Читать книгу Lad of Sunnybank - Albert Payson Terhune - Страница 5

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She came to The Place on the strength of a sheaf of letters of introduction which would have gained admittance for Benedict Arnold into the Sons of the Revolution. The letters were from European friends to whom the Mistress and the Master owed much in the way of courtesies and hospitality.

Wherefore Mrs. Héloïse Lejeune was invited to spend a week at The Place, on her arrival in America on a tour which was to serve as basis for a series of lectures in her own Latin country. She accepted the invitation with much alacrity.

“Everything in life has to be paid for,” grumbled the Master as he and the Mistress sat in their car at the rural railroad station, waiting for the guest’s belated train. “And always it has to be paid for at the most inconvenient times and in the most inconvenient way. Debts that can be settled in cash are the easiest to wipe out. The others are the really tough ones. They make me wish there were a moral bankruptcy court I could go through.”

“But we—”

“We didn’t want to visit at any of those houses in England and Scotland and France,” said the Master. “We’d have had a better time and a less expensive time at hotels or village inns. And now, of course, three of our loving hosts are ‘collecting,’ by sawing off this Lejeune woman on us as a guest—at a time when I ought to be working twelve hours a day and when you want to get those songs of yours finished. Why couldn’t she—”

A reassuring pat on his shoulder made the Master turn in annoyance toward his wife.

The Mistress was not a shoulder-patter, and he wondered glumly why she should choose this irritating mode of trying to dispel his crankiness. But her gloved hands were resting lightly on the car’s steering-wheel—even as the pat was repeated with insistent vehemence.

Not a hand, but an absurdly small and very white paw, was tapping the man’s shoulder.

A huge collie had been lying lazily on the rear seat. At the peevish note in the Master’s voice the dog had risen in sudden worry, and had shown quick sympathy for his god’s unknown trouble by patting eagerly at the nearest part of the man’s anatomy.

The Master’s scowl changed to a reluctant grin as he leaned back and rumpled the collie’s classic head.

“Lie down, Laddie,” he said. “It’s all right. Or if it isn’t, you can’t make it so by swatting my shoulders with your dusty feet. This is the only clean white suit I have left.”

The dog stretched out again on the seat, his plumed tail wagging. Lad was well content. The tone of annoyance was gone from the Master’s voice. Apparently everything was all right again. That was all Lad wanted to make certain of.

“Mrs. Lejeune wrote that beautiful essay in verse, on dogs, for one of the English magazines,” the Mistress was saying. “So she must like them. I wouldn’t have brought Lad over to meet her unless her essay had shown such a splendid understanding of—”

“Mrs. Lejeune didn’t write it,” was the Master’s morbid contradiction. “Maeterlinck wrote it. She took most of the best things in his ‘My Friend The Dog,’ and rhymed them and put them into her own words. Just the same, she wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t liked dogs. That’s the one bright spot—or the least unbright spot—in the thought of having her at Sunnybank with us for a whole interminable week. She—”

The behind-time train hooted dismally as it neared the station. The Master left the car and strode along the platform to meet the guest.

A minute later he returned, convoying a large and grenadier-like woman whose walk and demeanor gave somehow the impression that she was leading a ceremonial parade of ancient Egyptian priests.

The Mistress had signaled Lad to jump over to the front seat at her side, leaving the tonneau to Mrs. Lejeune and the Master and to an extensively labeled array of hand-luggage which a station porter distributed as best he could between and around their feet.

With lofty graciousness and with an ever-so-slight foreign accent, Mrs. Lejeune acknowledged the Mistress’s greeting. Then she stiffened at sight of the great mahogany-and-snow collie that nestled at her hostess’s side on the front seat.

Lad returned her unloving look with an icy gaze of aloofness. Then, with his tulip ears flattened close to his head, he turned his back on her.

There was chill insult in the collie’s manner. He did not like this newcomer. One glance had been enough to settle that fact in his uncannily psychic mind. He did not like her, and he saw she did not like him.

