“Then a railroad came, and then another, and they joined near the shack, and all at once a town sprang up.  Seven years ago there was only the shack there, Henri.  Two years ago there were eighteen hundred people.  This year, when I came through, there were five thousand, and two years from now there’ll be ten thousand.

“On the ground where that shack stood are three banks, with a capital of forty million dollars; you can see the glow of the electric lights of the city twenty miles away.  It has a hundred-thousand dollar college, a high school, the provincial asylum, a fire department, two clubs, a board of trade, and it’s going to have a street-car line within two years.  Think of that—­all where the coyotes howled a few years ago!

“People are coming in so fast that they can’t keep a census.  Five years from now there’ll be a city of twenty thousand where the old shack stood.  And the little girl in that shack, Henri—­she’s a young lady now, and her people are—­well, rich.  I don’t care about that.  The chief thing is that she is going to marry me in the spring.  Because of her I stopped killing things when she was only sixteen.  The last thing I killed was a prairie wolf, and it had young.  Eileen kept the little puppy.  She’s got it now—­tamed.  That’s why above all other wild things I love the wolves.  And I hope these two leave your trap-line safe.”

Henri was staring at him.  Weyman gave him the picture.  It was of a sweet-faced girl, with deep pure eyes, and there came a twitch at the corners of Henri’s mouth as he looked at it.

“My Iowaka died t’ree year ago,” he said.  “She too loved the wild thing.  But them wolf—­damn!  They drive me out if I can not kill them!” He put fresh fuel into the stove, and prepared for bed.

One day the big idea came to Henri.

Weyman was with him when they struck fresh signs of lynx.  There was a great windfall ten or fifteen feet high, and in one place the logs had formed a sort of cavern, with almost solid walls on three sides.  The snow was beaten down by tracks, and the fur of rabbit was scattered about.  Henri was jubilant.

“We got heem—­sure!” he said.

He built the bait-house, set a trap and looked about him shrewdly.  Then he explained his scheme to Weyman.  If the lynx was caught, and the two wolves came to destroy it, the fight would take place in that shelter under the windfall, and the marauders would have to pass through the opening.  So Henri set five smaller traps, concealing them skilfully under leaves and moss and snow, and all were far enough away from the bait-house so that the trapped lynx could not spring them in his struggles.

“When they fight, wolf jump this way an’ that—­an’ sure get in,” said Henri.  “He miss one, two, t’ree—­but he sure get in trap somewhere.”

That same morning a light snow fell, making the work more complete, for it covered up all footprints and buried the telltale scent of man.  That night Kazan and Gray Wolf passed within a hundred feet of the windfall, and Gray Wolf’s keen scent detected something strange and disquieting in the air.  She informed Kazan by pressing her shoulder against his, and they swung off at right angles, keeping to windward of the trap-line.