Читать книгу Lad: A Dog - The Original Classic Edition - Terhune Albert - Страница 1

LAD: A DOG [Pg iii]

(From a photograph by Lacy Van Wagenen) [Pg iv]

LAD: A DOG BY

ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE

NEW YORK

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

681 FIFTH AVENUE [Pg v]

Copyright 1919

By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

All Rights Reserved

First Printing, April, 1919

Second Printing, June, 1919

Third Printing, July, 1919

Fourth Printing, August, 1919

Fifth Printing, August, 1919

Sixth Printing, August, 1919

Seventh Printing, August, 1919

Eighth Printing, August, 1919

Ninth Printing, August, 1919

Tenth Printing, August, 1919

Eleventh Printing, December, 1919

Twelfth Printing, December, 1919

Thirteenth Printing, December, 1919

Fourteenth Printing, December, 1919

Fifteenth Printing, December, 1919

Sixteenth Printing, December, 1919

Seventeenth Printing, December, 1919

Eighteenth Printing, August, 1921

Nineteenth Printing,March, 1922

Twentieth Printing, August, 1922

Twenty-first Printing, Sept., 1922

Twenty-second Pr'ting, Feb., 1923

Printed in the United States of America

[Pg vi]

my book is dedicated to the memory of

Lad

thoroughbred in body and soul

[Pg viii]

1

CONTENTS

chapter page

I. His Mate 1

II. "Quiet!" 26

III. A Miracle of Two 49

IV. His Little Son 74

V. For a Bit of Ribbon 97

VI. Lost! 126

VII. The Throwback 156

VIII. The Gold Hat 180

IX. Speaking of Utility 218

X. The Killer251

XI. Wolf 297

XII. In the Day of Battle 321

Afterword 347 [Pg x]

LAD: A DOG [Pg 1] CHAPTER I

HIS MATE

Lady was as much a part of Lad's everyday happiness as the sunshine itself. She seemed to him quite as perfect, and as gloriously indispensable. He could no more have imagined a Ladyless life than a sunless life. It had never occurred to him to suspect that Lady could be any less devoted than he--until Knave came to The Place.

Lad was an eighty-pound collie, thoroughbred in spirit as well as in blood. He had the benign dignity that was a heritage from endless generations of high-strain ancestors. He had, too, the gay courage of a d'Artagnan, and an uncanny wisdom. Also--who could doubt it, after a look into his mournful brown eyes--he had a Soul.

His shaggy coat, set off by the snowy ruff and chest, was like orange-flecked mahogany. His ab[Pg 2]surdly tiny forepaws--in which

he took inordinate pride--were silver white.

Three years earlier, when Lad was in his first prime (before the mighty chest and shoulders had filled out and the tawny coat had waxed so shaggy), Lady had been brought to The Place. She had been brought in the Master's overcoat pocket, rolled up into a fuzzy gold-gray ball of softness no bigger than a half-grown kitten.

The Master had fished the month-old puppy out of the cavern of his pocket and set her down, asprawl and shivering and squealing, on the veranda floor. Lad had walked cautiously across the veranda, sniffed inquiry at the blinking pigmy who gallantly essayed to growl defiance up at the huge welcomer--and from that first moment he had taken her under his protection.

First it had been the natural impulse of the thoroughbred--brute or human--to guard the helpless. Then, as the shapeless yellow baby grew into a slenderly graceful collie, his guardianship changed to stark adoration. He was Lady's life slave.

And she bullied him unmercifully--bossed the gentle giant in a shameful manner, crowding him from the warmest spot by the fire, brazenly yet daintily snatching from between his jaws the choicest bone of their joint dinner, hectoring her dignified victim into lawn-romps in hot weather when he would far rather have drowsed under the lakeside trees.

[Pg 3]

Her vagaries, her teasing, her occasional little flurries of temper, were borne by Lad not meekly, but joyously. All she did was, in his eyes, perfect. And Lady graciously allowed herself to be idolized, for she was marvelously human in some ways. Lad, a thoroughbred descended from a hundred generations of thoroughbreds, was less human and more disinterested.

2

Life at The Place was wondrous pleasant for both the dogs. There were thick woods to roam in, side by side; there were squirrels to chase and rabbits to trail. (Yes, and if the squirrels had played fair and had not resorted to unsportsmanly tactics by climbing trees when close pressed, there would doubtless have been squirrels to catch as well as to chase. As for the rabbits, they were easier to overtake. And Lady got the lion's share of all such morsels.)

There was the ice-cool lake to plunge into for a swim or a wallow, after a run in the dust and July heat. There was a deliciously comfortable old rug in front of the living-room's open fire whereon to lie, shoulder to shoulder, on the nights when the wind screamed through bare trees and the snow scratched hungrily at the panes.

Best of all, to them both, there were the Master and the Mistress; especially the Mistress.

Any man with money to make the purchase may become a dog's owner. But no man--spend he ever so much coin and food and tact in the effort[Pg 4]--may become a dog's Master without the consent of the dog. Do you get the difference? And he whom a dog once unreservedly accepts as Master is forever that dog's God.

To both Lad and Lady, from the first, the man who bought them was not the mere owner but the absolute Master. To them he was the unquestioned lord of life and death, the hearer and answerer, the Eternal Law; his the voice that must be obeyed, whatever the command.

From earliest puppyhood, both Lad and Lady had been brought up within the Law. As far back as they could remember, they had known and obeyed The Place's simple code.

For example: All animals of the woods might lawfully be chased; but the Mistress' prize chickens and the other little folk of The Place must be ignored no matter how hungry or how playful a collie might chance to be. A human, walking openly or riding down the drive into The Place by daylight, must not be barked at except by way of friendly announcement. But anyone entering the grounds from other ingress than the drive, or anyone walking furtively or with a tramp slouch, must be attacked at sight.

Also, the interior of the house was sacrosanct. It was a place for perfect behavior. No rug must be scratched, nothing gnawed or played with. In fact, Lady's one whipping had followed a puppy-frolic effort of hers to "worry" the huge stuffed[Pg 5] bald eagle that stood on a papier-mache stump in the Master's study, just off the big living-room where the fireplace was.

That eagle, shot by himself as it raided the flock of prize chickens, was the delight of the Master's heart. And at Lady's attempt on it, he had taught her a lesson that made her cringe for weeks thereafter at bare sight of the dog-whip. To this day, she would never walk past the eagle without making the widest possible detour around it.

But that punishment had been suffered while she was still in the idiotic days of puppyhood. After she was grown, Lady would no more have thought of tampering with the eagle or with anything else in the house than it would occur to a human to stand on his head in church.

Then, early one spring, came Knave--a showy, magnificent collie; red-gold of coat save for a black "saddle," and with alert topaz

eyes.

Knave did not belong to the Master, but to a man who, going to Europe for a month, asked him to care for the dog in his absence. The Master, glad to have so beautiful an ornament to The Place, had willingly consented. He was rewarded when, on the train from town, an admiring crowd of commuters flocked to the baggage-car to stare at the splendid-looking collie.

The only dissenting note in the praise-chorus was the grouchy old baggage-man's.

"Maybe he's a thoroughbred, like you say,"[Pg 6] drawled the old fellow to the Master, "but I never yet saw a yellow-eyed, prick-eared dog I'd give hell-room to."

Knave showed his scorn for such silly criticism by a cavernous yawn.

"Thoroughbred?" grunted the baggage-man. "With them streaks of pinkish-yeller on the roof of his mouth? Ever see a thoroughbred that didn't have a black mouth-roof ?"

But the old man's slighting words were ignored with disdain by the crowd of volunteer dog-experts in the baggage-car. In time the

Master alighted at his station, with Knave straining joyously at the leash. As the Master reached The Place and turned into the drive,

3

both Lad and Lady, at sound of his far-off footsteps, came tearing around the side of the house to greet him.

On simultaneous sight and scent of the strange dog frisking along at his side, the two collies paused in their madly joyous onrush. Up went their ruffs. Down went their heads.

Lady flashed forward to do battle with the stranger who was monopolizing so much of the Master's attention. Knave, not at all

averse to battle (especially with a smaller dog), braced himself and then moved forward, stiff-legged, fangs bare.

But of a sudden his head went up; his stiff-poised brush broke into swift wagging; his lips curled down. He had recognized that his prospec[Pg 7]tive foe was not of his own sex. (And nowhere, except among humans, does a full-grown male ill-treat or even defend himself against the female of his species.)

Lady, noting the stranger's sudden friendliness, paused irresolute in her charge. And at that instant Lad darted past her. Full at

Knave's throat he launched himself. The Master rasped out:

"Down, Lad! Down!"

Almost in midair the collie arrested his onset--coming to earth bristling, furious and yet with no thought but to obey. Knave, seeing

his foe was not going to fight, turned once more toward Lady.

"Lad," ordered the Master, pointing toward Knave and speaking with quiet intentness, "let him alone. Understand? Let him alone." And Lad understood--even as years of training and centuries of ancestry had taught him to understand every spoken wish of the

Master's. He must give up his impulse to make war on this intruder whom at sight he hated. It was the Law; and from the Law there was no appeal.

With yearningly helpless rage he looked on while the newcomer was installed on The Place. With a wondering sorrow he found himself forced to share the Master's and Mistress' caresses with this interloper. With growing pain he submitted to Knave's gay attentions to Lady, and to Lady's[Pg 8] evident relish of the guest's companionship. Gone were the peaceful old days of utter content-ment.

Lady had always regarded Lad as her own special property--to tease and to boss and to despoil of choice food-bits. But her attitude toward Knave was far different. She coquetted, human-fashion, with the gold-and-black dog--at one moment affecting to scorn him, at another meeting his advances with a delighted friendliness.

She never presumed to boss him as she had always bossed Lad. He fascinated her. Without seeming to follow him about, she was forever at his heels. Lad, cut to the heart at her sudden indifference toward his loyal self, tried in every way his simple soul could devise to win back her interest. He essayed clumsily to romp with her as the lithely graceful Knave romped, to drive rabbits for her on their woodland rambles, to thrust himself, in a dozen gentle ways, upon her attention.

But it was no use. Lady scarcely noticed him. When his overtures of friendship chanced to annoy her, she rewarded them with a snap or with an impatient growl. And ever she turned to the all-conquering Knave in a keenness of attraction that was all but hypnotic.

As his divinity's total loss of interest in himself grew too apparent to be doubted, Lad's big heart broke. Being only a dog and a Grail-knight in thought, he did not realize that Knave's newness and his difference from anything she had known,[Pg 9] formed a large part of Lady's desire for the visitor's favor; nor did he understand that such interest must wane when the novelty should wear off.

All Lad knew was that he loved her, and that for the sake of a flashy stranger she was snubbing him.

As the Law forbade him to avenge himself in true dog-fashion by fighting for his Lady's love, Lad sadly withdrew from the unequal contest, too proud to compete for a fickle sweetheart. No longer did he try to join in the others' lawn-romps, but lay at a distance, his splendid head between his snowy little forepaws, his brown eyes sick with sorrow, watching their gambols.

Nor did he thrust his undesired presence on them during their woodland rambles. He took to moping, solitary, infinitely miserable.

Perhaps there is on earth something unhappier than a bitterly aggrieved dog. But no one has ever discovered that elusive something.

4

Knave from the first had shown and felt for Lad a scornful indifference. Not understanding the Law, he had set down the older col-lie's refusal to fight as a sign of exemplary, if timorous prudence, and he looked down upon him accordingly. One day Knave came home from the morning run through the forest without Lady. Neither the Master's calls nor the ear-ripping blasts of his dog-whistle could bring her back to The Place. Whereat Lad arose heavily from his favorite rest[Pg 10]ing-place under the living-room piano and cantered off to the woods. Nor did he return.

