The Black Wolf Pack

It was a terrible shock to me (said the Scoutmaster as he fingered a beaded buckskin bag). Old Blink Broosmore was responsible. It was a malicious thing for him to do. He meant it to be mean, too,-wanted to hurt me,-to wound my feelings and make me ashamed. And all because he nursed a grudge against dad-I mean Mr. Crawford.

It started because of that defective spark-plug in the engine of the roadster. Strange what a tiny thing such as a crack in a porcelain jacket around an old spark-plug can do in the way of changing the course of a fellow's whole life.

My last period in the afternoon at high school was a study period and I cut it because I had several things to do down town. I hurried home and took the roadster, and on my way out mother-I mean Mrs. Crawford-gave me an armful of books to return to the library and a list of errands she wanted me to do. While motoring down town I noticed that one cylinder was missing occasionally and I told myself I would change that spark-plug as soon as I got home.

I made all the stops I had planned and even drove around to the church because I wanted to look in at the parish house where some of my scouts (I was the assistant scoutmaster of Troop 6, of Marlborough) were putting up decorations for the very first Fathers and Sons dinner ever given which we were to have on Washington's birthday. That was in 1911.

As I was leaving I looked at my new wrist watch and discovered that it was a quarter of five.

"Just in time to catch dad and drive him home from the office," I said to myself, for I knew that he left the office of his big paper-mill down at the docks at five o'clock.

I jumped into the car and bowled along down Spring Street and the Front Street hill and arrived at the mill office at exactly five. Dad wasn't in sight so I decided to turn around and wait for him at the curb. That is how the trouble started. I got part way around on the hill when that cylinder began missing a lot and next thing I knew the motor stalled and there was I with my car crosswise on the hill, blocking traffic-and traffic is heavy on Front Street hill about five o'clock, because all the mills are rushing their trucks down to the piers with the last loads of merchandise before the down-river boats leave, at six o'clock.

In about two minutes I was holding up a line of trucks a block long and those drivers were saying a lot of things that were not very complimentary to me and not printed in Sunday-school papers. And old Blink Broosmore was right up at the head of the line with a truck load of cases from the box factory and the look on his face was about as ugly as a mud turtle's. Then, to make matters worse, my starter wouldn't work at the critical moment, and I had to get out to crank the engine. What a howl of indignation went up from those stalled truck drivers! I felt like a bad two-cent piece in a drawer full of five-dollar gold pieces. Guess my face was red behind my ears.

And then old Blink made the unkindest remark of all-no, he didn't make it to me; he just yelled it out to a couple of other truck-drivers.

"That's what happens with these make-believe dudes," he shouted. "That's the kid old Skin Flint Crawford took out of an orphan asylum. He's a kid that old Crawford took up with because he was too mean t' have t' Lord bless him with one o' his own. That's straight, fellers. I was Crawford's gardener when it happened an'-"

Old Blink stopped and got red and then white, and I could see the other truck men looking uncomfortable. I looked up and there was Dad Crawford on the curb boring holes into Blink with those cold gray eyes of his and looking as white as marble. No one said a word. It seemed as if the whole street became hushed and silent. I got the car around to the curb somehow and dad got in and the line of trucks trundled by with every driver looking straight ahead and some of them grinning nervously and apparently feeling mighty uncomfortable.

But that wasn't a patch to the way I felt, and I could see by the lack of color and set expression of dad's face and the way he stared straight ahead of him without saying a word that he was feeling very unhappy about it too. There was something behind it all-something that raised in my mind vague doubts and very unpleasant thoughts.

Dad never spoke a word all the way home, and, needless to say, I did not either-I couldn't; my whole world seemed to have been turned upside down in the space of half an hour. Was it true that I was not Donald Crawford? Was it possible that Alexander Crawford, this fine, big, broad-shouldered, kindly man beside me was not my real father? Was it a fact that that noble, generous, happy woman whom I called mamma was not my mother at all? Each of those questions took shape in my mind and each was like a stab in the heart, for Blink Broosmore had answered them all, and Alexander Crawford, though he must know how anxious I was to have Blink denied, did not speak to refute him.

We rolled up the drive and dad stepped out, still silent, but he did smile wistfully at me as he closed the car door.

"Put it away, Don, and hurry in for dinner," he said and I felt certain I detected a break in his voice. I felt sorry-sorry for him and sorry for myself, and as I put the car in the garage, I had a hard time trying to see things clearly; my eyes would get blurred and a lump would get into my throat in spite of me.