The Mistress and the Master, in the order named—these two were Sunnybank Lad’s deities. To them, from puppyhood, he had given eager and worshiping service. The rest of mankind did not interest him. But to most of The Place’s guests he accorded a cold courtesy. Toward none of them had he showed the affronting and affronted distaste which he bestowed on the large Mrs. Lejeune.

“This is Laddie,” the Mistress was explaining to her visitor, speaking fast and trying to ignore the collie’s rudeness. “I know how fond of dogs you are, so I—”

“I am not!” denied Mrs. Lejeune with charming frankness. “I detest them. I find them either gleesome or fleasome. When they are gleesome they smear their muddy paws on people’s white dresses. When they are fleasome, they—”

Laddie created a diversion at this point in the guest’s harangue. A right alluring and thrilling scent had assailed his keen nostrils so potently as to banish momentarily his disgust at this noxious stranger. The scent exhaled from a square black satchel the porter was lifting into the car from the heap of luggage on the platform edge.

Lad leaned far over the back of the seat, sniffing at the satchel with pleased interest. From a tiny wire grillwork at one end of the bag a sharp hiss rewarded the poke of his exploring nose. The hiss was followed by a fretful yowl which rose in timbre and volume until it merged into a second and more irate hiss.

Instantly Mrs. Lejeune’s lofty manner changed to solicitous tenderness. She bent over the satchel, lifting a corner of its lid and crooning softly into the interior:

“There, there, Massoud darling! The filthy brute sha’n’t bother you. He—”

Mrs. Lejeune’s promise was broken well-nigh before it was made. The inch-wide opening of the bag’s top was vastly entertaining to the inquisitive Lad. In merry expectation he nosed at the crack, to widen it for better inspection. Mrs. Lejeune aimed a corrective slap at him. The slap did not reach its target.

For the joggled lid flew wide, by reason of sudden internal pressure. A shapeless gray paw flashed forth—a paw equipped with a set of pinlike claws. Lad shrank back instinctively, with his nose tip adorned by three red furrows. At the same instant Massoud, a large and gray and frantically spitting Persian cat, whizzed forth from the satchel into a new and unfriendly world.

“Kittykittykitty!” wailed Mrs. Lejeune, imploringly, as she grabbed for the escaping cat.

But Kittykittykitty rewarded the effort at capture by sideswiping virulently her owner’s large, fat hand as it sought to seize her flying gray form. The same leap carried Massoud clear of the car and onto the station platform. Thence, without breaking her stride, she made a dash for the far side of the tracks.

Elated at the jolly adventure which had come so opportunely into his staid life, Lad gave chase. Before either the Mistress or the Master could guess at his intent, he was out of the car and galloping in mischievous pursuit. The whole thing happened in a fraction of a second.

Now, Massoud was in about as much danger of harm from Lad as would be a duck from immersion into a pond. The great collie had the fighting pluck and prowess of a tiger. But never had he harmed any creature smaller and weaker than himself. His meeting with the suddenly abhorred Mrs. Lejeune had somehow aroused in him the perverse imp of mischief that never sleeps any too soundly at the bottom of a collie’s nature.

He could not wreak his dislike on Mrs. Lejeune herself. Not only was she a woman, but also she was very evidently a guest.

And from babyhood Lad had understood and obeyed the rigidly simple guest-law of The Place. But he could and would pester her and at the same time add to his own fund of amusement, by chasing harmlessly the cat she had crooned to so lovingly.

Toward the tracks catapulted the fugitive, ears flat, tail enormous, the shapeless gray legs carrying her over the ground at an amazing pace. Close behind galloped the big collie, mischief in every inch of his giant body and in his deep-set eyes. Lad was having a beautiful time.

The Mistress was first to find voice.

“Laddie!” she called. “Lad!”

Almost in midair the charging collie checked his run. Always had he obeyed that soft voice. Nearly always, hitherto, he had rejoiced to obey it. But now his obedience was solely a matter of lifelong duty. Humans had such a silly way of interrupting, just when sport was at its height.

He halted disgruntedly, and made as though to come back to the car. Then, changing his purpose, he stood stockstill for an instant, while the mischief and even the reluctance went out of his eyes, leaving them troubled and alert.