Several hours later the Master went to the woods to investigate, followed by the rollicking Knave. At the forest edge the Master shouted. A far-off bark from Lad answered. And the Master made his way through shoulder-deep underbrush in the direction of the sound.

In a clearing he found Lady, her left forepaw caught in the steel jaws of a fox-trap. Lad was standing protectingly above her, stooping now and then to lick her cruelly pinched foot or to whine consolation to her; then snarling in fierce hate at a score of crows that flapped hopefully in the tree-tops above the victim.

The Master set Lady free, and Knave frisked forward right joyously to greet his released inamorata. But Lady was in no condition to play--then nor for many a day thereafter. Her forefoot was so lacerated and swollen that she was fain to hobble awkwardly on three legs for the next fortnight.

It was on one pantingly hot August morning, a little later, that Lady limped into the house in search of a cool spot where she might lie and lick her throbbing forefoot. Lad was lying, as usual, under the piano in the living-room. His tail thumped shy welcome on the hardwood floor as she passed, but she would not stay or so much as notice him.

[Pg 11]

On she limped, into the Master's study, where an open window sent a faint breeze through the house. Giving the stuffed eagle a wide berth, Lady hobbled to the window and made as though to lie down just beneath it. As she did so, two things happened: she leaned too much weight on the sore foot, and the pressure wrung from her an involuntary yelp of pain; at the same moment a crosscurrent of air from the other side of the house swept through the living-room and blew shut the door of the adjoining study. Lady was a prisoner.

Ordinarily this would have caused her no ill-ease, for the open window was only thirty inches above the floor, and the drop to the veranda outside was a bare three feet. It would have been the simplest matter in the world for her to jump out, had she wearied of her chance captivity.

But to undertake the jump with the prospect of landing her full weight and impetus on a forepaw that was horribly sensitive to the lightest touch--this was an exploit beyond the sufferer's will-power. So Lady resigned herself to imprisonment. She curled herself up on the floor as far as possible from the eagle, moaned softly and lay still.

At sound of her first yelp, Lad had run forward, whining eager sympathy. But the closed door blocked his way. He crouched,

wretched and anxious, before it, helpless to go to his loved one's assistance.

Knave, too, loping back from a solitary prowl[Pg 12] of the woods, seeking Lady, heard the yelp. His prick-ears located the sound at once. Along the veranda he trotted, to the open study window. With a bound he had cleared the sill and alighted inside the room.

It chanced to be his first visit to the study. The door was usually kept shut, that drafts might not blow the Master's desk-papers

about. And Knave felt, at best, little interest in exploring the interior of houses. He was an outdoor dog, by choice.

He advanced now toward Lady, his tail a-wag, his head on one side, with his most irresistible air. Then, as he came forward into the room, he saw the eagle. He halted in wonder at sight of the enormous white-crested bird with its six-foot sweep of pinion. It was a wholly novel spectacle to Knave; and he greeted it with a gruff bark, half of fear, half of bravado. Quickly, however, his sense of smell told him this wide-winged apparition was no living thing. And ashamed of his momentary cowardice, he went over to investigate it.

As he went, Knave cast over his shoulder a look of invitation to Lady to join him in his inspection. She understood the invitation, but memory of that puppyhood beating made her recoil from accepting it. Knave saw her shrink back, and he realized with a thrill that she was actually afraid of this lifeless thing which could harm no one. With due pride in showing off his own heroism before her,[Pg 13] and with the scamp-dog's innate craving to destroy, he sprang growling upon the eagle.

5

Down tumbled the papier-mache stump. Down crashed the huge stuffed bird with it; Knave's white teeth buried deep in the soft feathers of its breast.

Lady, horror-struck at this sacrilege, whimpered in terror. But her plaint served only to increase Knave's zest for destruction.

He hurled the bird to the floor, pinned it down with his feet and at one jerk tore the right wing from the body. Coughing out the mouthful of dusty pinions, he dug his teeth into the eagle's throat. Again bracing himself with his forelegs on the carcass, he gave a sharp tug. Head and neck came away in his mouth. And then before he could drop the mouthful and return to the work of demoli-tion, he heard the Master's step.

All at once, now, Knave proved he was less ignorant of the Law--or, at least, of its penalties--than might have been supposed from his act of vandalism. In sudden panic he bolted for the window, the silvery head of the eagle still, unheeded, between his jaws. With

a vaulting spring, he shot out through the open casement, in his reckless eagerness to escape, knocking against Lady's injured leg as he passed.

He did not pause at Lady's scream of pain, nor did he stop until he reached the chicken-house. Crawling under this, he deposited the incriminating eagle-head in the dark recess. Finding no pursuer,[Pg 14] he emerged and jogged innocently back toward the veranda.

The Master, entering the house and walking across the living-room toward the stairs, heard Lady's cry. He looked around for her, recognizing from the sound that she must be in distress. His eye fell on Lad, crouching tense and eager in front of the shut study door.

The Master opened the door and went into the study.

At the first step inside the room he stopped, aghast. There lay the chewed and battered fragments of his beloved eagle. And there, in one corner, frightened, with guilt writ plain all over her, cowered Lady. Men have been "legally" done to death on far lighter evidence than encompassed her.

The Master was thunderstruck. For more than two years Lady had had the free run of the house. And this was her first sin--at that, a sin unworthy any well-bred dog that has graduated from puppyhood and from milk-teeth. He would not have believed it. He could not have believed it. Yet here was the hideous evidence, scattered all over the floor.

The door was shut, but the window stood wide. Through the window, doubtless, she had gotten into the room. And he had surprised her at her vandal-work before she could escape by the same opening.

The Master was a just man--as humans go; but[Pg 15] this was a crime the most maudlin dog-spoiler could not have condoned. The eagle, moreover, had been the pride of his heart--as perhaps I have said. Without a word, he walked to the wall and took down a braided dog-whip, dust-covered from long disuse.

Lady knew what was coming. Being a thoroughbred, she did not try to run, nor did she roll for mercy. She cowered, moveless, nose

to floor, awaiting her doom.

Back swished the lash. Down it came, whistling as a man whistles whose teeth are broken. Across Lady's slender flanks it smote, with the full force of a strong driving-arm. Lady quivered all over. But she made no sound. She who would whimper at a chance touch to her sore foot, was mute under human punishment.

But Lad was not mute. As the Master's arm swung back for a second blow, he heard, just behind, a low, throaty growl that held all the menace of ten thousand wordy threats.

He wheeled about. Lad was close at his heels, fangs bared, eyes red, head lowered, tawny body taut in every sinew.

The Master blinked at him, incredulous. Here was something infinitely more unbelievable than Lady's supposed destruction of the

eagle. The Impossible had come to pass.

For, know well, a dog does not growl at its Master. At its owner, perhaps; at its Master,[Pg 16] never. As soon would a devout priest blaspheme his deity.

Nor does a dog approach anything or anybody, growling and with lowered head, unless intent on battle. Have no fear when a dog

6

barks or even growls at you, so long as his head is erect. But when he growls and lowers his head--then look out. It means but one thing.

The Master had been the Master--the sublime, blindly revered and worshiped Master--for all the blameless years of Lad's life. And now, growling, head down, the dog was threatening him.

It was the supreme misery, the crowning hell, of Lad's career. For the first time, two overpowering loves fought with each other in

his Galahad soul. And the love for poor, unjustly blamed, Lady hurled down the superlove for the Master.

In baring teeth upon his lord, the collie well knew what he was incurring. But he did not flinch. Understanding that swift death might

well be his portion, he stood his ground.

(Is there greater love? Humans--sighing swains, vow-laden suitors--can any of you match it? I think not. Not even the much-lauded

Antonys. They throw away only the mere world of earthly credit, for love.)

The Master's jaw set. He was well-nigh as unhappy as the dog. For he grasped the situation, and he was man enough to honor Lad's proffered sacrifice. Yet it must be punished, and punished in[Pg 17]stantly--as any dog-master will testify. Let a dog once growl or show his teeth in menace at his Master, and if the rebellion be not put down in drastic fashion, the Master ceases forever to be Mas-ter and degenerates to mere owner. His mysterious power over his dog is gone for all time.

Turning his back on Lady, the Master whirled his dog-whip in air. Lad saw the lash coming down. He did not flinch. He did not cower. The growl ceased. The orange-tawny collie stood erect. Down came the braided whiplash on Lad's shoulders--again over his loins, and yet again and again.

Without moving--head up, dark tender eyes unwinking--the hero-dog took the scourging. When it was over, he waited only to see the Master throw the dog-whip fiercely into a corner of the study. Then, knowing Lady was safe, Lad walked majestically back to his "cave" under the piano, and with a long, quivering sigh he lay down.

His spirit was sick and crushed within him. For the first time in his thoroughbred life he had been struck. For he was one of those not wholly rare dogs to whom a sharp word of reproof is more effective than a beating--to whom a blow is not a pain, but a damn-ing and overwhelming ignominy. Had a human, other than the Master, presumed to strike him, the assailant must have fought for

life.

Through the numbness of Lad's grief, bit by bit, began to smolder and glow a deathless hate for Knave, the cause of Lady's humiliation. Lad had[Pg 18] known what passed behind that closed study door as well as though he had seen. For ears and scent serve a true collie quite as usefully as do mere eyes.

The Master was little happier than was his favorite dog. For he loved Lad as he would have loved a human son. Though Lad did not realize it, the Master had "let off " Lady from the rest of her beating, in order not to increase her champion's grief. He simply ordered her out of the study.

And as she limped away, the Master tried to rekindle his own indignation and deaden his sense of remorse by gathering together the strewn fragments of the eagle. It occurred to him that though the bird was destroyed, he might yet have its fierce-eyed silvery head mounted on a board, as a minor trophy.

But he could not find the head.

Search the study as he would, he could not find it. He remembered distinctly that Lady had been panting as she slunk out of the room. And dogs that are carrying things in their mouths cannot pant. She had not taken the head away with her. The absence of the head only deepened the whole annoying domestic mystery. He gave up trying to solve any of the puzzle--from Lady's incredible vandalism to this newest turn of the affair.

Not until two days later could Lad bring himself to risk a meeting with Lady, the cause and the witness of his beating. Then, yearning for a[Pg 19] sight of her and for even her grudged recognition of his presence, after his forty-eight hours of isolation, he sallied forth from the house in search of her.

He traced her to the cool shade of a lilac clump near the outbuildings. There, having with one paw dug a little pit in the cool earth, she was curled up asleep under the bushes. Stretched out beside her was Knave.

7

Lad's spine bristled at sight of his foe. But ignoring him, he moved over to Lady and touched her nose with his own in timid caress. She opened one eye, blinked drowsily and went to sleep again.

But Lad's coming had awakened Knave. Much refreshed by his nap, he woke in playful mood. He tried to induce Lady to romp with him, but she preferred to doze. So, casting about in his shallow mind for something to play with, Knave chanced to remember the prize he had hidden beneath the chicken-house.

Away he ambled, returning presently with the eagle's head between his teeth. As he ran, he tossed it aloft, catching it as it fell--a pretty trick he had long since learned with a tennis-ball.

Lad, who had lain down as near to sleepily scornful Lady as he dared, looked up and saw him approach. He saw, too, with what Knave was playing; and as he saw, he went quite mad. Here was the thing that had caused Lady's interrupted punishment and his own black disgrace. Knave[Pg 20] was exploiting it with manifest and brazen delight.

For the second time in his life--and for the second time in three days--Lad broke the law. He forgot, in a trice, the command "Let

him alone!" And noiseless, terrible, he flew at the gamboling Knave.