As I dressed for dinner I felt half dazed. I hardly realized what I was doing, and I had to stop and pull myself together before I started downstairs to the dining room, for I knew if I did not have myself well in hand I would blubber like a big chump.

Mother and dad were waiting for me and I could see by mother's sad expression and the troubled look in her eyes that dad had told her of the whole occurrence. And that only added to my unhappiness because I felt for a certainty that all that Blink Broosmore had shouted must be true.

For the first time in my memory dad forgot to say grace, and none of us ate with any apparent relish and none of us tried to make conversation. It was a painful sort of a meal and I wanted to have it over with as soon as I could. It seemed hours before Nora cleared the table and served dad's demi-tasse.

I guess I then looked him full in the eyes for the first time since the occurrence on Front Street.

"That was a very unkind thing for Blink Broosmore to do," said dad, and I knew by the firmness and evenness of his voice that he had gained full control of his feelings.

"Is-is-oh, did he tell the truth, dad?" I gulped helplessly and for the life of me I could not keep back the tears.

"Unfortunately, Donald, there is just enough truth in it to make it hurt," said dad and I could see mother wince as if she had been struck, and turn away her face.

"They why-why? Oh! who am I?" I cried, for the whole thing had completely unnerved me.

"Don dear, we do not know to a certainty," said mother struggling with her emotions.

"But now that you are partly aware of the situation, I think there is a way you can find out, at least as much as we know," said dad, getting up and going into the library.

Through the doorway I could see him fumbling at the safe that he kept there beside the desk. Presently he drew out a battered and dented red tin box and a bundle of papers. These he brought into the dining room and laid on the table. Then he drew up a chair, cleared his throat, rather loudly it seemed to me, and began.

"Don, we always wanted a child, and why the Lord never blessed us with one of our own we do not know. Anyway, we wanted one so badly that we decided to adopt one. That was seventeen years ago, wasn't it, mother?"

Mother nodded.

"Doctor Raymond, the physician at the county institution, knew our desires and, being an old friend of the family, he volunteered to find us a good healthy baby that we could adopt and call our own. Not a week later you appeared on the scene. Dr. Raymond told us that a wagon drawn by a raw-boned horse, and loaded with household goods, drew up to the orphanage and a tired and worn-out looking old lady got out with a lusty year old child in one arm and this box and these papers under the other.

"At the office of the asylum she explained how she and her husband were moving from a Connecticut town to a little farm they had bought in Pennsylvania. Somewhere at a crossroad near Derby, Connecticut, they had found the baby and this box and bundle of papers in a basket under a bush with a card attached to the basket requesting that the finder adopt and take care of the baby.

"Of course, they could not pass the infant by, but the woman explained that they were too poor and too old to adopt the child so they had gone miles out of their way to find an orphanage and leave the baby there, along with the box and papers.

"When Dr. Raymond heard the story and saw you, for you were the baby, he got me on the telephone and told me all about you. And that night he brought you here, and you were such a chubby, bright, interesting little fellow that mother and I fell in love with you immediately and decided to adopt you, which we did according to law. So you are our legal child, Don, and all that, although we are not your real parents."

Somehow that made me feel a little happier. Dad and mother did have a claim on me at least. That was something.

"It was not until after Dr. Raymond had left," went on father, "that mother and I examined the box and papers that had come with you. Here they are."

Dad took up a worn and age-yellowed envelope addressed in a bold hand:

To the Finder

Inside was the following brief message:

To the Finder:-

The mother of this child, Donald Mullen, is dead. I, his father, cannot give him the care he should have. Will you, the finder, adopt him, care for him, and bring him up to be an honest, trustworthy man, and win the eternal gratitude of his dead mother and

Donald Mullen,

his father.

"Then my name is-or was Mullen," I exclaimed.

"According to that," said dad softly, "but when you became our son we kept your first name and discarded the family name of course."

"But-but what has become of my father, Donald Mullen?" I asked.

"My boy, we have tried both for your sake and for our own to find out. We have followed up and searched every possible clue and-but wait, here are other papers of interest and after you have read them I will tell you all we have done to locate your real father and afterwards we will talk the whole situation over." As dad was speaking he passed over the battered tin box. On the lid was inscribed the simple lines-

The contents of this box belong to the boy. If you are honest you will see that it comes into his hands at the proper time. If you are dishonest, then God help the boy and God help you!

