The Yellow Horde

When dawn lifted the shadows from the low country, Breed was prowling along the first rim of the hills. See Page 6 . THE YELLOW HORDE BY HAL G. EVARTS WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHARLES LIVINGSTON BULL TORONTO McCLELLAND AND STEWART 1921 Copyright, 1921, By Hal G. Evarts. All rights reserved Published April, 1921 Norwood Press Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co. Norwood, Mass., U. S. A. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS When dawn lifted the shadows from the low country, Breed was prowling along the first rim of the hills Frontispiece The elk migration had begun page 63 As the summer advanced the pups learned to pack-hunt with Breed 167 Breed was compelled to hunt farther from home as the deer quit the valleys 191 THE YELLOW HORDE The wolfer lay in his cabin and listened to the first few night sounds of the foothills. The clear piping notes of migrating plover floated softly down to him, punctuated by the rasping cry of a nighthawk. A coyote raised his voice, a perfect tenor note that swept up to a wild soprano, then fell again in a whirl of howls which carried amazing shifts of inflection, tearing up and down the coyote scale. One after another added his voice to the chorus until it seemed that the swelling volume could be produced by no less than a full thousand musical prairie wolves scattered through the foothills for a score of miles. Wild music to the ears of most men, the song of flat wastes and deserts and limitless horizons, freighted with a loneliness which is communicated to man in a positive ache for companionship,—and which carries a wealth of companionship in itself for those who have lived so long under the open skies that the song of the desert choir comes to them as a lullaby. It moved Collins, the wolfer, to quiet mirth. Always it affected him that way, this first clamorous outburst of the night. He read in it a note of deep-seated humor, the jeering laughter of the whole coyote tribe mocking the world of men who had sworn to exterminate their kind. "The little devils!" Collins chuckled. "The little yellow devils! Men can't wipe 'em out. There'll be a million coyotes left to howl when the last man dies." From this oft-repeated prophecy Collins was known to every stockman in three States as the Coyote Prophet,…