Knave was aware of the attack, barely in time to drop the eagle's head and spring forward to meet his antagonist. He was three years Lad's junior and was perhaps five pounds heavier. Moreover, constant exercise had kept him in steel-and-whale-bone condition; while lonely brooding at home had begun of late to soften Lad's tough sinews.

Knave was mildly surprised that the dog he had looked on as a dullard and a poltroon should have developed a flash of spirit. But he

was not at all unwilling to wage a combat whose victory must make him shine with redoubled glory in Lady's eyes.

Like two furry whirlwinds the collies spun forward toward each other. They met, upreared and snarled, slashing wolflike for the throat, clawing madly to retain balance. Then down they went, rolling in a right unloving embrace, snapping, tearing, growling.

Lad drove straight for the throat. A half-handful of Knave's golden ruff came away in his jaws. For except at the exact center, a collie's throat is protected by a tangle of hair as effective against assault as were Andrew Jackson's cotton-bale breast[Pg 21]works at New Orleans. And Lad had missed the exact center.

Over and over they rolled. They regained their footing and reared again. Lad's saber-shaped tusk ripped a furrow in Knave's satiny

forehead; and Knave's half deflected slash in return set bleeding the big vein at the top of Lad's left ear.

Lady was wide awake long before this. Standing immovable, yet wildly excited--after the age-old fashion of the female brute for

whom males battle and who knows she is to be the winner's prize--she watched every turn of the fight.

Up once more, the dogs clashed, chest to chest. Knave, with an instinctive throwback to his wolf forebears of five hundred years

earlier, dived for Lad's forelegs with the hope of breaking one of them between his foaming jaws.

He missed the hold by a fraction of an inch. The skin alone was torn. And down over the little white forepaw--one of the forepaws that Lad was wont to lick for an hour a day to keep them snowy--ran a trickle of blood.

That miss was a costly error for Knave. For Lad's teeth sought and found his left shoulder, and sank deep therein. Knave twisted and wheeled with lightning speed and with all his strength. Yet had not his gold-hued ruff choked Lad and pressed stranglingly against

his nostrils, all the heavier dog's struggles would not have set him free.

As it was, Lad, gasping for breath enough to fill[Pg 22] his lungs, relaxed his grip ever so slightly. And in that fraction of a second

Knave tore free, leaving a mouthful of hair and skin in his enemy's jaws.

In the same wrench that liberated him--and as the relieved tension sent Lad stumbling forward--Knave instinctively saw his chance and took it. Again heredity came to his aid, for he tried a manoeuver known only to wolves and to collies. Flashing above his stumbling foe's head, Knave seized Lad from behind, just below the base of the skull. And holding him thus helpless, he proceeded to

grit and grind his tight-clenched teeth in the slow, relentless motion that must soon or late eat down to and sever the spinal cord.

Lad, even as he thrashed frantically about, felt there was no escape. He was well-nigh as powerless against a strong opponent in this position as is a puppy that is held up by the scruff of the neck.

8

Without a sound, but still struggling as best he might, he awaited his fate. No longer was he growling or snarling.

His patient, bloodshot eyes sought wistfully for Lady. And they did not find her.

For even as they sought her, a novel element entered into the battle. Lady, hitherto awaiting with true feminine meekness the outcome of the scrimmage, saw her old flame's terrible plight, under the grinding jaws. And, proving herself false to all canons of ancestry--moved by some impulse she did not try to resist--she jumped forward.[Pg 23] Forgetting the pain in her swollen foot, she nipped Knave sharply in the hind leg. Then, as if abashed by her unfeminine behavior, she drew back, in shame.

But the work was done.

Through the red war lust Knave dimly realized that he was attacked from behind--perhaps that his new opponent stood an excellent chance of gaining upon him such a death-hold as he himself now held.

He loosed his grip and whizzed about, frothing and snapping, to face the danger. Before Knave had half completed his lightning whirl, Lad had him by the side of the throat.

It was no death-grip, this. Yet it was not only acutely painful, but it held its victim quite as powerless as he had just now held Lad. Bearing down with all his weight and setting his white little front teeth and his yellowing tusks firmly in their hold, Lad gradually shoved Knave's head sideways to the ground and held it there.

The result on Knave's activities was much the same as is obtained by sitting on the head of a kicking horse that has fallen. Unable to wrench loose, helpless to counter, in keen agony from the pinching of the tender throat-skin beneath the masses of ruff, Knave lost his nerve. And he forthwith justified those yellowish streaks in his mouth-roof whereof the baggage-man had spoken.

He made the air vibrate with his abject howls of pain and fear. He was caught. He could not get[Pg 24] away. Lad was hurting him horribly. Wherefore he ki-yi-ed as might any gutter cur whose tail is stepped upon.

Presently, beyond the fight haze, Lad saw a shadow in front of him--a shadow that resolved itself in the settling dust, as the Master.

And Lad came to himself.

He loosed his hold on Knave's throat, and stood up, groggily. Knave, still yelping, tucked his tail between his legs and fled for his

life--out of The Place, out of your story.

Slowly, stumblingly, but without a waver of hesitation, Lad went up to the Master. He was gasping for breath, and he was weak from fearful exertion and from loss of blood. Up to the Master he went--straight up to him.

And not until he was a scant two yards away did he see that the Master held something in his hand--that abominable, mischief-mak- ing eagle's head, which he had just picked up! Probably the dog-whip was in the other hand. It did not matter much. Lad was ready for this final degradation. He would not try to dodge it, he the double breaker of laws.

Then--the Master was kneeling beside him. The kind hand was caressing the dog's dizzy head, the dear voice--a queer break in it--

was saying remorsefully:

"Oh Lad! Laddie! I'm so sorry. So sorry![Pg 25] You're--you're more of a man than I am, old friend. I'll make it up to you, somehow!"

And now besides the loved hand, there was another touch, even more precious--a warmly caressing little pink tongue that licked his bleeding foreleg.

Lady--timidly, adoringly--was trying to stanch her hero's wounds.

"Lady, I apologize to you too," went on the foolish Master. "I'm sorry, girl."

Lady was too busy soothing the hurts of her newly discovered mate to understand. But Lad understood. Lad always understood.

[Pg 26]

9

CHAPTER II "QUIET"

To Lad the real world was bounded by The Place. Outside, there were a certain number of miles of land and there were an uncertain number of people. But the miles were uninspiring, except for a cross-country tramp with the Master. And the people were fool-

ish and strange folk who either stared at him--which always annoyed Lad--or else tried to pat him; which he hated. But The Place was--The Place.

Always, he had lived on The Place. He felt he owned it. It was assuredly his to enjoy, to guard, to patrol from high road to lake. It was his world.

The denizens of every world must have at least one deity to worship. Lad had one: the Master. Indeed, he had two: the Master and the Mistress. And because the dog was strong of soul and chivalric, withal, and because the Mistress was altogether lovable, Lad placed her altar even above the Master's. Which was wholly as it should have been.

There were other people at The Place--people to whom a dog must be courteous, as becomes a[Pg 27] thoroughbred, and whose caresses he must accept. Very often, there were guests, too. And from puppyhood, Lad had been taught the sacredness of the Guest Law. Civilly, he would endure the pettings of these visiting outlanders. Gravely, he would shake hands with them, on request. He would even permit them to paw him or haul him about, if they were of the obnoxious, dog-mauling breed. But the moment polite-ness would permit, he always withdrew, very quietly, from their reach and, if possible, from their sight as well.

Of all the dogs on The Place, big Lad alone had free run of the house, by day and by night.

He slept in a "cave" under the piano. He even had access to the sacred dining-room, at mealtimes--where always he lay to the left of the Master's chair.

With the Master, he would willingly unbend for a romp at any or all times. At the Mistress' behest he would play with all the silly abandon of a puppy; rolling on the ground at her feet, making as though to seize and crush one of her little shoes in his mighty jaws; wriggling and waving his legs in air when she buried her hand in the masses of his chest-ruff; and otherwise comporting himself

with complete loss of dignity.

But to all except these two, he was calmly unapproachable. From his earliest days he had never forgotten he was an aristocrat among inferiors. And, calmly aloof, he moved among his subjects.

[Pg 28]

Then, all at once, into the sweet routine of the House of Peace, came Horror.

It began on a blustery, sour October day. The Mistress had crossed the lake to the village, in her canoe, with Lad curled up in a furry heap in the prow. On the return trip, about fifty yards from shore, the canoe struck sharply and obliquely against a half-submerged log that a Fall freshet had swept down from the river above the lake. At the same moment a flaw of wind caught the canoe's quarter. And, after the manner of such eccentric craft, the canvas shell proceeded to turn turtle.

Into the ice-chill waters splashed its two occupants. Lad bobbed to the top, and glanced around at the Mistress to learn if this were a new practical joke. But, instantly, he saw it was no joke at all, so far as she was concerned.

Swathed and cramped by the folds of her heavy outing skirt, the Mistress was making no progress shoreward. And the dog flung himself through the water toward her with a rush that left his shoulders and half his back above the surface. In a second he had reached her and had caught her sweater-shoulder in his teeth.

She had the presence of mind to lie out straight, as though she were floating, and to fill her lungs with a swift intake of breath.

The dog's burden was thus made infinitely lighter than if she had struggled or had lain in a posture less easy for[Pg 29] towing. Yet he made scant headway, until she wound one hand in his mane, and, still lying motionless and stiff, bade him loose his hold on her shoulder.

In this way, by sustained effort that wrenched every giant muscle in the collie's body, they came at last to land.

10

Vastly rejoiced was Lad, and inordinately proud of himself. And the plaudits of the Master and the Mistress were music to him. Indefinably, he understood he had done a very wonderful thing and that everybody on The Place was talking about him, and that all were trying to pet him at once.

This promiscuous handling he began to find unwelcome. And he retired at last to his "cave" under the piano to escape from it. Matters soon quieted down; and the incident seemed at an end.

Instead, it had just begun.

For, within an hour, the Mistress--who, for days had been half-sick with a cold--was stricken with a chill, and by night she was in

the first stages of pneumonia.

Then over The Place descended Gloom. A gloom Lad could not understand until he went upstairs at dinner-time to escort the Mistress, as usual, to the dining-room. But to his light scratch at her door there was no reply. He scratched again and presently Master came out of the room and ordered him downstairs again.

Then from the Master's voice and look, Lad[Pg 30] understood that something was terribly amiss. Also, as she did not appear at dinner and as he was for the first time in his life forbidden to go into her room, he knew the Mistress was the victim of whatever mishap had befallen.

A strange man, with a black bag, came to the house early in the evening; and he and the Master were closeted for an interminable time in the Mistress' room. Lad had crept dejectedly upstairs behind them; and sought to crowd into the room at their heels. The Master ordered him back and shut the door in his face.

Lad lay down on the threshold, his nose to the crack at the bottom of the door, and waited. He heard the murmur of speech.

Once he caught the Mistress' voice--changed and muffled and with a puzzling new note in it--but undeniably the Mistress'. And his tail thumped hopefully on the hall floor. But no one came to let him in. And, after the mandate to keep out, he dared not scratch for admittance.

The doctor almost stumbled across the couchant body of the dog as he left the room with the Master. Being a dog-owner himself, the doctor understood and his narrow escape from a fall over the living obstacle did not irritate him. But it reminded him of something.

"Those other dogs of yours outside there," he said to the Master, as they went down the stairs, "raised a fearful racket when my

car came down[Pg 31] the drive, just now. Better send them all away somewhere till she is better. The house must be kept perfectly quiet."

