tell-tale prize. Once or twice there was a puzzling delay when the
Coyote had changed his course or gone over an open place; but one white
feather was good for fifty yards, and when the daylight was gone, Jake
was not two hundred yards from the hollow, in which at that very moment
were the nine little pups, having a perfectly delightful time with the
Hen, pulling it to pieces, feasting and growling, sneezing the white
feathers from their noses or coughing them from their throats.

If a puff of wind had now blown from them toward Jake, it might have
carried a flurry of snowy plumes or even the merry cries of the little
revellers, and the den would have been discovered at once. But, as luck
would have it, the evening lull was on, and all distant sounds were
hidden by the crashing that Jake made in trying to trace his feather
guides through the last thicket.

About this time Tito was returning home with a Magpie that she had
captured by watching till it went to feed within the ribs of a dead
Horse, when she ran across Jake's trail. Now, a man on foot is always
a suspicious character in this country. She followed the trail for a
little to see where he was going, and that she knew at once from the
scent. How it tells her no one can say, yet all hunters know that it
does. And Tito marked that it was going straight toward her home.
Thrilled with new fear, she hid the bird she was carrying, then followed
the trail of the man. Within a few minutes she could hear him in the
thicket, and Tito realized the terrible danger that was threatening. She
went swiftly, quietly around to the den hollow, came on the heedless
little roisterers, after giving the signal-call, which prevented them
taking alarm at her approach; but she must have had a shock when she
saw how marked the hollow and the den were now, all drifted over with
feathers white as snow. Then she gave the danger-call that sent them all