The negro was less considerate of the Mistress' comfort. With a screech that would have wakedevery 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 abetter. 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 vise-like 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 together 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 jardinière 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 solicitously 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 punishhim? 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 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—passinggood—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,muchbetter, he ambled homeward, to take up normal life again after a whole fortnight of martyrdom.
The connecting points between the inner and outer Lad were a pair of the wisest and darkest and most sorrowful eyes in all dogdom—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 human guests; people, for the most part, who did not understand dogsand 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 overgrown 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 Itsfinger-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 Master handled his burden so carefully, but because the collie's uncanny scent-power told him all at once that it was human.
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 theweak 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 positively 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,dodrive 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."
"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 theMaster 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! Comehere!"
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 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 shallnotkiss 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-scrubbingprocess. "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.She loved to play a myriad of intricate games with him—games ranging fromBeauty and the Beast, toFairy Princess and Dragon.
Whether asBeast(to herBeauty) or in the more complex and exacting rôle ofDragon, 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, shepaused, 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,prettyDoggie!"
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.
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 littlegirl'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. "Hegrowledat 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. "Takemy 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,veryunhappy. 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, withthe 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.
The Place, for the most part, lay on hillsideand 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 wheel-chair, 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 wheel-chair approached the lake-wall. Twice he put himself in front of it; only to beordered 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. Noweverything 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 thestony 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, fatter, 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 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 perhapsonlytwo 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.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,sicklyafraid. 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.
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 grassroots; 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.
Lad stood panting above the prostrate and crying Baby. His work was done; and instinct told him at what cost. But his idol was unhurt 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 largeas 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'sown 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 hadwalked!—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!
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 casein 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. Ladknows everything—kneweverything, 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 alwayssuccessful, 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 frequently, 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.
The Master sat down very suddenly on the veranda floor beside the dirt-encrusted brute, and caught it in his arms, sputtering disjointedly:
"Lad!—Laddie!—Oldfriend!You're alive again! You're—you're—alive!"
Yes, Lad had known enough to creep away tothe 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—butwhole.
"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."
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 oldLad 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.
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 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 elongating, 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 herteeth 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 ashis 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 moping 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 merepain 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 Master, he checked his onset and stood uncertain. He looked at his departingmate, his dark eyes abrim with sorrow, then glanced at the Master in an agony of appeal.
"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 inWolf'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 aimless 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.
Paternity, among dogs, is, from the very first,no tie at all. Lad, probably, had no idea of his relationship to his new ward. His adoption of Wolf was due solely to his own love for Lady and to the big heart and soul that stirred him into pity for anything helpless.
Lad took his new duties very seriously indeed. He not only accepted the annoyance of Wolf's undivided teasing, but he assumed charge of the puppy's education as well—this to the amusement of everyone on The Place. But everyone's amusement was kept from Lad. The sensitive dog would rather have been whipped than laughed at. So both the Mistress and Master watched the educational process with outwardly straight faces.
A puppy needs an unbelievable amount of educating. It is a task to wear threadbare the teacher's patience and to do all kinds of things to the temper. Small wonder that many humans lose patience and temper during the process and idiotically resort to the whip, to the boot-toe and to bellowing—in which case the puppy is never decently educated, but emerges from the process with a cowed and broken spirit or with an incurable streak of meanness that renders him worthless.
Time, patience, firmness, wisdom, temper-control, gentleness—these be the six absolute essentials for training a puppy. Happy the human who is blessed with any three of these qualities. Lad, being only a dog, was abundantly possessed of all six. And he had need of them.
To begin with, Wolf had a joyous yearning to tear up or bury every portable thing that could be buried or torn. He had a craze for destruction. A dropped lace handkerchief, a cushion left on the grass, a book or a hat lying on a veranda-chair—these and a thousand other things he looked on as treasure-trove, to be destroyed as quickly and as delightedly as possible.
He also enjoyed taking a flying leap onto the face or body of any hammock-sleeper. He would howl long and lamentably, nearly every night, at the moon. If the night were moonless, he howled on general principles. He thrilled with bliss at a chance to harry and terrify the chickens or peacocks or pigeons or any others of The Place's Little People that were safe prey for him. He tried this form of bullying once—only once—on the Mistress' temperamental gray cat, Peter Grimm. For the rest of the day Wolf nursed a scratched nose and a torn ear—which, for nearly a week, taught him to give all cats a wide berth; or, at most, to bark harrowingly at them from a safe distance.
Again, Wolf had an insatiable craving to find out for himself whether or not everything on earth was good to eat. Kipling writes of puppies' experiments in trying to eat soap and blacking. Wolf added to this limited fare a hundred articles, from clothespins to cigars. The climax came when he found on the veranda-table a two-pound box of chocolates, from which the wrapping-paper and giltcord had not yet been removed. Wolf ate not only all the candy, but the entire box and the paper and the string—after which he was tumultuously and horribly ill.