The Master looked back, up the stairway; at its top, pressed close against the Mistress' door, crouched Lad. Something in the dog's heartbroken attitude touched him.

"I'll send them over to the boarding-kennels in the morning," he answered. "All except Lad. He and I are going to see this through, together. He'll be quiet, if I tell him to."

All through the endless night, while the October wind howled and yelled around the house, Lad lay outside the sickroom door, his nose between his absurdly small white paws, his sorrowful eyes wide open, his ears alert for the faintest sound from the room beyond.

Sometimes, when the wind screamed its loudest, Lad would lift his head--his ruff abristle, his teeth glinting from under his upcurled lip. And he would growl a throaty menace. It was as though he heard, in the tempest's racket, the strife of evil gale-spirits to burst in through the rattling windows and attack the stricken Mistress. Perhaps--well, perhaps there are things visible and audible to dogs; to which humans were deaf and blind. Or perhaps they are not.

Lad was there when day broke and when the Master, heavy-eyed from sleeplessness, came out. He was there when the other dogs were herded[Pg 32] into the car and carried away to the boarding-kennels.

Lad was there when the car came back from the station, bringing to The Place an angular, wooden-faced woman with yellow hair and

a yellower suitcase--a horrible woman who vaguely smelt of disinfectants and of rigid Efficiency, and who presently approached the

11

sickroom, clad and capped in stiff white. Lad hated her.

He was there when the doctor came for his morning visit to the invalid. And again he tried to edge his own way into the room, only to be rebuffed once more.

"This is the third time I've nearly broken my neck over that miserable dog," chidingly announced the nurse, later in the day, as she came out of the room and chanced to meet the Master on the landing. "Do please drive him away. I've tried to do it, but he only snarls at me. And in a dangerous case like this----"

"Leave him alone," briefly ordered the Master.

But when the nurse, sniffing, passed on, he called Lad over to him. Reluctantly, the dog quitted the door and obeyed the summons.

"Quiet!" ordered the Master, speaking very slowly and distinctly. "You must keep quiet. Quiet! Understand?"

Lad understood. Lad always understood. He must not bark. He must move silently. He must make no unnecessary sound. But, at least, the[Pg 33] Master had not forbidden him to snarl softly and loathingly at that detestable white-clad woman every time she stepped over him.

So there was one grain of comfort.

Gently, the Master called him downstairs and across the living-room, and put him out of the house. For, after all, a shaggy eighty-pound dog is an inconvenience stretched across a sickroom doorsill.

Three minutes later, Lad had made his way through an open window into the cellar and thence upstairs; and was stretched out, head between paws, at the threshold of the Mistress' room.

On his thrice-a-day visits, the doctor was forced to step over him, and was man enough to forbear to curse. Twenty times a day, the nurse stumbled over his massive, inert body, and fumed in impotent rage. The Master, too, came back and forth from the sickroom, with now and then a kindly word for the suffering collie, and again and again put him out of the house.

But always Lad managed, by hook or crook, to be back on guard within a minute or two. And never once did the door of the Mistress' room open that he did not make a strenuous attempt to enter.

Servants, nurse, doctor, and Master repeatedly forgot he was there, and stubbed their toes across his body. Sometimes their feet drove agonizingly into his tender flesh. But never a whimper or[Pg 34] growl did the pain wring from him. "Quiet!" had been the command, and he was obeying.

And so it went on, through the awful days and the infinitely worse nights. Except when he was ordered away by the Master, Lad would not stir from his place at the door. And not even the Master's authority could keep him away from it for five minutes a day.

The dog ate nothing, drank practically nothing, took no exercise; moved not one inch, of his own will, from the doorway. In vain did the glories of Autumn woods call to him. The rabbits would be thick, out yonder in the forest, just now. So would the squirrels-- against which Lad had long since sworn a blood-feud (and one of which it had ever been his futile life ambition to catch).

For him, these things no longer existed. Nothing existed; except his mortal hatred of the unseen Something in that forbidden room--the Something that was seeking to take the Mistress away with It. He yearned unspeakably to be in that room to guard her from her nameless Peril. And they would not let him in--these humans.

Wherefore he lay there, crushing his body close against the door and--waiting.

And, inside the room, Death and the Napoleonic man with the black bag fought their "no-quarter" duel for the life of the still, little

white figure in the great white bed.

One night, the doctor did not go home at all.[Pg 35] Toward dawn the Master lurched out of the room and sat down for a moment on the stairs, his face in his hands. Then and then only, during all that time of watching, did Lad leave the doorsill of his own accord.

Shaky with famine and weariness, he got to his feet, moaning softly, and crept over to the Master; he lay down beside him, his huge

12

head athwart the man's knees; his muzzle reaching timidly toward the tight-clenched hands.

Presently the Master went back into the sickroom. And Lad was left alone in the darkness--to wonder and to listen and to wait. With a tired sigh he returned to the door and once more took up his heartsick vigil.

Then--on a golden morning, days later, the doctor came and went with the look of a Conqueror. Even the wooden-faced nurse forgot to grunt in disgust when she stumbled across the dog's body. She almost smiled. And presently the Master came out through the doorway. He stopped at sight of Lad, and turned back into the room. Lad could hear him speak. And he heard a dear, dear voice make answer; very weakly, but no longer in that muffled and foreign tone which had so frightened him. Then came a sentence the dog could understand.

"Come in, old friend," said the Master, opening the door and standing aside for Lad to enter.

At a bound, the collie was in the room. There[Pg 36] lay the Mistress. She was very thin, very white, very feeble. But she was there. The dread Something had lost the battle.

Lad wanted to break forth into a peal of ecstatic barking that would have deafened every one in the room. The Master read the wish and interposed,

"Quiet!"

Lad heard. He controlled the yearning. But it cost him a world of will-power to do it. As sedately as he could force himself to move, he crossed to the bed.

The Mistress was smiling at him. One hand was stretched weakly forth to stroke him. And she was saying almost in a whisper, "Lad! Laddie!"

That was all. But her hand was petting him in the dear way he loved so well. And the Master was telling her all over again how the dog had watched outside her door. Lad listened--not to the man's praise, but to the woman's caressing whisper--and he quivered from head to tail. He fought furiously with himself once again, to choke back the rapturous barking that clamored for utterance. He knew this was no time for noise. Even without the word of warning, he would have known it. For the Mistress was whispering. Even the Master was speaking scarce louder.

But one thing Lad realized: the black danger was past. The Mistress was alive! And the whole house was smiling. That was enough. And the yearn[Pg 37]ing to show, in noise, his own wild relief, was all but irresistible. Then the Master said:

"Run on, Lad. You can come back by-and-by."

And the dog gravely made his way out of the room and out of the house.

The minute he was out-of-doors, he proceeded to go crazy. Nothing but sheer mania could excuse his actions during the rest of that day. They were unworthy of a mongrel puppy. And never before in all his blameless, stately life had Lad so grossly misbehaved as he now proceeded to do. The Mistress was alive. The Horror was past. Reaction set in with a rush. As I have said, Lad went crazy.

Peter Grimm, the Mistress's cynical and temperamental gray cat, was picking its dainty way across the lawn as Lad emerged from the house.

Ordinarily, Lad regarded Peter Grimm with a cold tolerance. But now, he dashed at the cat with a semblance of stark wrath. Like a furry whirlwind he bore down upon the amazed feline. The cat, in dire offense, scratched his nose with a quite unnecessary virulence and fled up a tree, spitting and yowling, tail fluffed out as thick as a man's wrist.

Seeing that Peter Grimm had resorted to unsportsmanly tactics by scrambling whither he could not follow, Lad remembered the need for silence and forbore to bark threats at his escaped victim.[Pg 38] Instead, he galloped to the rear of the house where stood the dairy.

The dairy door was on the latch. With his head Lad butted it open and ran into the stone-floored room. A line of full milk-pans were ranged side by side on a shelf. Rising on his hind-legs and bracing his forepaws on the shelf, Lad seized edges of the deep pans, one after another, between his teeth, and, with a succession of sharp jerks brought them one and all clattering to the floor.

13

Scampering out of the dairy, ankle deep in a river of spilt milk, and paying no heed to the cries of the scandalized cook, he charged forth in the open again. His eye fell on a red cow, tethered by a long chain in a pasture-patch beyond the stables.

She was an old acquaintance of his, this cow. She had been on The Place since before he was born. Yet, to-day Lad's spear knew no brother. He tore across the lawn and past the stables, straight at the astonished bovine. In terror, the cow threw up her tail and sought to lumber away at top speed. Being controlled by her tether she could run only in a wide circle. And around and around this circle Lad drove the bellowing brute as fast as he could make her run, until the gardener came panting to her relief.

But neither the gardener nor any other living creature could stay Lad's rampage that day. He fled merrily up to the Lodge at the gate, burst into[Pg 39] its kitchen and through to the refrigerator. There, in a pan, he found a raw leg of mutton. Seizing this twelve-pound morsel in his teeth and dodging the indignant housewife, he careered out into the highway with his prize, dug a hole in the roadside ditch and was gleefully preparing to bury the mutton therein, when its outraged owner rescued it.

A farmer was jogging along the road behind a half-dozing horse. A painful nip on the rear hind-leg turned the nag's drowsy jog into a really industrious effort at a runaway. Already, Lad had sprung clear of the front wheel. As the wagon bumped past him, he leaped upward; deftly caught a hanging corner of the lap-robe and hauled it free of the seat.

Robe in mouth, he capered off into a field; playfully keeping just out of the reach of the pursuing agrarian; and at last he deposited

the stolen treasure in the heart of a bramble-patch a full half-mile from the road.

Lad made his way back to The Place by a wide detour that brought him through the grounds of a neighbor of the Master's.

This neighbor owned a dog--a mean-eyed, rangy and mangy pest of a brute that Lad would ordinarily have scorned to notice. But, most decidedly, he noticed the dog now. He routed it out of its kennel and bestowed upon it a thrashing that brought its possessor's entire family shrieking to the scene of conflict.

[Pg 40]

Courteously refusing to carry the matter further, in face of a half-dozen shouting humans, Lad cantered homeward.

From the clothes-line, on the drying-ground at The Place, fluttered a large white object. It was palpably a nurse's uniform--palpably

the nurse's uniform. And Lad greeted its presence there with a grin of pure bliss.

In less than two seconds the uniform was off the line, with three huge rents marring its stiff surface. In less than thirty seconds, it was reposing in the rich black mud on the verge of the lake, and Lad was rolling playfully on it.

Then he chanced to remember his long-neglected enemies, the squirrels, and his equally-neglected prey, the rabbits. And he loped off to the forest to wage gay warfare upon them. He was gloriously, idiotically, criminally happy. And, for the time, he was a fool.

All day long, complaints came pouring in to the Master. Lad had destroyed the whole "set" of cream. Lad had chased the red cow

till it would be a miracle if she didn't fall sick of it. Lad had scared poor dear little Peter Grimm so badly that the cat seemed likely to spend all the rest of its nine lives squalling in the tree-top and crossly refusing to come down.

Lad had spoiled a Sunday leg of mutton, up at the Lodge. Lad had made a perfectly respectable horse run madly away for nearly twenty-five feet,[Pg 41] and had given the horse's owner a blasphemous half-mile run over a plowed field after a cherished and rav-ished lap-robe. Lad had well-nigh killed a neighbor's particularly killable dog. Lad had wantonly destroyed the nurse's very newest and most expensive uniform. All day it was Lad--Lad--Lad!

Lad, it seemed, was a storm-center, whence radiated complaints that ran the whole gamut from tears to lurid profanity; and, to each and every complainant, the Master made the same answer:

"Leave him alone. We're just out of hell--Lad and I! He's doing the things I'd do myself, if I had the nerve." Which, of course, was a manifestly asinine way for a grown man to talk.