Massoud had sped across the nearer of the two railroad tracks beyond the side platform. But as she struck the farther track she was aware of a sinister buzzing of the rail beneath her galloping paws and of a dismaying roar that ripped at her temperamental nerves.

Glancing sidewise as she ran, she beheld a gigantic black bulk rushing down at her.

The New York express was thundering southward, making no stop at this unimportant country station.

Massoud saw it looming above her. Strength and sense deserted her at the sight. She had reached the far rail of the express track. On it she crouched—helpless, shuddering, her glazed green eyes fixed on the onrushing locomotive.

It was this which had caused Lad to check his leisurely return toward the car and to the Mistress who had summoned him thither. Seated beside the Mistress in that same car, not a month ago, he had seen a stray kitten cut in two as it meandered across a railroad track in front of a train. Well did the dog realize Massoud’s sickening peril.

The Master saw also. Even as the cat came to a paralyzed standstill on the rail, the man moved the bulk of his shoulders between his guest and her pet’s impending slaughter.

Mrs. Lejeune thus missed seeing Massoud’s terrified pause, though, nursing her scratched hand, she sought to follow the chase by peering around the Master’s interfering shoulder.

She filled the air with denunciatory lamentations and with shrill demands that the murderous dog be recalled from his pursuit. Neither of her hearers gave heed.

For, as the express bore down upon the cat, a swirl of sunlit orange-tinted mahogany fur flashed across the track, under the very prow of the engine’s cowcatcher. Sunnybank Lad had gone into action.

Seemingly bent on a hideous form of suicide, the mighty collie hurled himself at lightning speed in front of the roaring train. Across the track he sped at the incredible pace known to no dog but collie and greyhound. As he sprang, he dipped his head earthward, without abating one jot of his fiery speed.

Then the express, traveling at nearly sixty miles an hour, cut off the onlookers’ view of the scene.

The guest continued to whicker forth her wild commands. The Mistress stared at the obstructing train’s spinning wheels with bone-white face and hard-set mouth. Unconscious of what he did, the Master swore softly and venomously, as an accompaniment to Mrs. Lejeune’s screeched prattle.

A million centuries crawled by. Then the express was gone, leaving a blinding eddy of cinders and dust and smoke in its wake. Through the murk stared the Mistress and the Master, their gaze studying the gleaming rails, with sick horror for signs of what they dreaded.

On the far side of the track, perhaps twenty feet beyond the rails, stood Lad. From between his mighty jaws dangled and squirmed and writhed and yowled a mass of gray fur. He was holding the rescued Massoud deftly and gently by the nape of her furry neck, even as he had snatched her up during his shrewdly judged dash across the track.

Through the maze of dust and cinders Mrs. Lejeune caught her first semi-distinct view of the situation. She saw her adored cat twisting futilely in the grip of a huge dog—a dog seemingly bent upon breaking her neck.

With a dexterity foreign to women of her size, she darted across the track and grabbed her imperiled and indignant cat, holding the squalling and spitting and scratching feline hysterically to her breast—and at the same time aiming a fervent kick at Lad.

The kick caught the dog full in the ribs, painfully and humiliatingly. In all Laddie’s three years of life, never before had he been kicked. At The Place dogs were not punished in that way, the Master believing that man can find better ways of showing his inferiority to dumb brutes than by kicking them. The unprecedented assault staggered the collie. He whirled on the assailant, his curved white eyeteeth agleam from under his upcurled lip.

Had a man other than the Master done this fool thing to him, Lad would have been all over the aggressor before the punitive foot could have touched ground again. But this was a woman, and Lad contented himself with snarling loathingly up into her rage-purpled face. Then, majestically, he strode back to where the Mistress and the Master stood.

He thrust his muzzle into the Mistress’s cupped hand for comfort and for praise. He got both.

With difficulty the Master swallowed words which would have shamed The Place’s hospitality. Then he said to his wife:

“Drive home with her. Try to explain what really happened. I can’t explain it to her. If I tried to speak to her now, I’d say things I could be jailed for. I’m going to walk. Come along, Laddie.”

