Hungry, lonely, he approached an unpainted cottage on its outskirts. Two dogs rushed at him; he faced them and they turned back. He trotted on, hair risen in an angry tuft down his back. He slept curled up in an abandoned shed, but not for long. The morning stars lingering low over the flat horizon kept pace with him, then a sea of mottled pink clouds, then the huge red face of the rising sun.
At midday he pounced on an animal like a muskrat that tried to cross the track—a tough thing to kill, a tougher to eat. At dusk he drew near afarmhouse, where a man was chopping wood. The man picked up a stick, ordered him away, then went on chopping.
He made no more overtures after this, but many a farmer thought a fox had been among his chickens. Habits of civilization had given way perforce to habits of outlawry. Only as he galloped north day after day his eyes still shone with the eager light of the bird dog's craving for human companionship and love.
The number of tracks that branched out from the city whose environs he skirted bewildered him for a minute; then he took the one that pointed due north. All the days he travelled, part of the nights. Sometimes at first he had wondered why he did not reach home, at last to travel always north had become a habit, and he wondered no more.
But the time came when he could not keep on going as fast and as long as formerly. There were days when he found hardly anything at all to eat. The endless ties passing under him began to make him dizzy and faint. His long hair was matted; his ribs showed; his eyes grew haggard. It was a wonder the young man knew him for what he was.
He had come into the freight yards of a town at nightfall, in a cold, driving rain, a bedraggled, forlorn figure, a stray dog. A passenger train had just passed him, stopped at the station ahead, then pulled out. A light glistened down wet rails intohis hungry eyes and blinded him. Rows of silent dripping box cars hid the man crossing the track at the street. Frank almost ran into him. Both stopped. The man was buttoned up to his neck in an overcoat and carried a satchel.
"Hello!" he said.
Frank started to slink back under a box car.
"Come here!" He stooped down and looked into the dog's eyes. "Where did you drop from?" he said. "You come with me! Let's talk it over."
In a warm, firelit cottage room a young woman ran to meet the man—then for the first time she saw the dog.
"Why, John!" she cried. "Where did you get him?"
"He got me," laughed the man, "on the way home from the station. He's starving. Get him something to eat. Then I'll tell you about it."
She glanced at a cradle, whose covers were being suddenly and violently agitated.
"I'll answer for this old fellow," assured the man. "He's seen better days. I think I've seen him before."
Out in the bright little kitchen, where they scraped together all the scraps they could find, he went on:
"Of course I may be mistaken. But at a little station where I sell goods sometimes, I used to see a big red Irish setter following a tall man and a little boy. I think they lived out in the countryfrom there. The kind of folks and the kind of dog you don't forget. If it wasn't so far—hang it, I believe it's the dog, anyhow! Well, we'll take good care of him, and next week when I go through I'll find out."
The young woman in a raincoat came out in the back yard and held the streaming lantern while the man arranged some sacks underneath the porch and closed and bolted the back gate. He heard them go up the back steps, heard them moving about in the house. Like a decent old fellow he licked the rain from his silken coat, smoothed out the matted strands, then curled up comfortably in his dry bed and slept deep and long.
He stayed with them a week, while strength returned to his muscles, fire to his eyes, courage to his heart. But as he lay before their hearth at night he saw always in his mind that other fire—the fire of home. The stars were still shining that morning when he scrambled over the high back fence and was gone.
But it was with new life and confidence that he continued his journey. He slunk no more on the outskirts of towns; he passed boldly through. Fortune favoured him now; on the second day after he left them he ran into snow, and rabbits are almost helpless before a swift pounce in the snow.
The drifts grew deeper as he travelled north. Fields of dead cotton stalks were varied by fields ofwithered corn stubble, yellow, broken rows on white hills. There was an occasional big farmhouse now, a house with white pillars like his master's, set in a grove of naked oaks. And at last, following fence rows and hedges, lines of cylindrical cedars climbed over and over high hills. The look of home was on the face of nature, the smell of home was in the air.
It was a bitter cold afternoon when the mountains first took shape in the distance. He could make them out, though the sky was heavily overcast. Those were the mountains he saw every morning from the back porch of his home. He barked at them as he ran. He would lie before his own fire this night.
At dusk sudden hunger assailed him. On a hill was a big farmhouse, the windows aglow, smoke veering wildly from the chimneys. And on the wind came the smell of cooking meat. He stopped on an embankment, pricked his ears, licked his chops. Then he scrambled down the embankment and like a big fox made his way along a fence row toward that house from whence came the smell of cooking meat. At the same time flakes of snow began to drive horizontally across the white fields.
Suddenly from out the yard two stocky cream-coloured dogs rushed at him. They came with incredible swiftness through the snow, considering their short bench legs. Frank waited, head up, ears pricked. One was a female; it was she who camefirst. He would not fight a female; he even wagged his tail haughtily. But in a twinkling she was under him and had caught his hind leg in a crushing, grinding grip. He lunged back, snarling, and the other dog sprang straight at his throat.
He was down in the snow, he was on his feet again, he was ripping the short back of the dog at his throat into shreds, his fangs flashing in the dusk. He was dragging them by sheer strength off toward the railroad; but he could not tear that grip from his hind leg, nor that other grip from his throat.
He did not cry out—he was no yelping cur. But it was growing dark, the air was full of snow, the grip was tightening on his throat, the other grip had pulled him down at last to his haunches. Then two men came running toward them, the one white, the other black. The white man grabbed the dog at his throat, the black man the dog under him. The white man was pounding the dog's nose with his fist, was cramming snow down his bloody mouth.