Long after dusk, Lad pattered meekly home, very tired and quite sane. His spell of imbecility had worn itself out. He was once more

his calmly dignified self, though not a little ashamed of his babyish pranks, and mildly wondering how he had come to behave so.

14

Still, he could not grieve over what he had done. He could not grieve over anything just yet. The Mistress was alive! And while the craziness had passed, the happiness had not. Tired, drowsily at peace with all the world, he curled up under the piano and went to sleep.

He slept so soundly that the locking of the house for the night did not rouse him. But something[Pg 42] else did. Something that occurred long after everyone on The Place was sound asleep. Lad was joyously pursuing, through the forest aisles of dreamland, a whole army of squirrels that had not sense enough to climb trees--when in a moment, he was wide awake and on guard. Far off, very far off, he heard a man walking.

Now, to a trained dog there is as much difference in the sound of human footfalls as, to humans, there is a difference in the aspect

of human faces. A belated countryman walking along the highway, a furlong distant, would not have awakened Lad from sleep. Also, he knew and could classify, at any distance, the footsteps of everyone who lived on The Place. But the steps that had brought him wide awake and on the alert to-night, did not belong to one of The Place's people; nor were they the steps of anybody who had a right to be on the premises.

Someone had climbed the fence, at a distance from the drive, and was crossing the grounds, obliquely, toward the house. It was a man, and he was still nearly two hundred yards away. Moreover, he was walking stealthily; and pausing every now and then as if to reconnoiter.

No human, at that distance, could have heard the steps. No dog could have helped hearing them. Had the other dogs been at home instead of at the boarding-kennels, The Place would by this time have been re-echoing with barks. Both scent and[Pg 43] sound would have given them ample warning of the stranger's presence.

To Lad, on the lower floor of the house, where every window was shut, the aid of scent was denied. Yet his sense of hearing was enough. Plainly, he heard the softly advancing steps--heard and read them. He read them for an intruder's--read them for the steps of a man who was afraid to be heard or seen, and who was employing all the caution in his power.

A booming, trumpeting bark of warning sprang into Lad's throat--and died there. The sharp command "Quiet!" was still in force. Even in his madness, that day, he had uttered no sound. He strangled back the tumultuous bark and listened in silence. He had risen to his feet and had come out from under the piano. In the middle of the living-room he stood, head lowered, ears pricked. His ruff was abristle. A ridge of hair rose grotesquely from the shaggy mass of coat along his spine. His lips had slipped back from his teeth. And so he stood and waited.

The shuffling, soft steps were nearer now. Down through the trees they came, and then onto the springy grass of the lawn. Now

they crunched lightly on the gravel of the drive. Lad moved forward a little and again stood at attention.

The man was climbing to the veranda. The vines rustled ever so slightly as he brushed past them. His footfall sounded lightly on the veranda itself.

[Pg 44]

Next there was a faint clicking noise at the old-fashioned lock of one of the bay windows. Presently, by half inches, the window began to rise. Before it had risen an inch, Lad knew the trespasser was a negro. Also that it was no one with whose scent he was familiar.

Another pause, followed by the very faintest scratching, as the negro ran a knife-blade along the crack of the inner wooden blinds in search of the catch.

The blinds parted slowly. Over the window-sill the man threw a leg. Then he stepped down, noiselessly into the room. He stood there a second, evidently listening.

And, before he could stir or breathe, something in the darkness hurled itself upon him.

Without so much as a growl of warning, eighty pounds of muscular, hairy energy smote the negro full in the chest. A set of hot-breathing jaws flashed for his jugular vein, missed it by a half-inch, and the graze left a red-hot searing pain along the negro's throat. In the merest fraction of a moment, the murderously snapping jaws sank into the thief 's shoulder. It is collie custom to fight with a

15

running accompaniment of snarling growls. But Lad did not give voice. In total silence he made his onslaught. In silence, he sought and gained his hold.

The negro was less considerate of the Mistress' comfort. With a screech that would have waked[Pg 45] every mummy in Egypt, he reeled back, under that first unseen impact, lost his balance and crashed to the hardwood floor, overturning a table and a lamp in his fall. Certain that a devil had attacked him there in the black darkness, the man gave forth yell after yell of mortal terror. Frantically, he strove to push away his assailant and his clammy hand encountered a mass of fur.

The negro had heard that all the dogs on The Place had been sent away because of the Mistress' illness. Hence his attempt at burglary. Hence also, his panic fear when Lad had sprung on him.

But with the feel of the thick warm fur, the man's superstitious terror died. He knew he had roused the house; but there was still time to escape if he could rid himself of this silent, terrible creature. He staggered to his feet. And, with the knife he still clutched, he smote viciously at his assailant.

Because Lad was a collie, Lad was not killed then and there. A bulldog or a bull-terrier, attacking a man, seeks for some convenient hold. Having secured that hold--be it good or bad--he locks his jaws and hangs on. You can well-nigh cut his head from his body before he will let go. Thus, he is at the mercy of any armed man who can keep cool long enough to kill him.

But a collie has a strain of wolf in his queer brain. He seeks a hold, it is true. But at an instant's notice, he is ready to shift that hold for a[Pg 46] better. He may bite or slash a dozen times in as many seconds and in as many parts of the body. He is everywhere at once--he is nowhere in particular. He is not a pleasant opponent.

Lad did not wait for the negro's knife to find his heart. As the man lunged, the dog transferred his profitless shoulderhold to a grip on the stabbing arm. The knife blade plowed an ugly furrow along his side. And the dog's curved eye-tooth slashed the negro's arm from elbow to wrist, clean through to the bone.

The knife clattered to the floor. The negro wheeled and made a leap for the open window; he had not cleared half the space when Lad bounded for the back of his neck. The dog's upper set of teeth raked the man's hard skull, carrying away a handful of wool and flesh; and his weight threw the thief forward on hands and knees again. Twisting, the man found the dog's furry throat; and with both hands sought to strangle him; at the same time backing out through the window. But it is not easy to strangle a collie. The piles of tumbled ruff-hair form a protection no other breed of dog can boast. Scarcely had the hands found their grip when one of them was crushed between the dog's viselike jaws.

The negro flung off his enemy and turned to clear the veranda at a single jump. But before he had half made the turn, Lad was at his throat again, and the two crashed through the vines to[Pg 47]gether and down onto the driveway below. The entire combat had not lasted for more than thirty seconds.

The Master, pistol and flashlight in hand, ran down to find the living-room amuck with blood and with smashed furniture, and one of the windows open. He flashed the electric ray through the window. On the ground below, stunned by striking against a stone jardiniere in his fall, the negro sprawled senseless upon his back. Above him was Lad, his searching teeth at last having found their coveted throat-hold. Steadily, the great dog was grinding his way through toward the jugular.

There was a deal of noise and excitement and light after that. The negro was trussed up and the local constable was summoned by telephone. Everybody seemed to be doing much loud talking.

Lad took advantage of the turmoil to slip back into the house and to his "cave" under the piano; where he proceeded to lick solici-

tously the flesh wound on his left side.

He was very tired; and he was very unhappy and he was very much worried. In spite of all his own precautions as to silence, the negro had made a most ungodly lot of noise. The commandment "Quiet!" had been fractured past repair. And, somehow, Lad felt blame for it all. It was really his fault--and he realized it now--that the man had made such a racket. Would the Master punish[Pg

48] him? Perhaps. Humans have such odd ideas of Justice. He----

Then it was that the Master found him; and called him forth from his place of refuge. Head adroop, tail low, Lad crept out to meet his scolding. He looked very much like a puppy caught tearing a new rug.

But suddenly, the Master and everyone else in the room was patting him and telling him how splendid he was. And the Master had

16

found the deep scratch on his side and was dressing it, and stopping every minute or so, to praise him again. And then, as a crowning reward, he was taken upstairs for the Mistress to stroke and make much of.

When at last he was sent downstairs again, Lad did not return to his piano-lair. Instead, he went out-of-doors and away from The

Place. And, when he thought he was far enough from the house, he solemnly sat down and began to bark.

It was good--passing good--to be able to make a noise again. He had never before known how needful to canine happiness a bark really is. He had long and pressing arrears of barks in his system. And thunderously he proceeded to divest himself of them for nearly half an hour.

Then, feeling much, much better, he ambled homeward, to take up normal life again after a whole fortnight of martyrdom. [Pg 49]

CHAPTER III

A MIRACLE OF TWO

The connecting points between the inner and outer Lad were a pair of the wisest and darkest and most sorrowful eyes in all dog-dom--eyes that gave the lie to folk who say no dog has a soul. There are such dogs once in a human generation.

Lad had but one tyrant in all the world. That was his dainty gold-and-white collie-mate, Lady; Lady, whose affections he had won in fair life-and-death battle with a younger and stronger dog; Lady, who bullied him unmercifully and teased him and did fearful things to his stately dignity; and to whom he allowed liberties that would have brought any other aggressor painfully near to death.

Lady was high-strung and capricious; a collie de luxe. Lad and she were as oddly contrasted a couple, in body and mind, as one could find in a day's journey through their North Jersey hinterland. To The Place (at intervals far too few between to suit Lad), came hu-man guests; people, for the most part, who did not understand dogs[Pg 50] and who either drew away in causeless fear from them or else insisted on patting or hauling them about.

Lad detested guests. He met their advances with cold courtesy, and, as soon as possible, got himself out of their way. He knew the

Law far too well to snap or to growl at a guest. But the Law did not compel him to stay within patting distance of one.

The careless caress of the Mistress or the Master--especially of the Mistress--was a delight to him. He would sport like an over-grown puppy with either of these deities; throwing dignity to the four winds. But to them alone did he unbend--to them and to his adored tyrant, Lady.

To The Place, of a cold spring morning, came a guest; or two guests. Lad at first was not certain which. The visible guest was a

woman. And, in her arms she carried a long bundle that might have been anything at all.

Long as was the bundle, it was ridiculously light. Or, rather, pathetically light. For its folds contained a child, five years old; a child that ought to have weighed more than forty pounds and weighed barely twenty. A child with a wizened little old face, and with a skeleton body which was powerless from the waist down.

Six months earlier, the Baby had been as vigorous and jolly as a collie pup. Until an invisible Something prowled through the land, laying Its[Pg 51] finger-tips on thousands of such jolly and vigorous youngsters, as frost's fingers are laid on autumn flowers--and with the same hideous effect.

This particular Baby had not died of the plague, as had so many of her fellows. At least, her brain and the upper half of her body had not died.

Her mother had been counseled to try mountain air for the hopeless little invalid. She had written to her distant relative, the Mistress, asking leave to spend a month at The Place.

Lad viewed the arrival of the adult guest with no interest and with less pleasure. He stood, aloof, at one side of the veranda, as the newcomer alighted from the car.

But, when the Master took the long bundle from her arms and carried it up the steps, Lad waxed curious. Not only because the Mas-ter handled his burden so carefully, but because the collie's uncanny scent-power told him all at once that it was human.

17

Lad had never seen a human carried in this manner. It did not make sense to him. And he stepped, hesitantly, forward to investigate.

The Master laid the bundle tenderly on the veranda hammock-swing, and loosed the blanket-folds that swathed it. Lad came over to him, and looked down into the pitiful little face.

There had been no baby at The Place for many a year. Lad had seldom seen one at such close quarters. But now the sight did something queer to his heart--the big heart that ever went out to the[Pg 52] weak and defenseless, the heart that made a playfully snapping puppy or a cranky little lapdog as safe from his terrible jaws as was Lady herself.