D. Mullen.

It was some time before I could make up my mind to force the lid. When I did the first thing that my eyes fell upon was this buckskin bag of unmistakable Indian design, beautifully decorated with bead work and highly colored porcupine quills cunningly worked into a good luck design. As I picked up the bag I saw that it was sealed with wax and to it was attached a card on which was penned:

To my son:-

Here is all the wealth I possess. It isn't much. The bag with its contents was sent to me by my brother, Fay, who is out in the Rockies. He gave it to me to pay my expenses out there to join him. I am leaving it for you. It may help you over some rocky places if it ever gets into your hands, and I trust the good Lord that it does.

Lovingly,

Your Father.

The bag gave forth the unmistakable clink of gold coins as I dropped it on the table.

That message from my father, whom I had never seen, made my heart heavy and again that lump gathered in my throat, for I could feel the heartaches that the writing of that note must have caused him. I had not the courage to break the seal of the bag and examine its contents. I pushed it aside and took from the box another time-yellowed envelope addressed to

My Son Donald

Inside I found the following:

Dear Boy:-

I cannot determine whether I am giving you a mean deal or whether this is all for your good. Your mother, Barbara Parker Mullen, is dead, God bless her! She has been dead now six months. It seems to me like eternity. I have tried to take care of you as she would have cared for you but I am afraid I have lost heart, and my courage, and I am afraid my faith has slipped from me. I fear that I am a broken-spirited failure. The passing of your mother has taken everything from me. I am no longer fit or able to care for you and I must pass you on to someone else and trust your welfare to God. For neither your mother nor I have any relatives left who are able to take care of you.

What will become of you I cannot guess. I can only hope for the best. But by the time you are old enough to read and understand this message you will, I hope, have forgiven me or praised me for my effort to find you a home.

What will become of me I do not know. I have one brother left in the world, Fay Mullen, and he is out in Piute Pass in the Rockies grubbing for gold. I am going out to join him for I know the only way I can forget my grief and get hold of myself once more is to bury myself in the wilderness.

Fay has sent me a bag of double eagles to pay my expenses west. That is all the money I have in the world. I am not going to use it. I will work my way west and leave the gold for you. It is the least and probably the last that I can do for you.

If, when you read this you have any desires to know who you really are, I will leave you the following information:

Your mother, a wonderful woman, was Barbara Parker of Litchfield, Connecticut, daughter of Judge Arnold Parker of Litchfield, now deceased. I am Donald Mullen, the eldest of three brothers; Fay Mullen is the next of age and Patrick Mullen, the gunsmith of Maiden Lane, New York, is the youngest. We were born in Byron Bridge, Ireland, and we three came to this country after our parents died. You come of an honest, worthwhile people on my side, and of the best American blood on your mother's, Donald, and I ask only that you live an honest, honorable life and have faith in your country and your God, and He will be with you to the end.

Good-bye, boy.

Lovingly,

Your Father.

I read the letter aloud but I confess that my voice broke toward the end and I choked up until reading was difficult.

For some time after I finished, we three sat in silence. The thoughts and mental pictures of that broken man parting with his baby son seventeen years before made me most unhappy.

Dad broke the silence.

"Well, now you are acquainted with the whole situation, what do you think?

""I scarcely know what to think," said I. "It does not appear natural for a man to abandon his own son in the manner he did. It seems heartless and cruel. I cannot understand it; yet I wish I could see my poor father. I wonder if he is still alive. Certainly with the information at hand it should not be impossible for me to trace him or some relatives of my mother. Don't you think so?"

"That is what I thought, Don, for when you were three years old I began to wonder about your father's whereabouts. I wanted to meet him and perhaps help him if I could. Do not think that your poor father was cruel, for it is evident that the man was suffering from a nervous breakdown and consequently more or less irresponsible; I think he acted wonderfully well under the circumstances. In order to help him I began a search and for ten years I have had detectives and private individuals following up every possible lead. Yet, with all my efforts, the search has amounted to nothing. Your father's trail ended at a Spokane outfitting store. I could not locate anyone nearer to you than an old maiden great-aunt of your mother's although I have had every clue investigated.

"The only relative of your father's that I could get any information about was his youngest brother, Patrick Mullen, your uncle and a famous gunsmith of Maiden Lane, New York. He is dead now but his reputation for making an exceptionally fine hand-forged gun lives on even to-day. Patrick Mullen died just before I began my search for your father, but in digging around for facts about him, I learned that he had made a limited number of very fine guns, on each of which he had stamped his full name, 'Patrick Mullen.' Other guns of an inferior quality that he made bore the simple stamp of 'P. Mullen.' The old man was very proud of each 'Patrick Mullen' that he turned out and like the true artist that he was he kept track of each one, sold them only to men he knew and when the owner died he bought the gun back himself so that he always knew its whereabouts.