"They'll kill him, Will!" he panted. "Go get some water to throw in their faces."
The black man disappeared running—came back running, a bucket in each hand.
And now it was over, and off there the white man held both his dogs by their collars. They were panting, their wrinkled eyes half closed, their mouths dripping bloody foam. For many yards around the snow was churned into little hillocks.And there lay old Frank, panting hard, head up, eyes shining.
"Pick him up, Will!" said the white man. "His leg's broke."
"Cap'n," said the negro, "I'm afraid of him."
The white man swore, shaking his dogs angrily. That was some man's bird dog, a fine one, too.
"I believe that's Steve Earle's setter, from Freedom Hill across the river!" he cried above the wind. "By George, I believe that's just who it is! We'll go and get the sled!"
But when they hurried back with the sled the wounded dog was gone. They followed his bloodstained tracks across the field, up the embankment, and to the railroad. They looked at them between the rails, fast filling with snow. The white man put his hands to his ears.
"He'll freeze to-night," he said.
In the teeth of the wind, like a three-legged automaton, Frank was fighting his way doggedly through the night. The wind almost blew him off the embankments; the swirling waves of snow choked him. Maybe he would have lain down, maybe it would have happened as the man said, if it had not been for the spirit within him and for what he saw.
For just before him the superstructure of an iron trestle rose pencilled in snow against the night. Far below a black river wound serpentine into the mists. A mile to the left, he knew, was SquireKirby's. In those dim bottoms on either side of the trestle he and his master and the squire had hunted a hundred times. The birds had scattered on those wooded hills now vibrant with the blast. Out on the trestle he picked his slow, hesitating way.
Suddenly he cried out sharply. A mighty gust of wind striking him in mid-air and almost hurling him into the blackness below had caused him to put down as a brace his wounded hind leg. Gasping, trembling, he lay down for a minute on the whitened ties, one leg hanging through. Then he rose and doggedly picked his way on.
On the high embankment at the other side of the trestle he stopped and, in spite of the blood stiffened under his throat and the water frozen on his shoulders, he raised his quivering nose. Beyond those misty bottoms, to the left, over those storm-swept ridges, lay Freedom Hill.
Halfway down the embankment he cried out again. He had slipped in the snow and fallen on his leg. Under shelter of the embankment he rested for a moment, panting as if the night were hot. Then lunging, tottering, falling, rising again, panting, gasping but with never another cry, old Frank fought his way up the river bottoms, past the farm of John Davis, across the field in front of Tom Belcher's store, now a dim smudge in the blackness—dragged himself over the last ridge, dragged himself home.
Belly deep in drifted snow he stood at the corner of the lot fence and surveyed the white distance that lay between him and his kennel—more unattainable to his weakness than a quarter of a continent had been to his strength. And while he stood there the roaring of the wind in the great oaks overhead, the cracking of their naked branches, the swirl of snow against his nose and in his eyes, bewildered him, and suddenly something deep within him whispered to him to lie down and rest.
But the sudden terror of death lurked in that whisper and, head dragging in the snow, he staggered across the yard toward his kennel. In here he would crawl and hide from that fearful thing that had told him to lie down in the snow and rest. He reached the kennel, he touched it with his eager nose, he tried to root his way in between the slats which he had not known were there. Then gasping and helpless he sat down before it. The door of his kennel was nailed up. The great hulk of the house loomed dark and silent above it. Maybe his people were gone!
With this new terror in his heart he fought his way around to the side of the house. Underneath his master's window he raised his head and tried to bark. But the wind snatched the muffled sound out of his throat and hurled it away into the darkness. Once more the still small voice that terrified even while it soothed pleaded with him to lie down and rest. Maybe he would have listened now, maybehe would have yielded, if he had not seen through the living-room curtains the sudden flicker of firelight on the ceiling. They were not gone—they were only asleep. Tail wagging strangely as if someone in there had spoken to him, he rose for the last time and struggled toward the front of the house. At the corner a gust of wind, waiting in ambush, rushed at him and stopped him where he was. A moment he waited for it to die down, then dragged himself to the steps, up the steps, his ruined hind leg hitting each one like a rag tied in a knot and frozen.
By the big front door he sat down and raised to it his suffering eyes. A hundred times it had opened to his whim; now in his need it barred his way. Gathering all his remaining strength, he raised his paw—the paw he shook hands with—and scratched. There was no sound from within.
Once more—it would be the last time, so heavy had his leg become—he raised his paw and scratched. Then careless of all things, of master and mistress, of life and death, he sank down before the door and laid his head on the sill.
He never knew how it happened. He only knew there was a burst of light in his eyes, and somebody had picked him up. Then faces were bent close to him; something hot and gagging was being poured down his throat; a voice—the most commanding voice in all the world—ordered him to swallow,swallow. And now he saw before him, as he lay on his side, a roaring fire whose flames licked and twisted among oak logs piled high into the chimney.
Strange that he had not known that fire all the time; that he had not known who these people were. But then he had been on a long journey, and he was tired, very tired. He must tell them he knew now, let them know he appreciated what they were doing. He always did that even with strangers, and these—they were his master, his mistress, his Tommy. He must——
It was Tommy's shrill voice that broke the silence.
"Look, Papa, look, look! He wagged his tail. He wagged his old tail!"