The foregoing were but a small percentage of his gay sins. And on respectable, middle-aged Lad fell the burden of making him into a decent canine citizen. Lad himself had been one of those rare puppies to whom the Law is taught with bewildering ease. A single command or prohibition had ever been enough to fix a rule in his almost uncannily human brain. Perhaps if the two little brown pups had lived, one or both of them might have taken after their sire in character. But Wolf was the true son of temperamental, wilful Lady, and Lad had his job cut out for him in educating the puppy.
It was a slow, tedious process. Lad went at it, as he went at everything—with a gallant dash, behind which was an endless supply of resource and endurance. Once, for instance, Wolf leaped barkingly upon a filmy square of handkerchief that had just fallen from the Mistress' belt. Before the destructive little teeth could rip the fine cambric into rags, the puppy found himself, to his amazement, lifted gently from earth by the scruff of his neck and held thus, in midair, until he dropped the handkerchief.
Lad then deposited him on the grass—whereupon Wolf pounced once more upon the handkerchief,only to be lifted a second time, painlessly but terrifyingly, above earth. After this was repeated five times, a gleam of sense entered the puppy's fluff-brain, and he trotted sulkily away, leaving the handkerchief untouched.
Again, when he made a wild rush at the friendly covey of peacock chicks, he found he had hurled himself against an object as immobile as a stone wall. Lad had darted in between the pup and the chicks, opposing his own big body to the charge. Wolf was bowled clean over by the force of the impact, and lay for a minute on his back, the breath knocked clean out of his bruised body.
It was a longer but easier task to teach him at whom to bark and at whom not to bark. By a sharp growl or a menacing curl of the lips, Lad silenced the youngster's clamorous salvo when a guest or tradesman entered The Place, whether on foot or in a car. By his own thunderously menacing bark he incited Wolf to a like outburst when some peddler or tramp sought to slouch down the drive toward the house.
The full tale of Wolf's education would require many profitless pages in the telling. At times the Mistress and the Master, watching from the sidelines, would wonder at Lad's persistency and would despair of his success. Yet bit by bit—and in a surprisingly short time for so vast an undertaking—Wolf's character was rounded into form. True, he had the ever-goading spirits of a true puppy.And these spirits sometimes led him to smash even such sections of the law as he fully understood. But he was a thoroughbred, and the son of clever parents. So he learned, on the whole, with gratifying speed—far more quickly than he could have been taught by the wisest human.
Nor was his education a matter of constant drudgery. Lad varied it by taking the puppy for long runs in the December woods and relaxed to the extent of romping laboriously with him at times.
Wolf grew to love his sire as he had never loved Lady. For the discipline and the firm kindliness of Lad were having their effect on his heart as well as on his manners. They struck a far deeper note within him than ever had Lady's alternating affection and crossness.
In truth, Wolf seemed to have forgotten Lady. But Lad had not. Every morning, the moment he was released from the house, Lad would trot over to Lady's empty kennel to see if by any chance she had come back to him during the night. There was eager hope in his big dark eyes as he hurried over to the vacant kennel. There was dejection in every line of his body as he turned away from his hopeless quest.
Late gray autumn had emerged overnight into white early winter. The ground of The Place lay blanketed in snow. The lake at the foot of the lawn was frozen solid from shore to shore. Thetrees crouched away from the whirling north wind as if in shame at their own black nakedness. Nature, like the birds, had flown south, leaving the northern world as dead and as empty and as cheerless as a deserted bird's-nest.
The puppy reveled in the snow. He would roll in it and bite it, barking all the while in an ecstasy of excitement. His gold-and-white coat was thicker and shaggier now, to ward off the stinging cold. And the snow and the roaring winds were his playfellows rather than his foes.
Most of all, the hard-frozen lake fascinated him. Earlier, when Lad had taught him to swim, Wolf had at first shrunk back from the chilly black water. Now, to his astonishment, he could run on that water as easily—if somewhat sprawlingly—as on land. It was a miracle he never tired of testing. He spent half his time on the ice, despite an occasional hard tumble or involuntary slide.
Once and once only—in all her six-week absence and in his own six-week loneliness—had Lad discovered anything to remind him of his lost mate; and that discovery caused him for the first time in his blameless life to break the most sacred of The Place's simple Laws—the inviolable Guest-Law.
It was on a day in late November. A runabout came down the drive to the front door of the house. In it rode the vet' who had taken Lady away. He had stopped for a moment on his wayto Paterson, to report as to Lady's progress at his dog-hospital.
Lad was in the living-room at the time. As a maid answered the summons at the door, he walked hospitably forward to greet the unknown guest. The vet' stepped into the room by one door as the Master entered it by the other—which was lucky for the vet'.
Lad took one look at the man who had stolen Lady. Then, without a sound or other sign of warning, he launched his mighty bulk straight at the vet's throat.
Accustomed though he was to the ways of dogs, the vet' had barely time to brace himself and to throw one arm in front of his throat. And then Lad's eighty pounds smote him on the chest, and Lad's powerful jaws closed viselike on the forearm that guarded the man's throat. Deep into the thick ulster the white teeth clove their way—through ulster-sleeve and undercoat sleeve and the sleeves of a linen shirt and of flannels—clear through to the flesh of the forearm.
"Lad!" shouted the Master, springing forward.
