Sunset Ranch: A Story of a Boy's Adventures in the West — page 16: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

10 The Tenderfoot. Cuthbert Lee’s home had been in the ill-starred Shenandoah Valley. The hooting of owls and barking of prairie dogs in a gopher village close by were sounds with which he had become somewhat accustomed, so that they gave him no uneasiness; but presently other noises of the night came to his ears that somehow strained his nerves to their utmost tension. He recognized the familiar yelp or bark of the sneaking coyote, to whom the blaze was a beacon of fear, and he judged from the chorus of sounds, that quite a pack of these jackals of the prairie hovered near by. “Vip! Yip! Yip!’ What was that long-drawn, mournti howl that pierced the darkness of the night with startling force, causing the lone camper to clutch his sturdy cudgel and stare into the pitchy gloom with bated breath? It was a gaunt gray prairie wolf that gave tongue— he had heard it once before, though safe at the time behind the rampart of freighters’ wagons, and could never forget the dread sound. Flashing into his mind came all the stories he had ever read concerning these bold animals—of hunters attacked and borne down by mere force of numbers, to fall victims to the sharp, snapping fangs of the gray prairies—of travelers on the snow-covered Si- berian steppes chased by a troop of gaunt wolves, frequently overwhelmed and forced to fight for life. The prospect was not pleasant, to be sure. “Yip! Yip! Yip!” To his dismay a second howl of the same hideous tenor came from a point opposite, and a third sounded in the distance. The boy-camper sprang to his feet in alarm. Evidently his situation was perilous in the ex- treme—what would he not have given for the new Winchester repeating rifle that had been fastened to comicloolks.com