He sniffed in friendly fashion at the child's pathetically upturned face. Into the dull baby-eyes, at sight of him, came a look of

pleased interest--the first that had crossed their blankness for many a long day. Two feeble little hands reached out and buried themselves lovingly in the mass of soft ruff that circled Lad's neck.

The dog quivered all over, from nose to brush, with joy at the touch. He laid his great head down beside the drawn cheek, and posi-

tively reveled in the pain the tugging fingers were inflicting on his sensitive throat.

In one instant, Lad had widened his narrow and hard-established circle of Loved Ones, to include this half-dead wisp of humanity. The child's mother came up the steps in the Master's wake. At sight of the huge dog, she halted in quick alarm.

"Look out!" she shrilled. "He may attack her! Oh, do drive him away!"

"Who? Lad," queried the Mistress. "Why, Lad wouldn't harm a hair of her head if his life depended on it! See, he adores her already. I never knew him to take to a stranger before. And she looks brighter and happier, too, than she has looked in months. Don't make her cry by sending him away from her."

[Pg 53]

"But," insisted the woman, "dogs are full of germs. I've read so. He might give her some terrible----"

"Lad is just as clean and as germless as I am," declared the Mistress, with some warmth. "There isn't a day he doesn't swim in the lake, and there isn't a day I don't brush him. He's----"

"He's a collie, though," protested the guest, looking on in uneasy distaste, while Baby secured a tighter and more painful grip on the

delighted dog's ruff. "And I've always heard collies are awfully treacherous. Don't you find them so?"

"If we did," put in the Master, who had heard that same asinine question until it sickened him, "if we found collies were treacherous, we wouldn't keep them. A collie is either the best dog or the worst dog on earth. Lad is the best. We don't keep the other kind. I'll

call him away, though, if it bothers you to have him so close to Baby. Come, Lad!"

Reluctantly, the dog turned to obey the Law; glancing back, as he went, at the adorable new idol he had acquired; then crossing obediently to where the Master stood.

The Baby's face puckered unhappily. Her pipestem arms went out toward the collie. In a tired little voice she called after him: "Dog! Doggie! Come back here, right away! I love you, Dog!"

Lad, vibrating with eagerness, glanced up at the[Pg 54] Master for leave to answer the call. The Master, in turn, looked inquiringly at his nervous guest. Lad translated the look. And, instantly, he felt an unreasoning hate for the fussy woman.

The guest walked over to her weakly gesticulating daughter and explained:

"Dogs aren't nice pets for sick little girls, dear. They're rough; and besides, they bite. I'll find Dolly for you as soon as I unpack:"

"Don't want Dolly," fretted the child. "Want the dog! He isn't rough. He won't bite. Doggie! I love you! Come here!"

Lad looked up longingly at the Master, his plumed tail a-wag, his ears up, his eyes dancing. One hand of the Master's stirred toward

18

the hammock in a motion so imperceptible that none but a sharply watchful dog could have observed it.

Lad waited for no second bidding. Quietly, unobtrusively, he crossed behind the guest, and stood beside his idol. The Baby fairly squealed with rapture, and drew his silken head down to her face.

"Oh, well!" surrendered the guest, sulkily. "If she won't be happy any other way, let him go to her. I suppose it's safe, if you people say so. And it's the first thing she's been interested in, since----No, darling," she broke off, sternly. "You shall not kiss him! I draw the line at that. Here! Let Mamma rub your lips with her handkerchief."

"Dogs aren't made to be kissed," said the Master, sharing, however, Lad's disgust at the lip-scrubbing[Pg 55] process. "But she'll come to less harm from kissing the head of a clean dog than from kissing the mouths of most humans. I'm glad she likes Lad. And I'm still gladder that he likes her. It's almost the first time he ever went to an outsider of his own accord."

That was how Lad's idolatry began. And that, too, was how a miserably sick child found a new interest in life.

Every day, from morning to dusk, Lad was with the Baby. Forsaking his immemorial "cave" under the music-room piano, he lay all night outside the door of her bedroom. In preference even to a romp through the forest with Lady, he would pace majestically alongside the invalid's wheelchair as it was trundled along the walks or up and down the veranda.

Forsaking his post on the floor at the left of the Master's seat, at meals--a place that had been his alone since puppyhood--he lay always behind the Baby's table couch. This to the vast discomfort of the maid who had to step over him in circumnavigating the board, and to the open annoyance of the child's mother.

Baby, as the days went on, lost none of her first pleasure in her shaggy playmate. To her, the dog was a ceaseless novelty. She loved

to twist and braid the great white ruff on his chest, to toy with his sensitive ears, to make him "speak" or shake hands or lie down or stand up at her bidding.[Pg 56] She loved to play a myriad of intricate games with him--games ranging from Beauty and the Beast,

to Fairy Princess and Dragon.

Whether as Beast (to her Beauty) or in the more complex and exacting role of Dragon, Lad entered wholesouledly into every such game. Of course, he always played his part wrong. Equally, of course, Baby always lost her temper at his stupidity, and pummeled him, by way of chastisement, with her nerveless fists--a punishment Lad accepted with a grin of idiotic bliss.

Whether because of the keenly bracing mountain air or because of her outdoor days with a chum who awoke her dormant interest in life, Baby was growing stronger and less like a sallow ghostling. And, in the relief of noting this steady improvement, her mother continued to tolerate Lad's chumship with the child, although she had never lost her own first unreasoning fear of the big dog.

Two or three things happened to revive this foolish dread. One of them occurred about a week after the invalid's arrival at The Place. Lady, being no fonder of guests than was Lad, had given the veranda and the house itself a wide berth. But one day, as Baby lay in

the hammock (trying in a wordy irritation to teach Lad the alphabet), and as the guest sat with her back to them, writing letters, Lady

trotted around the corner of the porch.

At sight of the hammock's queer occupant, she[Pg 57] paused, and stood blinking inquisitively. Baby spied the graceful gold-and- white creature. Pushing Lad to one side, she called, imperiously:

"Come here, new Doggie. You pretty, pretty Doggie!"

Lady, her vanity thus appealed to, strolled mincingly forward. Just within arm's reach, she halted again. Baby thrust out one hand, and seized her by the ruff to draw her into petting-distance.

The sudden tug on Lady's fur was as nothing to the haulings and maulings in which Lad so meekly reveled. But Lad and Lady were by no means alike, as I think I have said. Boundless patience and a chivalrous love for the Weak, were not numbered among Lady's erratic virtues. She liked liberties as little as did Lad; and she had a far more drastic way of resenting them.

At the first pinch of her sensitive skin there was an instant flash of gleaming teeth, accompanied by a nasty growl and a lightning-quick forward lunge of the dainty gold-white head. As the wolf slashes at a foe--and as no animals but wolf and collie know how to--Lady slashed murderously at the thin little arm that sought to pull her along.

19

And Lad, in the same breath, hurled his great bulk between his mate and his idol. It was a move unbelievably swift for so large a dog. And it served its turn.

The eye-tooth slash that would have cut the little[Pg 58] girl's arm to the bone, sent a red furrow athwart Lad's massive shoulder. Before Lady could snap again, or, indeed, could get over her surprise at her mate's intervention, Lad was shouldering her off the

edge of the veranda steps. Very gently he did this, and with no show of teeth. But he did it with much firmness.

In angry amazement at such rudeness on the part of her usually subservient mate, Lady snarled ferociously, and bit at him.

Just then, the child's mother, roused from her letter-writing by the turmoil, came rushing to her endangered offspring's rescue.

"He growled at Baby," she reported hysterically, as the noise brought the Master out of his study and to the veranda on the run. "He

growled at her, and then he and that other horrid brute got to fighting, and----"

"Pardon me," interposed the Master, calling both dogs to him, "but Man is the only animal to maltreat the female of his kind. No male dog would fight with Lady. Much less would Lad--Hello!" he broke off. "Look at his shoulder, though! That was meant for Baby. Instead of scolding Lad, you may thank him for saving her from an ugly slash. I'll keep Lady chained up, after this."

"But----"

"But, with Lad beside her, Baby is in just about as much danger as she would be with a guard of forty U. S. Regulars," went on the Master. "Take[Pg 59] my word for it. Come along, Lady. It's the kennel for you for the next few weeks, old girl. Lad, when I get back, I'll wash that shoulder for you."

With a sigh, Lad went over to the hammock and lay down, heavily. For the first time since Baby's advent at The Place, he was unhappy--very, very unhappy. He had had to jostle and fend off Lady, whom he worshipped. And he knew it would be many a long day before his sensitively temperamental mate would forgive or forget. Meantime, so far as Lady was concerned, he was in Coventry.

And just because he had saved from injury a Baby who had meant no harm and who could not help herself ! Life, all at once, seemed dismayingly complex to Lad's simple soul.

He whimpered a little, under his breath; and lifted his head toward Baby's dangling hand for a caress that might help make things easier. But Baby had been bitterly chagrined at Lady's reception of her friendly advances. Lady could not be punished for this. But Lad could.

She slapped the lovingly upthrust muzzle with all her feeble force. For once, Lad was not amused by the castigation. He sighed, a second time; and curled up on the floor beside the hammock, in a right miserable heap; his head between his tiny forepaws, his great sorrowful eyes abrim with bewildered grief.

Spring drowsed into early summer. And, with[Pg 60] the passing days, Baby continued to look less and less like an atrophied mummy,

and more like a thin, but normal, child of five. She ate and slept, as she had not done for many a month.

The lower half of her body was still dead. But there was a faint glow of pink in the flat cheeks, and the eyes were alive once more. The hands that pulled at Lad, in impulsive friendliness or in punishment, were stronger, too. Their fur-tugs hurt worse than at first. But the hurt always gave Lad that same twinge of pleasure--a twinge that helped to ease his heart's ache over the defection of Lady.

On a hot morning in early June, when the Mistress and the Master had driven over to the village for the mail, the child's mother wheeled the invalid chair to a tree-roofed nook down by the lake--a spot whose deep shade and lush long grass promised more coolness than did the veranda.

It was just the spot a city-dweller would have chosen for a nap--and just the spot through which no countryman would have cared to venture, at that dry season, without wearing high boots.

Here, not three days earlier, the Master had killed a copperhead snake. Here, every summer, during the late June mowing, The Place's scythe-wielders moved with glum caution. And seldom did their progress go unmarked by the scythe-severed body of at least one snake.

20

The Place, for the most part, lay on hillside[Pg 61] and plateau, free from poisonous snakes of all kinds, and usually free from mosquitoes as well. The lawn, close-shaven, sloped down to the lake. To one side of it, in a narrow stretch of bottom-land, a row of weeping willows pierced the loose stone lake-wall.

Here, the ground was seldom bone-dry. Here, the grass grew rankest. Here, also, driven to water by the drought, abode eft, lizard and

an occasional snake, finding coolness and moisture in the long grass, and a thousand hiding places amid the stone-crannies or the

lake-wall.

If either the Mistress or the Master had been at home on this morning, the guest would have been warned against taking Baby there at all. She would have been doubly warned against the folly which she now proceeded to commit--of lifting the child from the wheelchair, and placing her on a spread rug in the grass, with her back to the low wall.

The rug, on its mattress of lush grasses, was soft. The lake breeze stirred the lower boughs of the willows. The air was pleasantly cool here, and had lost the dead hotness that brooded over the higher ground.

The guest was well pleased with her choice of a resting place. Lad was not.

The big dog had been growingly uneasy from the time the wheelchair approached the lake-wall. Twice he put himself in front of it; only to be[Pg 62] ordered aside. Once the wheels hit his ribs with jarring impact. As Baby was laid upon her grassy bed, Lad barked loudly and pulled at one end of the rug with his teeth.