Thus began a visit which to this day is remembered at The Place as might be an epidemic of smallpox. On Lad it bore harder than on the humans. Always, from further back than he could remember, the collie had been as free throughout the house at any and all times as were his owners. But now everything was different.

In the first place, the obese guest with the faint Continental accent, and the temperamental Persian cat, was ubiquitously present, and the presence shattered for Lad the sweet peace of the home he loved.

They hated him, these two intruders; they made no secret of their hate. Moreover, an hour after their arrival, the Mistress had led the collie to a kennel down near the stables, and very gently had made him understand this was to be his abiding-place for the time. He was forbidden the house—he who had been the house’s guard and honored inmate from puppyhood!

Worse, his queerly sensitive mind told him the Mistress was wretchedly unhappy and that the master was in a continuously villainous temper.

The great dog grieved bewilderedly over these manifestations of malaise in the two humans he worshipped. True, both of them contrived to hide their state of mind from the guest, but no slightest shade of human mood can be hidden from a chum collie.

Exiled and worriedly sad, the dog moped miserably around The Place, welcoming with pathetic eagerness his very few chances to romp or walk with the Mistress or the Master, during such times as one of them was free from the entertaining of their guest.

Also there were dinners, and at least one tea and a garden party, in Mrs. Lejeune’s honor. Such functions implied the presence of many outsiders. Lad hated crowds.

Mrs. Lejeune did not scruple to tell all and sundry the story of Lad’s supposed attempts to kill her darling Massoud. Nor did she hesitate to reiterate to everyone that the very sight of a dog nauseated her. In that dog-loving hinterland community—especially among The Place’s intimates, who were fond of Lad—she won scant popularity.

“Why did you write that essay poem, praising dogs, if you hate them so?” asked the Master once, when she had been holding forth on this chronic dislike of hers.

“Why did your American poet, Fergus Ager, write exquisite child-poems, when he abominated brats?” she countered. “Why did the English poet, Brunning, write that deathlessly beautiful horse-ballad of his, when he shuddered at the sight of a horse?”

“I don’t know,” said the Master. “Why?”

“Children and dogs and horses are popular themes with the masses,” explained Mrs. Lejeune. “Anything written about them is certain of popularity, if it is well done. For that matter, it is common knowledge that the most inspired dogbook ever written was by a Britisher who not only did not own dogs, but who was afraid of them. He told me that when he came to America to lecture, people used to insist on bringing their horrible dogs for him to see, and it was the worst ordeal that he ever went through. Now, cats—especially Persian cats—”

“Yes,” vaguely assented the Master, “now, cats. Especially Persian cats—”

He broke off to watch Massoud craftily stalking an oriole that was singing its heart out from the summit of a tiny veranda-side shrub. At The Place, song birds of every kind were as much at home as was Lad himself. No cat or other animal was allowed to molest them. As a result they were as tame as chickens and they nested by scores among the thick veranda vines.

Now, for the first time, a Sunnybank song bird was annoyed by a Sunnybank human. The Master flung his pudgy tobacco-pouch at the oriole. The bird, in fluttering surprise, broke off its song and flew away—just as Massoud completed her stalking preliminaries and sprang for her escaped victim.

“Yes,” repeated the Master, apropos of nothing at all, “especially Persian cats. We have two cats of our own. One of them is a Persian. Tippy, you know. We are fond of them both. We’ve had them for years, and they’re part of our household. They leave the birds alone, and the dogs leave our cats alone. It’s all a matter of simple early training.”

Gloomily he watched the mincing progress of Massoud across the lawn toward the lake edge. Along the bank were bushes where nested innumerable small birds.

Lad also noted the progress of the detested Massoud, from the kennel where he lay in unhappy solitude. The Mistress’s early command of “Leave her alone, Laddie!” had rendered the Persian cat immune from further jocose harrying by the law-abiding collie.

But now, as she made her dainty way over the sward in the direction of the lakeside bushes, the command seemed harshly difficult to obey. There was a full hundred yards of lawn between the cat and the lake, and an increasingly wide space between her and the protection of the house.

