I shall never forget the shock I received as I pushed the door of the little hut open. I had started with my case full of all I thought I should want--even to vitriol, in case of a last resource. But Wolfie was beyond my skill. He lay stretched out on his blankets, dead, with his two dead hounds beside him. There was a half-empty bottle in his left hand and a big six-shooter in his right. There were three cartridges in the revolver and three empty shells. The old man and both hounds had each been killed with a bullet through the head. [Illustration: “HE LAY STRETCHED OUT ON HIS BLANKETS, DEAD, WITH HIS TWO DEAD HOUNDS BESIDE HIM.”] I examined the injured foot and understood the whole thing. Wolfie had doctored himself, but the wound had got worse and worse, and at last the old fellow, in awful, never-ending pain, had drunk himself half-dead and completed the work with his trigger finger. Meanwhile the weather had been growing gradually colder, and the wind started to moan as I fastened the door from the outside, after quitting that abode of death. The sky, too, was rapidly darkening, and Pete shook his head up and down and stamped uneasily. Mounting, I rode off; but I had not been going long when, away in the distance, I heard the dismal, long-drawn howl of a prairie wolf, then another, and another. Not till that moment did it flash upon me what an all-round fool I was. I had brought no revolver with me. It had started to snow, evening was drawing in, and there were those gaunt brutes in the distance--yet I had no protection against either the weather or the wolves. I touched up old Pete, and we started to travel fast for home. We had not gone more than a mile farther before a real, genuine blizzard sprang up. How it came down! Waves, absolute waves of snow, whirred, cut, and beat about my face, while the wind howled and shrieked dismally. Then I did the worst, most foolish thing a man could have done. I tried to guide old Pete! I steered him, and, though Pete knew better, he obeyed; and so, between a good old horse and a fool of a young man, we made a fine mess of it. We got lost, tangled up, with the snow whirling about us in sheets. Every minute it got deeper and thicker, and at last poor old Pete staggered, tried vainly to right himself, fell over, and collapsed. Try as I would I couldn’t get him up, and--well, I fear I lost my nerve, what with the blinding snow and the distant howl of those wretched wolves. As the snow beat down upon me, piling up pitilessly over the now stiffening form of the poor old horse, I thought it time to move on. To stay where I was meant being frozen to death, to go on might mean the same; but there was just a chance, and I stumbled forward and took the chance.