The guest shook her parasol at him and ordered him back to the house. Lad obeyed no orders, save those of his two deities. Instead of slinking away, he sat down beside the child; so close to her that his ruff pressed against her shoulder. He did not lie down as usual, but sat--tulip ears erect, dark eyes cloudy with trouble; head turning slowly from side to side, nostrils pulsing.

To a human, there was nothing to see or hear or smell--other than the cool beauty of the nook, the soughing of the breeze in the willows, the soft fragrance of a June morning. To a dog, there were faint rustling sounds that were not made by the breeze. There were equally faint and elusive scents that the human nose could not register. Notably, a subtle odor as of crushed cucumbers. (If ever you have killed a pit-viper, you know that smell.)

The dog was worried. He was uneasy. His uneasiness would not let him sit still. It made him fidget and shift his position; and, once

or twice, growl a little under his breath.

Presently, his eyes brightened, and his brush began to thud gently on the rug-edge. For, a quarter mile above, The Place's car was turning in from the highway. In it were the Mistress and the Master, coming home with the mail. Now[Pg 63] everything would be all right. And the onerous duties of guardianship would pass to more capable hands.

As the car rounded the corner of the house and came to a stop at the front door, the guest caught sight of it. Jumping up from her seat on the rug, she started toward it in quest of mail. So hastily did she rise that she dislodged one of the wall's small stones and sent it rattling down into a wide crevice between two larger rocks.

She did not heed the tinkle of stone on stone; nor a sharp little hiss that followed, as the falling missile smote the coils of a sleeping copperhead snake in one of the wall's lowest cavities. But Lad heard it. And he heard the slithering of scales against rocksides, as the snake angrily sought new sleeping quarters.

The guest walked away, all ignorant of what she had done. And, before she had taken three steps, a triangular grayish-ruddy head was pushed out from the bottom of the wall.

Twistingly, the copperhead glided out onto the grass at the very edge of the rug. The snake was short, and thick, and dirty, with a distinct and intricate pattern interwoven on its rough upper body. The head was short, flat, wedge-shaped. Between eye and nostril, on either side, was the sinister "pinhole," that is the infallible mark of the poison-sac serpent.

(The rattlesnake swarms among some of the[Pg 64] stony mountains of the North Jersey hinterland; though seldom, nowadays, does it venture into the valleys. But the copperhead--twin brother in murder to the rattler--still infests meadow and lakeside. Smaller, fat-ter, deadlier than the diamond-back, it gives none of the warning which redeems the latter from complete abhorrence. It is a creature as evil as its own aspect--and name. Copperhead and rattlesnake are the only pit-vipers left now between Canada and Virginia.)

Out from its wall-cranny oozed the reptile. Along the fringe of the rug it moved for a foot or two; then paused uncertain--perhaps

21

momentarily dazzled by the light. It stopped within a yard of the child's wizened little hand that rested idle on the rug. Baby's other arm was around Lad, and her body was between him and the snake.

Lad, with a shiver, freed himself from the frail embrace and got nervously to his feet.

There are two things--and perhaps only two things--of which the best type of thoroughbred collie is abjectly afraid and from

which he will run for his life. One is a mad dog. The other is a poisonous snake. Instinct, and the horror of death, warn him violently away from both.

At stronger scent, and then at sight of the copperhead, Lad's stout heart failed him. Gallantly had he attacked human marauders who had invaded The Place. More than once, in dashing fearlessness, he had fought with dogs larger than himself.[Pg 65] With a d'Artagnan-like gaiety of zest, he had tackled and deflected a bull that had charged head down at the Mistress.

Commonly speaking, he knew no fear. Yet now he was afraid; tremulously, quakingly, sickly afraid. Afraid of the deadly thing that was halting within three feet of him, with only the Baby's fragile body as a barrier between.

Left to himself, he would have taken, incontinently, to his heels. With the lower animal's instinctive appeal to a human in moments of danger, he even pressed closer to the helpless child at his side, as if seeking the protection of her humanness. A great wave of cowardice shook the dog from foot to head.

The Master had alighted from the car; and was coming down the hill, toward his guest, with several letters in his hand. Lad cast a yearning look at him. But the Master, he knew, was too far away to be summoned in time by even the most imperious bark.

And it was then that the child's straying gaze fell on the snake.

With a gasp and a shudder, Baby shrank back against Lad. At least, the upper half of her body moved away from the peril. Her legs and feet lay inert. The motion jerked the rug's fringe an inch or two, disturbing the copperhead. The snake coiled, and drew back its three-cornered head, the forklike maroon tongue playing fitfully.

[Pg 66]

With a cry of panic-fright at her own impotence to escape, the child caught up a picture book from the rug beside her, and flung it at the serpent. The fluttering book missed its mark. But it served its purpose by giving the copperhead reason to believe itself attacked.

Back went the triangular head, farther than ever; and then flashed forward. The double move was made in the minutest fraction of a

second.

A full third of the squat reddish body going with the blow, the copperhead struck. It struck for the thin knee, not ten inches away from its own coiled body. The child screamed again in mortal terror.

Before the scream could leave the fear-chalked lips, Baby was knocked flat by a mighty and hairy shape that lunged across her toward

her foe.

And the copperhead's fangs sank deep in Lad's nose.

He gave no sign of pain; but leaped back. As he sprang his jaws caught Baby by the shoulder. The keen teeth did not so much as

bruise her soft flesh as he half-dragged, half-threw her into the grass behind him.

Athwart the rug again, Lad launched himself bodily upon the coiled snake.

As he charged, the swift-striking fangs found a second mark--this time in the side of his jaw.

An instant later the copperhead lay twisting and writhing and thrashing impotently among the grass[Pg 67]roots; its back broken, and its body seared almost in two by a slash of the dog's saber-like tusk.

The fight was over. The menace was past. The child was safe.

And, in her rescuer's muzzle and jaw were two deposits of mortal poison.

22

Lad stood panting above the prostrate and crying Baby. His work was done; and instinct told him at what cost. But his idol was un-hurt and he was happy. He bent down to lick the convulsed little face in mute plea for pardon for his needful roughness toward her.

But he was denied even this tiny consolation. Even as he leaned downward he was knocked prone to earth by a blow that all but fractured his skull.

At the child's first terrified cry, her mother had turned back. Nearsighted and easily confused, she had seen only that the dog had knocked her sick baby flat, and was plunging across her body. Next, she had seen him grip Baby's shoulder with his teeth and drag her, shrieking, along the ground.

That was enough. The primal mother-instinct (that is sometimes almost as strong in woman as in lioness--or cow), was aroused. Fearless of danger to herself, the guest rushed to her child's rescue. As she ran she caught her thick parasol by the ferule and swung it aloft.

Down came the agate-handle of the sunshade on the head of the dog. The handle was as large[Pg 68] as a woman's fist, and was

composed of a single stone, set in four silver claws.

As Lad staggered to his feet after the terrific blow felled him, the impromptu weapon arose once more in air, descending this time on

his broad shoulders.

Lad did not cringe--did not seek to dodge or run--did not show his teeth. This mad assailant was a woman. Moreover, she was a guest, and as such, sacred under the Guest Law which he had mastered from puppyhood.

Had a man raised his hand against Lad--a man other than the Master or a guest--there would right speedily have been a case for a hospital, if not for the undertaker. But, as things now were, he could not resent the beating.

His head and shoulders quivered under the force and the pain of the blows. But his splendid body did not cower. And the woman, wild with fear and mother-love, continued to smite with all her random strength.

Then came the rescue.

At the first blow the child had cried out in fierce protest at her pet's ill-treatment. Her cry went unheard.

"Mother!" she shrieked, her high treble cracked with anguish. "Mother! Don't! Don't! He kept the snake from eating me! He----!" The frantic woman still did not heed. Each successive blow seemed to fall upon the little onlooker's[Pg 69] own bare heart. And

Baby, under the stress, went quite mad.

Scrambling to her feet, in crazy zeal to protect her beloved playmate, she tottered forward three steps, and seized her mother by the skirt.

At the touch the woman looked down. Then her face went yellow-white; and the parasol clattered unnoticed to the ground.

For a long instant the mother stood thus; her eyes wide and glazed, her mouth open, her cheeks ashy--staring at the swaying child who clutched her dress for support and who was sobbing forth incoherent pleas for the dog.

The Master had broken into a run and into a flood of wordless profanity at sight of his dog's punishment. Now he came to an

abrupt halt and was glaring dazedly at the miracle before him. The child had risen and had walked.

The child had walked!--she whose lower motive-centers, the wise doctors had declared, were hopelessly paralyzed--she who could never hope to twitch so much as a single toe or feel any sensation from the hips downward!

Small wonder that both guest and Master seemed to have caught, for the moment, some of the paralysis that so magically departed from the invalid!

23

And yet--as a corps of learned physicians later agreed--there was no miracle--no magic--about it. Baby's was not the first, nor

the thousandth case[Pg 70] in pathologic history, in which paralyzed sensory powers had been restored to their normal functions by means of a shock.

The child had had no malformation, no accident, to injure the spine or the co-ordination between limbs and brain. A long illness had left her powerless. Country air and new interest in life had gradually built up wasted tissues. A shock had re-established communication between brain and lower body--a communication that had been suspended; not broken.

When, at last, there was room in any of the human minds for aught but blank wonder and gratitude, the joyously weeping mother was made to listen to the child's story of the fight with the snake--a story corroborated by the Master's find of the copperhead's half-severed body.

"I'll--I'll get down on my knees to that heaven-sent dog," sobbed the guest, "and apologize to him. Oh, I wish some of you would beat me as I beat him! I'd feel so much better! Where is he?"

The question brought no answer. Lad had vanished. Nor could eager callings and searchings bring him to view. The Master, returning from a shout-punctuated hunt through the forest, made Baby tell her story all over again. Then he nodded.

"I understand," he said, feeling a ludicrously unmanly desire to cry. "I see how it was. The snake must have bitten him, at least once. Probably oftener, and he knew what that meant. Lad[Pg 71] knows everything--knew everything, I mean. If he had known a little less he'd have been human. But--if he'd been human, he probably wouldn't have thrown away his life for Baby."

"Thrown away his life," repeated the guest. "I--I don't understand. Surely I didn't strike him hard enough to----" "No," returned the Master, "but the snake did."

"You mean, he has----?"

"I mean it is the nature of all animals to crawl away, alone, into the forest to die. They are more considerate than we. They try to cause no further trouble to those they have loved. Lad got his death from the copperhead's fangs. He knew it. And while we were all taken up with the wonder of Baby's cure, he quietly went away--to die."

The Mistress got up hurriedly, and left the room. She loved the great dog, as she loved few humans. The guest dissolved into a flood

of sloppy tears.

"And I beat him," she wailed. "I beat him--horribly! And all the time he was dying from the poison he had saved my child from! Oh, I'll never forgive myself for this, the longest day I live."

"The longest day is a long day," drily commented the Master. "And self-forgiveness is the easiest of all lessons to learn. After all, Lad was only a dog. That's why he is dead."

The Place's atmosphere tingled with jubilation over the child's cure. Her uncertain, but always[Pg 72] successful, efforts at walking were an hourly delight.

But, through the general joy, the Mistress and the Master could not always keep their faces bright. Even the guest mourned frequent-ly, and loudly, and eloquently the passing of Lad. And Baby was openly inconsolable at the loss of her chum.

At dawn on the morning of the fourth day, the Master let himself silently out of the house, for his usual before-breakfast cross-country tramp--a tramp on which, for years, Lad had always been his companion. Heavy-hearted, the Master prepared to set forth alone.