"In that way all of the 101 'Patrick Mullen's' he made came back to him, save one. There is one of the complete number still missing and no one seems to know where it is. This is more remarkable because the missing gun is a flint-lock rifle of the style of seventy years ago. That gun has always struck me as being a valuable clue in our search, because it is the only rifle ever made by the old gunsmith and I have a feeling that that missing 'Patrick Mullen' may have been given to your father by the brother, and that may account for the fact that among the papers of Patrick Mullen there is no record of its whereabouts; this is in a measure confirmed by the report that the man outfitting at Spokane had a long old-fashioned rifle, and collectors say there used to be an expert in antique arms by the name of Mullen."

The suggestion made me tremendously excited. Beyond a doubt in my mind that missing "Patrick Mullen" was my father's gun. I imagined him parting with everything else save the unique gun his famous brother had made for him. Why he should wish for a flint-lock rifle was an unanswerable question, but someone wanted that sort of a gun or it would not have been made, and my father's letters showed him to be a man of sentiment, and impractical, just the sort of fellow to use a flint-lock when he might just as well have had a modern breech-loading high-power rifle.

"I believe you've hit it, dad. Hot dog!" I exclaimed. "Bet a cookie that that gun does belong to my father and if we can find it we will probably find him too-would not that be bully?"

"I feel the same way too, Don. But finding that missing gun will be as difficult as finding your father. I have searched the country over for it and made a wonderful collection of flint-lock guns, as you see by looking at yonder gun-rack; I have had dozens of arms collectors and detectives looking for guns of that description, but no Patrick Mullen rifle has turned up anywhere. There have, of course, been many false clues and many queer rifles offered to me and I have put a great many thousands of dollars into the search, and my collection of flint-locks is the best in the land, Don. But so far nothing but failures seem to have rewarded my search-no, I'm wrong, there is one man out west-out in the little jerk-water town of Grave Stone, who insists that there is a wild man living in a lonely, almost inaccessible valley in the mountains, who shoots a gun which looks like the one for which I am searching. For a number of years this man of mystery, it seems, has been appearing and reappearing, according to Big Pete Darlinkel, my informant, but even Pete has never got in personal touch with this eccentric hermit. Neither have several detectives I have sent out there for that purpose. The detectives seem to be all right in towns or cities and are undoubtedly brave men, but something out there appears to frighten them and they lose interest the moment they cut the trail of the wild hunter. I begin to think this wild man is a myth, too. Strange, though, that just a week ago I received another letter from Pete Darlinkel. Wait, I'll find it."

He returned from the library presently with a letter which he opened and passed over to me. It read:

Dear Mr. Crawford:-

Maybe you hain't interested no more but thet tha' ole Dopped ganger, the Wild Hunter, the spooky old critter, has been seen agin. i wuz on the top of the painted Butte yesterday squinten one i in the valley look'n for elk and look'n up with tother i for Big horn on the mountain, when i staged the old duffer snoop'en along in one of the parks an' he had the same long hair and long rifle he uster have. He sure is a ghost or else he's a nut or an old timer gone locoed. He sends the chills down my backbone every time i sots my eyes on him.

Your obedients sarvent,

Big Pete.

There was something about that crude letter that stirred me deeply.

Could this strange freak that Big Pete saw from the top of the painted Butte possess that Patrick Mullen rifle? If so did he know anything about the whereabouts of my father? It is not uncommon for people suffering from a mental breakdown to flee to the country or wilderness and there live the life of a recluse, and from my father's last letter it was evident that he had had a nervous breakdown from anxiety and brooding over the loss of my mother, to whom he evidently was devotedly attached. It might, therefore, be possible that this strange, wild man himself was my father, an unpleasant possibility. At any rate, I felt that I could not rest, at least until I discovered to a certainty the name of the maker of the long rifle said to be carried by the wild hunter and I told dad just how I felt about it.

"I knew you would feel that way, son," said he. "I have often wanted to go west for the very same purpose and I knew that when I told you everything you would want to go too. I intended to lay all the facts before you when you were twenty-one but now that Blink Broosmore has taken it upon himself to inform you and his truck-driving friends of the mystery surrounding your real parentage, I guess it is best you know all there is to be known about the situation. The rest I'll leave to you. In fact, it would please me a great deal if you would run down this last vague clue to see if your father really is still alive. Go, Donald, and God bless you, and take that bag of gold with you, unopened, for it may now stand your father in good stead, and if you do find him, bring him here and I promise you he will never want for a thing, nor will you, my son, for you are still my boy whatever your real parentage may be."