward toward the firelight, intending to take up his old resting-place, perhaps a score of paces from the fire. No sooner had Finn entered the outermost ring of dim firelight than the man looked up and saw, not the whole of him, but the light flickering on his legs. "Well, I'll be teetotally damned if that ain't the limit!" gasped the man, as he sprang to his feet. He snatched a three-foot length of burning sapling from the fire and, rushing forward, flung it so truly after the retreating Wolfhound that it fell athwart his neck, singeing his coat and enveloping him from nose to tail in a cloud of glowing sparks. A stone followed the burning wood, and the man himself, shouting and cursing, followed the stone. But he had no need to run. The flying sparks, the smell of burned hair, the horrible suggestion of the red-hot iron bar--these were amply sufficient for Finn, without the added humiliation of the stone, and the curses, and the man's loud, blundering footfalls. The Wolfhound broke into a gallop, shocked, amazed, alarmed, and beyond words embittered. He snarled as he ran, and he ran till the camp was a mile behind him, beyond scent and hearing.