“It is a wolf!” wailed Bobby, and immediately disappeared, head first, down the hole in the snow drift.

CHAPTER XIV

THE MOUNTAIN HUT

If Bobby had not gone first and had not stuck half way down the hole with her feet kicking madly just at the mouth of the tunnel, without doubt Betty Gordon would have been driven by her own fears back into the Pullman coach.

That shaggy beast diving from the top of the embankment, plunging, yelping and whining, through the softer drifts of snow, frightened Betty just as much as it had Bobby Littell.  The latter had got away with a flying start, however, and her writhing body plugged the only means of escape.  So Betty really had to face the approaching terror.

“Oh!  Oh!” cried Betty, turning from the approaching beast in despair.  “Hurry!  Hurry, Bobby Littell!  Do you want me to be eaten up?”

But Bobby had somehow cramped herself in the winding passage through the snow, and her voice was muffled as she too cried for help.

However, Bobby’s demands for assistance were much more likely to bring it than the cries of the girl outside.  The porter heard Bobby first, and when he opened the door of the coach several men who were near heard the girl.

“Help!  Help!  A wolf is eating her!” shrieked the frightened Bobby.

“Ma soul an’ body!  He must be a-chawin’ her legs off!” cried the darkey and he seized Bobby by the wrists, threw himself backward, and the girl came out of the tunnel like an aggravating cork out of a bottle.

“What’s this?” demanded Mr. Richard Gordon, who happened to be coming back to the end of the train to look for his niece and her chum.

“Oh, Mr. Gordon!” sputtered Bobby, scrambling up, “it’s got her!  A wolf!  It’s got Betty!”

“A wolf?” repeated Uncle Dick.  “I didn’t know there were any wolves left in this part of the country.”

Major Pater was with him.  Mr. Gordon grabbed the latter’s walking stick and went up that tunnel a good deal quicker than Bobby had come down it.  And when he got to the surface he found his niece, laughing and crying at once, and almost smothered by the joyful embraces of a big Newfoundland dog!

“A wolf indeed!” cried Mr. Gordon, but beating off the animal good-naturedly.  “He must be a friend of yours, Betty.”

“Oh, dear me, he did scare us so!” Betty rejoined, getting up out of the drift, trying to brush off her coat, and petting the exuberant dog at the same time.  “But it is a dear—­and its master must be somewhere about, don’t you think, Uncle Dick?”

Its master was, for the next moment he appeared at the top of the bank down which the “wolf” had wallowed.  He hailed Uncle Dick and Betty with a great, jovial shout and plunged down the slope himself.  He was a young man on snowshoes, and he proved to be a telegraph operator at that station three miles south.