THE WHITE WOLF by Franklin Gregory

John?”
     
    John Craven drew thoughtfully on his cigar stub.
     
    “No-o-o,” he said slowly. “No-o-o, it don't.” “See there!” cried Mandel triumphantly. Craven was embarrassed. He said, after a moment:
     
    “Y’know, there was a reporter feller up here from the city today. Came in here, he did.”
    Meade said, “Met him. Old man Trent sent him up. It was Dave’s goat was lost first.” Farney, who was gaunt and white-haired, gulped his whiskey.
     
    “Or d’Wigney los’ a duck, too. Heinrich Derhammer tole me.”
     
    “A duck ain’t nothin’,” Mandel countered. “A fox’r a ferret mighta done that.”
    Farney shook his head.
     
    “This weren’t no ferret. Leastways, Heinrich Derhammer said there was tracks about . . . in the mud like. Like a dog’s tracks.” He leered at Mandel, then added hastily: “Or a wolf’s.”
     
    Klonsterman shook his head.
     
    “Ain't been a wolf in these parts close cornin’ to fifty year,” he said. “ ’Member the last’n kilt. I was just a kid. But Pa an’ alia men, they fit to died. They got out an’ they tracked’m down. They spread out fanwise an’ they closed in. Took three-four days. Found’m down the creek back of Miller’s place, near Lacey’s Lane, that’s where.”
    The men jabbered. It remained for little Nellie Sage, who was called a bit queer in the head, to create the real excitement—before a bug-eyed audience of women.
     
    The following Saturday night she ran into Pott’s General Store, out of breath, just before dosing time.
     
    “I seen it!” she screamed. “I seen it! I seen it jest now, over on Lacey’s Lane!”
    She stood panting, while half a dozen farm wives and village women—there for their last-minute Saturday-night shopping and a bargain of gossip—gazed at her with astonishment.
     
    Nellie was nineteen and pretty in a pale sort of way. She was simple, hadn’t had much schooling, and was maid-of-all-work for the Dawsons, whose farm was divided from the Trent estate by the Caldwell place.
     
    Mrs. Potts, the fat wife of the storekeeper, grabbed Nellie by the shoulders.
     
    ‘‘You seen what?” she demanded. She shook the girl.
     
    “I seen it! I seen that thing!” Nellie shrieked.
     
    “That big dog?” asked Mrs. Tilson, shifting her market basket from one arm to the other.
     
    “ 'Tain’t no dog,” Nellie said stubbornly. “I seen it. Never seen nothin’ like it. I was walkin’ nice as you please along the lane an’ I come to the bridge over Bowling Creek near where the Millers used to live. I was walkin’ to one side—the side toward the old dam an’ I crossed the bridge, an’ right there it was, square in the middle of the lane.”
     
    “What was?” demanded Mrs. Potts.
     
    “I keep tellin’ you, don’t I?” Nellie cried. “This thing. Big as life and white as snow it was. An’ it had red eyes an’ sharp teeth an’ it looked at me—goshamighty, I near died!
     
    Near scared out of my wits, I was! It looked like the pictures of wolves!”
     
    Her story went the rounds. It differed in detail, depending on who told it. Truth is a loose commodity, and it wasn't very long before some folks were telling how it was Mrs. Trent, not Nellie, who saw the thing, although nobody explained what the haughty '' Mrs. Trent would be doing walking along Lacey’s Lane at night.
     
    The thing grew in the telling. It became as big as a horse. It had the head of a tiger.
     
    Mrs. Trent was down for a week from fright.
     
    Some of the men visited the spot and followed an old path along the bank of the creek. They found the prints of some sort of an animal, which seemed to bear out Nellie’s story. But the prints were vague and they disappeared at the bank of the creek farther down.
     
     
    THE rolling, somewhat wooded land of the Tilson farm sprawled on the south side of the county road, midway between the village of Friends Meeting and the Trent estate. Immediately east was the old