“When I felt the sickness coming on me I tried to drive them in,” he whispered, “but they broke and scattered and I fell beside the trail—they must get in—snow coming—” In an hour his fever rose again, he tossed and muttered with only fleeting intervals of consciousness. Ted had found food and shelter for his horse in the sheep shed, and had settled down to his task of anxious watching. The snow fell faster and faster so that darkness came on by mid-afternoon. He had tried to drive the old collie dog out to herd in the sheep, but the poor creature would not leave its master and, even when pushed outside, remained whining beside the door. “He couldn’t do much anyway,” sighed Ted as he let him in again. “How those coyotes yelp! I wish, after all, that I had brought Pedro.” Michael had heard the coyotes too and was striving feebly to rise from his bed. “I must go out to them, my poor creatures,” he gasped. “Those devil beasts will have them driven over the whole country before morning.” But he fell back, too weak to move farther, and was silent a long time. When he did speak it was almost aloud. “With the cold and the snow, I’m thinking there will be worse things abroad this night than just the coyotes.” He lay very still while Ted sat beside him, beginning to feel sleepy and blinking at the firelight. Eleven o’clock, twelve, one, the slow hands of his watch pointed to the crawling hours. Michael was not asleep but he said nothing, he was listening too intently. It was after one and the boy might have been dozing, when the old man spoke again. “Hark,” he said. For a moment Ted could hear nothing save the pat-pat of the snow against the window, but the collie dog bristled and growled as he lay upon the hearth and pricked his ears sharply. Then the boy heard it too, a faint cry and far off, not the sharp yelping of the coyotes, though that was ominous enough, but the long hungry howl of a timber wolf. Tears of weakness and terror were running down the Irishman’s face. “My poor sheep, I must save them,” he cried. “What’s the value of a man’s life alongside of the creatures that’s trusted to him. Those murderers will have every one of them killed for me.” Ted jumped up quickly and bundled on his coat. “Where’s your rifle, Michael?” he asked. “I don’t know much about sheep, but I will do what I can.” “The rifle?” returned Michael doubtfully. “Now, I had it on my shoulder the day I went out with the sickness on me, and it is in my mind that I did not bring it home again. But there is the little gun hanging on the nail; there’s no more shells for it but there’s two shots still left in the chamber.” The boy took down the rusty revolver and spun the cylinder with a practiced finger. “Two shots is right,” he said, “and you have no more shells? Well, two shots may scare a wolf.”