In obedience to the sharp command, Lad loosed his grip and dropped to the floor—where he stood quivering with leashed fury.
Through the rage-mists that swirled over his brain, he knew he had broken the Law. He had never merited punishment. He did not fear it. But the Master's tone of fierce disapproval cut thesensitive dog soul more painfully than any scourge could have cut his body.
"Lad!" cried the Master again, in rebuking amazement.
The dog turned, walked slowly over to the Master and lay down at his feet. The Master, without another word, opened the front door and pointed outward. Lad rose and slunk out. He had been ordered from the house, and in a stranger's presence!
"He thinks I'm responsible for his losing Lady," said the vet', looking ruefully at his torn sleeve. "That's why he went for me. I don't blame the dog. Don't lick him."
"I'm not going to lick him," growled the Master. "I'd as soon thrash a woman. Besides, I've just punished him worse than if I'd taken an ax-handle to him. Send me a bill for your coat."
In late December came a thaw—a freak thaw that changed the white ground to brown mud and rotted the smooth surface of the lake-ice to gray slush. All day and all night the trees and the eaves sent forth a drearydrip-drip-drip. It was the traditional January Thaw—set forward a month.
On the third and last morning of the thaw Wolf galloped down to the lake as usual. Lad jogged along at his side. As they reached the margin, Lad sniffed and drew back. His weird sixth sense somehow told him—as it tells an elephant—that there was danger ahead.
Wolf, however, was at the stage of extreme youth when neither dogs nor humans are bothered by premonitions. Ahead of him stretched the huge sheet of ice whereon he loved to gambol. Straightway he frisked out upon it.
A rough growl of warning from Lad made him look back, but the lure of the ice was stronger than the call of duty.
The current, at this point of the lake, twisted sharply landward in a half-circle. Thus, for a few yards out, the rotting ice was still thick, but where the current ran, it was thin, and as soggy as wet blotting-paper—as Wolf speedily discovered.
He bounded on the thinner ice driving his hind claws into the slushy surface for his second leap. He was dismayed to find that the ice collapsed under the pounding feet. There was a dull, sloppy sound. A ten-foot ice-cake broke off from the main sheet; breaking at once into a dozen smaller cakes; and Wolf disappeared, tail first, into the swift-running water beneath.
To the surface he came, at the outer edge of the hole. He was mad, clear through, at the prank his beloved lake had played on him. He struck out for shore. On the landward side of the opening his forefeet clawed helplessly at the unbroken ledge of ice. He had not the strength or the wit to crawl upon it and make his way to land. The bitter chill of the water was already paralyzing him. The strong current was tugging at his hindquarters. Anger gave way to panic. The puppy wasted much of his remaining strength by lifting up his voice in ear-splitting howls.
The Mistress and the Master, motoring into the drive from the highway nearly a quarter-mile distant, heard the racket. The lake was plainly visible to them through the bare trees, even at that distance, and they took in the impending tragedy at a glance. They jumped out of the car and set off at a run to the water-edge. The way was long and the ground was heavy with mud. They could not hope to reach the lake before the puppy's strength should fail.
But Lad was already there. At Wolf's first cry, Lad sprang out on the ice that heaved and chucked and cracked under his greater weight. His rush carried him to the very edge of the hole, and there, leaning forward and bracing all four of his absurdly tiny white paws, he sought to catch the puppy by the neck and lift him to safety. But before his rescuing jaws could close on Wolf's fur, the decayed ice gave way beneath his weight, and the ten-foot hole was widened by another twenty feet of water.
Down went Lad with a crash, and up he came, in almost no time, a few feet away from where Wolf floundered helplessly among the chunks of drifting ice. The breaking off of the shoreward mass of ice, under Lad's pressure, had left thepuppy with no foothold at all. It had ducked him and had robbed him even of the chance to howl.
His mouth and throat full of water, Wolf strangled and splashed in a delirium of terror. Lad struck out for him, butting aside the impending ice-chunks with his great shoulders, and swimming with a rush that lifted a third of his tawny body out of water. His jaws gripped Wolf by the middle of the back, and he swam thus with him toward shore. At the edge of the shoreward ice he gave a heave which called on every numbing muscle of the huge frame, and which—in spite of the burden he held—again lifted his head and shoulders high above water.
He thus flung Wolf's body halfway up on the ledge of ice. The puppy's flying forepaws chanced to strike the ice-surface. His sharp claws bit into its soft upper crust. With a frantic wriggle he was out of the water and on top of this thicker stratum of shore-ice, and in a second he had regained shore and was careering wildly up the lawn toward the greater safety of his kennel.
Yet, halfway in his flight, courage returned to the sopping-wet baby. He halted, turned about and, with a volley of falsetto barks, challenged the offending water to come ashore and fight fair.
As Wolf's forepaws had gripped the ice, he had further aided his climb to safety by thrusting downward with his hind legs. Both his hind pawshad struck Lad's head, their thrust had driven Lad clean under water. There the current caught him.
When Lad came up, it was not to the surface but under the ice, some yards below. The top of his head struck stunningly against the underpart of the ice-sheet.