It would be glorious fun to whiz out in chase of her. Of course, he would not harm a fuzzy hair of her when at last he should overhaul her. But the chase would be a delight.

Then, sighing, Lad resigned himself to the dull cheerlessness of lying inert in his kennel while a million attractive things waited to be done.

The Mistress and the Master—they were with that odious big woman who loathed him and whom he loathed. The house, with his cool “cave” under the piano—that too was denied him while Mrs. Lejeune should remain at The Place.

This peculiarly teasable alien cat—she must be left alone. His human deities were distressingly unhappy about something. That was the worst phase of all, to Lad, in this period of interminable unpleasantness.

Drowsily his eyes continued to follow the lakebound cat.

No longer was the Master watching Massoud’s progress from the veranda and speculating surlily on the probable killing of one or more of the trustful birds whose nests dotted the shore bushes. He had just been called indoors, to the telephone. The Mistress also had gone into the house a minute earlier to give orders for dinner. Mrs. Lejeune was left alone on the shaded porch.

The air was lazily warm and athrob with bird songs. The lake lay fire-blue at the foot of the emerald lawn and amid its circle of softly protecting hills. From the rose-garden drifted faintly a myriad sweet odors. Mrs. Lejeune’s poetic soul expanded under the loveliness of it all—as might the soul of an elephant at scent of a ton of circus peanuts.

She smiled as she saw Massoud draw near to the first of the lakeside bushes, and saw the mincing gait of the cat merge into a tigerish crawl. The dear little pet had discovered an unsuspecting bird somewhere in the bush. That was evident. She was creeping up on her prey with that lithe grace which her owner so admired in her.

Better to see the stalking process, Mrs. Lejeune left her veranda chair and started down the lawn amid the ancient oak trees, toward the water’s edge. She moved slowly and on tiptoe, lest sound of her approach disturb the absorbedly creeping cat.

She came into the line of Lad’s vision. The dog’s upper lip curled instinctively, showing once more a glint of the terrible white eyeteeth. Then, in chill contempt, he looked once more at the craftily moving cat—the cat he had been bidden to leave alone.

As Mrs. Lejeune neared the bank, Massoud halted, crouching low and swishing her great feathery tail. The cat’s jaws chattered. Her whole body was aquiver.

Then, gauging her distance, she launched herself at a slate-hued catbird that was singing on a twig midway up the bush.

Of the infinite variety of birds which made Sunnybank their summer abiding-place—a cloud of them staying all winter to feast on the ample daily rations of suet and crumbs doled out to them—the catbirds were loved by the Mistress and the Master better than all the rest combined.

As a result, catbirds nested in the big lilac clump near the house and in even nearer shrubbery, and were as tame as canaries. One or two of them even used to alight close beside the Mistress’s feet on the veranda floor during breakfast and lunch, sometimes singing gloriously, sometimes pertly demanding food. They seemed to know of these two humans’ protective fondness for them.

Nearly all singing birds have but a single song—two or three or four notes which they repeat over and over in changeless iteration. But a catbird has a repertory. His song lasts sometimes for several minutes; soft, divinely sweet, shifting from one theme to another without repeating itself.

Even more beautiful and varied than the mockingbird’s is the catbird’s changeful song. (Both of them excel, by far, the nightingale, as singers.) The catbird seems to be making up his music, afresh, as he goes on in his song, and to be improvising with conscious skill.

True, once in a way, he seems to be making fun of his own poetic chant by breaking it off with a half-disdainful and wholly mischievous catcall. But this startling contrast only intensifies his song’s beauty.

As a mimic he has no equal. For hours he will try to imitate the oriole’s four-note call, until he has learned it so perfectly that human ears cannot detect the difference between it and the original (and indignant) oriole’s. It is the same with his deftness in catching and copying the songs of two or three other varieties of birds.