As he swung shut the veranda door behind him, Something arose stiffly from a porch rug--Something the Master looked at in a

daze of unbelief.

It was a dog--yet no such dog as had ever before sullied the cleanness of The Place's well-scoured veranda.

The animal's body was lean to emaciation. The head was swollen--though, apparently, the swelling had begun to recede. The fur, from spine to toe, from nose to tail-tip, was one solid and shapeless mass of caked mud.

24

The Master sat down very suddenly on the veranda floor beside the dirt-encrusted brute, and caught it in his arms, sputtering dis-jointedly:

"Lad!--Laddie!--Old friend! You're alive again! You're--you're--alive!"

Yes, Lad had known enough to creep away to[Pg 73] the woods to die. But, thanks to the wolf-strain in his collie blood, he had also known how to do something far wiser than die.

Three days of self-burial, to the very nostrils, in the mysteriously healing ooze of the marshes, behind the forest, had done for him what such mud-baths have done for a million wild creatures. It had drawn out the viper-poison and had left him whole again--thin, shaky on the legs, slightly swollen of head--but whole.

"He's--he's awfully dirty, though! Isn't he?" commented the guest, when an idiotic triumph-yell from the Master had summoned the whole family, in sketchy attire, to the veranda. "Awfully dirty and----"

"Yes," curtly assented the Master, Lad's head between his caressing hands. "'Awfully dirty.' That's why he's still alive." [Pg 74]

CHAPTER IV

HIS LITTLE SON

Lad's mate Lady was the only one of the Little People about The Place who refused to look on Lad with due reverence. In her

frolic-moods she teased him unmercifully; in a prettily imperious way she bossed and bullied him--for all of which Lad adored her. He had other reasons, too, for loving Lady--not only because she was dainty and beautiful, and was caressingly fond of him, but because he had won her in fair mortal combat with the younger and showier Knave.

For a time after Knave's routing, Lad was blissfully happy in Lady's undivided comradeship. Together they ranged the forests beyond The Place in search of rabbits. Together they sprawled shoulder to shoulder on the disreputable old fur rug in front of the living-room fire. Together they did joyous homage to their gods, the Mistress and the Master.

Then in the late summer a new rival appeared--to be accurate, three rivals. And they took up all of Lady's time and thought and love. Poor old[Pg 75] Lad was made to feel terribly out in the cold. The trio of rivals that had so suddenly claimed Lady's care were fuzzy and roly-poly, and about the size of month-old kittens. In brief, they were three thoroughbred collie puppies.

Two of them were tawny brown, with white forepaws and chests. The third was not like Lad in color, but like the mother--at least, all of him not white was of the indeterminate yellowish mouse-gray which, at three months or earlier, turns to pale gold.

When they were barely a fortnight old--almost as soon as their big mournful eyes opened--the two brown puppies died. There seemed no particular reason for their death, except the fact that a collie is always the easiest or else the most impossible breed of dog to raise.

The fuzzy grayish baby alone was left--the puppy which was soon to turn to white and gold. The Mistress named him "Wolf." Upon Baby Wolf the mother-dog lavished a ridiculous lot of attention--so much that Lad was miserably lonely. The great collie

would try with pathetic eagerness, a dozen times a day, to lure his mate into a woodland ramble or into a romp on the lawn, but Lady

met his wistful advances with absorbed indifference or with a snarl. Indeed when Lad ventured overnear the fuzzy baby, he was warned off by a querulous growl from the mother or by a slash of her shiny white teeth.

[Pg 76]

Lad could not at all understand it. He felt no particular interest--only a mild and disapproving curiosity--in the shapeless little whimpering ball of fur that nestled so helplessly against his beloved mate's side. He could not understand the mother-love that kept Lady with Wolf all day and all night. It was an impulse that meant nothing to Lad.

After a week or two of fruitless effort to win back Lady's interest, Lad coldly and wretchedly gave up the attempt. He took long solitary walks by himself in the forest, retired for hours at a time to sad brooding in his favorite "cave" under the living-room piano, and

25

tried to console himself by spending all the rest of his day in the company of the Mistress and the Master. And he came thoroughly to disapprove of Wolf. Recognizing the baby intruder as the cause of Lady's estrangement from himself, he held aloof from the puppy.

The latter was beginning to emerge from his newborn shapelessness. His coat's texture was changing from fuzz to silk. Its color was turning from gray into yellow. His blunt little nose was lengthening and growing thin and pointed. His butter-ball body was elongat-ing, and his huge feet and legs were beginning to shape up. He looked more like a dog now, and less like an animated muff. Also within Wolf 's youthful heart awoke the devil of mischief, the keen urge of play. He found Lady a pleasant-enough playfellow up to

a certain point. But a painfully sharp pinch from her[Pg 77] teeth or a reproving and breath-taking slap from one of her forepaws was likely to break up every game that she thought had gone far enough; when Wolf 's clownish roughness at length got on her hair-trigger nerves.

So, in search of an additional playmate, the frolicsome puppy turned to Lad, only to find that Lad would not play with him at all. Lad

made it very, very clear to everyone--except to the fool puppy himself--that he had no desire to romp or to associate in any way with this creature which had ousted him from Lady's heart! Being cursed with a soul too big and gentle to let him harm anything so helpless as Wolf, he did not snap or growl, as did Lady, when the puppy teased. He merely walked away in hurt dignity.

Wolf had a positive genius for tormenting Lad. The huge collie, for instance, would be snoozing away a hot hour on the veranda or under the wistaria vines. Down upon him, from nowhere in particular, would pounce Wolf.

The puppy would seize his sleeping father by the ear, and drive his sharp little milk-teeth fiercely into the flesh. Then he would brace

himself and pull backward, possibly with the idea of dragging Lad along the ground.

Lad would wake in pain, would rise in dignified unhappiness to his feet and start to walk off--the puppy still hanging to his ear. As Wolf was a collie and not a bulldog, he would lose his grip as[Pg 78] his fat little body left the ground. Then, at a clumsy gallop, he would pursue Lad, throwing himself against his father's forelegs and nipping the slender ankles. All this was torture to Lad, and dire mortification too--especially if humans chanced to witness the scene. Yet never did he retaliate; he simply got out of the way.

Lad, nowadays, used to leave half his dinner uneaten, and he took to moping in a way that is not good for dog or man. For the mop-ing had in it no ill-temper--nothing but heartache at his mate's desertion, and a weary distaste for the puppy's annoying antics. It was bad enough for Wolf to have supplanted him in Lady's affection, without also making his life a burden and humiliating him in the eyes of his gods.

Therefore Lad moped. Lady remained nervously fussy over her one child. And Wolf continued to be a lovable, but unmitigated, pest. The Mistress and the Master tried in every way to make up to Lad for the positive and negative afflictions he was enduring, but the sorrowing dog's unhappiness grew with the days.

Then one November morning Lady met Wolf 's capering playfulness with a yell of rage so savage as to send the puppy scampering away in mortal terror, and to bring the Master out from his study on a run. For no normal dog gives that hideous yell except in racking pain or in illness; and mere[Pg 79] pain could not wring such a sound from a thoroughbred.

The Master called Lady over to him. Sullenly she obeyed, slinking up to him in surly unwillingness. Her nose was hot and dry; her soft brown eyes were glazed, their whites a dull red. Her dense coat was tumbled.

After a quick examination, the Master shut her into a kennel-room and telephoned for a veterinary.

"She is sickening for the worst form of distemper," reported the vet' an hour later, "perhaps for something worse. Dogs seldom get distemper after they're a year old, but when they do it's dangerous. Better let me take her over to my hospital and isolate her there. Distemper runs through a kennel faster than cholera through a plague-district. I may be able to cure her in a month or two--or I may not. Anyhow, there's no use in risking your other dogs' lives by leaving her here."

So it was that Lad saw his dear mate borne away from him in the tonneau of a strange man's car.

Lady hated to go. She whimpered and hung back as the vet' lifted her aboard. At sound of her whimper Lad started forward, head low, lips writhing back from his clenched teeth, his shaggy throat vibrant with growls. At a sharp word of command from the Mas-ter, he checked his onset and stood uncertain. He looked at his departing[Pg 80] mate, his dark eyes abrim with sorrow, then glanced at the Master in an agony of appeal.

26

"It's all right, Laddie," the Master tried to console him, stroking the dog's magnificent head as he spoke. "It's all right. It's the only

chance of saving her."

Lad did not grasp the words, but their tone was reassuring. It told him, at least, that this kidnaping was legal and must not be prevented. Sorrowfully he watched the chugging car out of sight, up the drive. Then with a sigh he walked heavily back to his "cave" beneath the piano.

Lad, alone of The Place's dogs, was allowed to sleep in the house at night, and even had free access to that dog-forbidden spot, the dining-room. Next morning, as soon as the doors were opened, he dashed out in search of Lady. With some faint hope that she might have been brought back in the night, he ransacked every corner of The Place for her.

He did not find Lady. But Wolf very promptly found Lad. Wolf was lonely, too--terribly lonely. He had just spent the first solitary night of his three-month life. He missed the furry warm body into whose shelter he had always cuddled for sleep. He missed his playmate--the pretty mother who had been his fond companion.

There are few things so mournful as the eyes of even the happiest collie pup; this morning, loneliness had intensified the melancholy expression in[Pg 81] Wolf 's eyes. But at sight of Lad, the puppy gamboled forward with a falsetto bark of joy. The world was not quite empty, after all. Though his mother had cruelly absented herself, here was a playfellow that was better than nothing. And up to Lad frisked the optimistic little chap.

Lad saw him coming. The older dog halted and instinctively turned aside to avoid the lively little nuisance. Then, halfway around, he stopped and turned back to face the puppy.

Lady was gone--gone, perhaps, forever. And all that was left to remind Lad of her was this bumptious and sharp-toothed little son of hers. Lady had loved the youngster--Lady, whom Lad so loved. Wolf alone was left; and Wolf was in some mysterious way a part of Lady.

So, instead of making his escape as the pest cantered toward him, Lad stood where he was. Wolf bounded upward and as usual nipped merrily at one of Lad's ears. Lad did not shake off his tormentor and stalk away. In spite of the pain to the sensitive flesh, he remained quiet, looking down at the joyful puppy with a sort of sorrowing friendliness. He seemed to realize that Wolf, too, was lonely and that the little dog was helpless.

Tired of biting an unprotesting ear, Wolf dived for Lad's white forelegs, gnawing happily at them with a playfully unconscious throwback to his wolf ancestors who sought thus to disable an enemy by breaking the foreleg bone. For all seemingly aim[Pg 82]less puppy-play had its origin in some ancestral custom.

Lad bore this new bother unflinchingly. Presently Wolf left off the sport. Lad crossed to the veranda and lay down. The puppy trotted over to him and stood for a moment with ears cocked and head on one side as if planning a new attack on his supine victim; then with a little satisfied whimper, he curled up close against his father's shaggy side and went to sleep.

Lad gazed down at the slumberer in some perplexity. He seemed even inclined to resent the familiarity of being used for a pillow. Then, noting that the fur on the top of the puppy's sleepy head was rumpled, Lad bent over and began softly to lick back the tousled hair into shape with his curving tongue--his raspberry-pink tongue with the single queer blue-black blot midway on its surface. The puppy mumbled drowsily in his sleep and nestled more snugly to his new protector.

And thus Lad assumed formal guardianship of his obstreperous little son. It was a guardianship more staunch by far than Lady's had been of late. For animal mothers early wear out their zealously self-sacrificing love for their young. By the time the latter are able to shift for themselves, the maternal care ceases. And, later on, the once-inseparable relationship drops completely out of mind.