men seemed pleased, and congratulated the Terrier, while the Greyhounds
pottered around in restless perplexity.

[Illustration]

A stranger in the party, a newly arrived Englishman, asked if he might
have the brush--the tail, he explained--and on being told to help
himself, he picked up the victim by the tail, and with one awkward chop
of his knife he cut it off at the middle, and the Coyote dropped, but
gave a shrill yelp of pain. She was not dead, only playing possum, and
now she leaped up and vanished into a near-by thicket of cactus and
sage.

With Greyhounds a running animal is the signal for a run, so the two
long-legged Dogs and the white broad-chested Dog dashed after the
Coyote. But right across their path, by happy chance, there flashed a
brown streak ridden by a snowy powder-puff, the visible but evanescent
sign for Cottontail Rabbit. The Coyote was not in sight now. The Rabbit
was, so the Greyhounds dashed after the Cottontail, who took advantage
of a Prairie-dog's hole to seek safety in the bosom of Mother Earth, and
the Coyote made good her escape.

[Illustration]

She had been a good deal jarred by the rude treatment of the Terrier,
and her mutilated tail gave her some pain. But otherwise she was all
right, and she loped lightly away, keeping out of sight in the hollows,
and so escaped among the fantastic buttes of the Badlands, to be
eventually the founder of a new life among the Coyotes of the Little
Missouri.