It is not a chance repetition. As I have said, he will try for hours, sometimes, before he has reproduced another bird’s song flawlessly and to his own satisfaction. Nor will he cease until he has achieved the task. About him, too, is found a strain of elfin mischief, a true and keen sense of fun. And he is gaily fearless. I have seen him drive a five-foot black snake from his babies’ nest, and chase the squirming monster for more than a hundred yards; pecking in punitive rage as the shining black head, yet clever enough to elude the snake’s jaws or his coils.

So much for a digression, which perhaps is not so much of a digression, after all; as it explains the tameness of the catbird which Massoud was stalking and the affectionate welcome it and its kind had always found at The Place.

Massoud sprang upward and outward, toward the bush. It was a good pounce—powerful and well judged. But a scud of rain had fallen during the night. The lakeside grass was damp and slippery.

In the take-off, Massoud’s driving hind feet slipped ever so little. Not enough to spoil her leap, but enough to make it fall short of its goal by some three or four inches.

Thus, instead of digging deep into the feathers and flesh of a luckless songster, Massoud’s foreclaws found themselves scrabbling desperately for a purchase hold amid a mesh of brittle twigs.

Away flew the bird, in wrathful amaze at such treatment. The cat clawed with all four feet to keep from falling through the interlacing little branches into the deep water below.

There she hung, squalling and clawing, unable to move forward or back, and hard put to it to avert a tumble into the lake.

Lad lifted his head from his white paws and gazed with new and genuine interest. This promised to be very entertaining indeed.

Mrs. Lejeune was running forward in an agony of apprehension, calling shrilly for someone or anyone to help her in extricating her cat from this peril of a ducking. The lake bottom shelved down at that part of the bank, with no intermediate shallows. Massoud must needs swim if she should fall into the water. And Mrs. Lejeune did not know whether or not cats could swim.

Panting, she hurried to the rescue of her pet. Gripping a handful of the bush twigs and bracing her slippered feet against the steep edge of the bank, she reached far out over the water, grasping for any seizable part of Massoud.

The impulse was laudable, but several laws of nature rendered it a failure.

One of these laws concerned gravitation and the tendency of unbalanced heavy bodies to topple. Another was the aforesaid slipperiness of the lakeside grass. A third was the inability of a handful of thin witch-elm twigs to withstand a sudden tugging weight of the two hundred pounds.

The still summer air was shattered by a calliope-like shriek. Lad saw Mrs. Lejeune’s body shoot forward through space as if it had been shoved violently from behind. Through the unimpeding bush it drove its way and for some short distance farther.

Then once more the abused law of gravitation asserted itself and the unfortunate woman fell with an echoing splash into the smooth blue water.

Massoud was jarred loose from her own precarious hold on the crackling twigs by her owner’s dramatic passage through the bush. The cat landed well out in the lake, whence she swam with entire ease, if with much discomfort, to the safety of the shore.

Mrs. Lejeune was less fortunate. She went clean under. The air billowed her clothes. Her own fat aided in bringing her to the surface like some obese cork.

Spraddled out and making desperate efforts to swim—an art she never had troubled to learn—she gurgled and gasped, seeking to clear her lungs and mouth of water in order to scream afresh for help.

Her shriek, as she fell, had changed Lad’s academic interest in the scene into immediate concern. There was terror in that yell. There was peril in the water.

The dog tore forward at top speed, racing for the lake. He was following the instinct of his kind, heedless of whether the imperiled human were friend or foe.

Mrs. Lejeune’s aimless struggles carried her head under again. With a frantic twist she brought it to the surface. As she did so, her water-bleared eyes, staring in panic glassiness, beheld a mahogany-and-snow body leap from the bank and hit the lake resoundingly, close beside her.

As her head was about to go down again, from the mad uselessness of her own struggles, she felt something grip her shoulder, bearing her up and easing momentarily the mysterious force which was tugging to draw her under.

“Lad!” she gabbled, deliriously, wrenching her body around so as to fling both thick arms about the dog’s throat.

Now, Lad was having enough trouble, without this added handicap. It was no light matter for even so powerful a dog to hold above the surface the head and shoulders of a crazily writhing woman of Mrs. Lejeune’s weight.

When that weight was shifted so as to bear down on his battling forequarters and when convulsive arms squeezed shut his breathing apparatus, and when the woman’s impeding bulk pressed against his chest and pinioned his front legs—the situation waxed acute.

Woman and dog went under water together, both of them helpless. The strangling pain in her nostrils and throat made Mrs. Lejeune loosen her grip on the collie, in order to beat uselessly with her hands in an effort to rise. Freed of the dead weight that was choking and drowning him Lad came to the surface.

A five seconds’ swim would have brought him comfortably to shore. But he was not minded to accept life at the expense of the woman who had half-smothered him. A blur of whitish cloth appeared just below the surface. Lad struck for it and seized it, pulling it upward with all his might.

Luckily his teeth had found the victim’s shoulder once more. A mighty heave brought her head above the water.

Lad churned the lake to foam as he swung the heavy and twisting body sidewise in an attempt to tow it ashore. This time Mrs. Lejeune’s arms missed their clutch for him. Straining every splendid muscle, the dog dragged her shoreward. Faint with fright, she relaxed. Thus, her feet sank and her tall body became almost perpendicular. As a result, she felt the shelving lake bottom beneath her soles.

The solid touch revived her. With a last scrambling summoning of all her strength, she floundered landward. For perhaps three steps she waddled; then her legs gave way and she sat down hard, in some eighteen inches of water. Lad had let go of her shoulder and had splashed ashore. His work was done.

It was then that the Master and the Mistress, drawn by their guest’s first calliope shriek, came running to the edge of the lake.

“It’s worse than when she hated Lad!” sighed the Mistress that evening when, for a minute, she and her husband were alone. “Worse for Laddie, I mean. He was happier out in his lonely kennel than with Mrs. Lejeune trying to kiss him every five minutes, and—”

“Dogs aren’t meant to be kissed,” said the Master. “And when it comes to being kissed by Mrs. Lejeune, the term ‘a dog’s life’ takes on a new and horrible meaning. She says she is going to get the Humane Society to give him a medal—he’d lots rather have a steak bone—and she is going to bring him into her new lecture on ‘Real Life Heroes.’ Poor ol Lad!”

“He behaves beautifully about it, though,” declared the Mistress. “And she doesn’t know enough about dogs to see how he detests being pawed and cooed to by her. It’s an awful reward for saving her life.”

“He didn’t,” contradicted the Master.

“Didn’t what?”

“Didn’t save her life. I know every inch of the lake, all along our shore. The water isn’t more than five feet deep, anywhere, at that part of the bank. If she had had sense enough to try to stand up, instead of spread-eagling, when she fell in, she could have walked ashore. The water wasn’t above her chin.”

“Oh!”

“Don’t tell her that, of course. Lad saved her cat’s life and she hated him. He didn’t save her own life—and she is daft about him. That’s how it goes. But——”

“She has a wonderful idea,” interrupted the Mistress. “I know you’ll appreciate it. She wants us to give Lad to her and to accept her heavenly cat, Massoud in exchange.”

The Master’s mouth flew ajar from the force of a torrent of words that sizzled for utterance. Before they could be spoken, Lad came pacing solemnly past them as they stood on the veranda.

From the house he emerged. He paid no heed to either of his deities as he strode by. In his jaws he was carrying a spangled purple satin girdle which the grateful Mrs. Lejeune had taken from her own ample meridian and had knotted artistically around the disgusted dog’s throat.

Twice Lad had managed to wriggle free of the undesired gift. Twice Mrs. Lejeune had retied it lovingly about his neck.

A third time he had freed himself of it; and now he was bearing it forth into the night. Every line and every motion of his shaggy body was vibrant with grim resolve to be made ridiculous by it no more.

Solemnly he made his way to the nearest flower border. There his white little forepaws wrought vehemently in the soft loam until he had dug a hole nearly a foot deep.

Into this cavity he dropped the garish purple satin ornament. With his nose for a shovel he pushed the loose earth over it until the hole was filled.

Then, with a last disgusted look toward the house whence Mrs. Lejeune’s voice could be heard calling tenderly to him, he slunk away to the Lejeuneless sanctity of his own kennel.