Lad: A Dog Part 26

And there, perforce, Lad had paused. For, taught from puppyhood, he knew the boundaries of The Place as well as did the Mistress or the Master, and he knew equally well that his own jurisdiction ended at those boundaries. Beyond them he might not chase even the most loathed intruder. The highroad was sanctuary.

Wherefore at the road edge he stopped and turned slowly back. His pursuit was ended, but not his anger, nor his memory of the marauder's scent. The man had trespa.s.sed slyly on The Place. He had gotten away unpunished. These things rankled in the big dog's mind....

It was a pretty little cattle show and staged in a pretty setting withal--at Glure Towers, two weeks later. The big sunken meadow on the verge of the Ramapo River was lined on two sides with impromptu sheds. The third side was blocked by something between a grand stand and a marquee. The tree-hung river bordered the fourth side. In the field's center was the roped-off judging inclosure into which the cattle, cla.s.s by cla.s.s, were to be led.

Above the pastoral scene brooded the architectural crime, known as The Towers--homestead and stronghold of Hamilcar Q. Glure, Esquire.

Glure had made much money in Wall Street--a crooked little street that begins with a graveyard and ends in a river. Having waxed indecently rich, he had erected for himself a hideously expensive estate among the Ramapo Mountains and had settled down to the task of patronizing his rural neighbors. There he elected to be known as the "Wall Street Farmer," a t.i.tle that delighted not only himself but everyone else in the region.

There was, in this hinterland stretch, a friendly and constant rivalry among the natives and other old residents in the matter of stock raising. Horses, cattle, pigs, chickens, even a very few sheep were bred for generations along lines which their divers owners had laid out--lines which those owners fervently believed must some day produce perfection.

Each owner or group of owners had his own special ideas as to the best way to produce this super-stock result. The local stock shows formed the only means of proving or disproving the excellence of the varied theories. Hence these shows were looked upon as barnyard supreme courts.

Mr. Glure had begun his career in the neighborhood with a laudable aim of excelling everybody else in everything. He had gone, heart and soul, into stock producing and as he had no breeding theories of his own he proceeded to acquire a set. As it would necessarily take years to work out these beliefs, he bridged the gap neatly by purchasing and importing prize livestock and by entering it against the home-raised products of his neighbors.

Strangely enough, this did not add to the popularity which he did not possess. Still more strangely, it did not add materially to his prestige as an exhibitor, for the judges had an exasperating way of handing him a second or third prize ribbon and then of awarding the coveted blue rosette to the owner and breeder of some local exhibit.

After a long time it began to dawn upon Glure that narrow neighborhood prejudice deemed it unsportsmanlike to buy prize stock and exhibit it as one's own. At approximately the same time three calves were born to newly imported prize cows in the two-acre model barns of Glure Towers, and with them was born Glure's newest idea.

No one could deny he had bred these calves himself. They were born on his own place and of his own high-pedigreed cattle. Three breeds were represented among the trio of specimens. By points and by lineage they were well-nigh peerless. Wherefore the plan for a show of neighborhood "home-raised" cattle. At length Glure felt he was coming into his own.

The hinterland folk had fought shy of Glure since the dog show wherein he had sought to win the capital prize by formulating a set of conditions that could be filled by no entrant except a newly imported champion Merle of his own.

But the phrase "home-raised" now proved a bait that few of the region's stock lovers could resist; and on the morning of the show no fewer than fifty-two cattle of standard breeds were shuffling or lowing in the big impromptu sheds.

A farm hand, the day before, had led to the show ground The Place's sole entrant--the pretty little Alderney heifer of which the Master had spoken to Glure and which, by the way, was destined to win nothing higher than a third-prize ribbon.

For that matter, to end the suspense, the best of the three Glure calves won only a second prize, all the first for their three breeds going to two nonplutocratic North Jerseymen who had bred the ancestors of their entrants for six generations.

The Mistress and the Master motored over to Glure Towers on the morning of the show in their one car. Lad went with them. He always went with them.

Not that any dog could hope to find interest in a cattle show, but a dog would rather go anywhere with his Master than to stay at home without him. Witness the glad alacrity wherewith the weariest dog deserts a snug fireside in the vilest weather for the joy of a master-accompanying walk.

A tire puncture delayed the trip. The show was about to begin when the car was at last parked behind the sunken meadow. The Mistress and the Master, with Lad at their heels, started across the meadow afoot toward the well-filled grand-stand.

Several acquaintances in the stand waved to them as they advanced.

Also, before they had traversed more than half the meadow's area their host bore down upon them.

Mr. Glure (dressed, as usual, for the Occasion) looked like a blend of Landseer's "_Edinburgh Drover_" and a theater-program picture of "_What the Man Will Wear_."

He had been walking beside a garishly liveried groom who was leading an enormous Holstein bull toward the judging enclosure. The bull was steered by a five-foot bar, the end snapped to a ring in his nose.

"h.e.l.lo, good people!" Mr. Glure boomed, pump-handling the unenthusiastic Mistress' right hand and bestowing a jarringly annoying slap upon the Master's shoulder. "Glad to see you! You're late. Almost too late for the best part of the show. Before judging begins, I'm having some of my choicest European stock paraded in the ring. Just for exhibition, you know. Not for a contest. I like to give a treat to some of these farmers who think they know how to breed cattle."

"Yes?" queried the Master, who could think of nothing cleverer to say.

"Take that bull, Tenebris, of mine, for instance," proclaimed Glure, with a wave toward the approaching Holstein and his guide. "Best ton of livestock that ever stood on four legs. Look how he----"

Glure paused in his lecture for he saw that both the Mistress and the Master were staring, not at the bull, but at the beast's leader. The spectacle of a groom in gaudy livery, on duty at a cattle show, was all but too much for their gravity.

"You're looking at that boy of mine, hey? Fine, well-set-up chap, isn't he? A faithful boy. Devoted to me. Slavishly devoted. Not like most of these grumpy, independent Jersey rustics. Not much. He's a treasure, Winston is. Used to be chief handler for some of the biggest cattle breeders in the East he tells me. I got hold of him by chance, and just by the sheerest good luck, a week or so ago. Met him on the road and he asked for a lift. He----"

It was then that Lad disgraced himself and his deities, and proved himself all unworthy to appear in so refined an a.s.sembly. The man in livery had convoyed the bull to within a few feet of the proudly exhorting Glure. Now, without growl or other sign of warning, the hitherto peaceable dog changed into a murder machine.

In a single mighty bound he cleared the narrowing distance between himself and the advancing groom.

The leap sent him hurtling through the air, an eighty-pound furry catapult, straight for the man's throat.

Over and beyond the myriad cattle odors, Lad had suddenly recognized a scent that spelt deathless hatred. The scent had been verified by a single glance at the brilliantly clad man in livery. Wherefore the mad charge.

The slashing jaws missed their mark in the man's throat by a bare half inch. That they missed it at all was because the man also recognized Lad, and shrank back in mortal terror.

Even before the eighty-pound weight, smashing against his chest, sent the groom sprawling backward to the ground, Lad's slashing jaws had found a hold in place of the one they had missed.

This grip was on the liveried shoulder, into which the fangs sank to their depth. Down went the man, screaming, the dog atop of him.

"Lad!" cried the Mistress, aghast. "_Lad!_" Through the avenging rage that misted his brain the great dog heard. With a choking sound that was almost a sob he relinquished his hold and turned slowly from his prey.

The Master and Glure instinctively took a step toward the approaching dog and the writhingly prostrate man. Then, still more instinctively, and without even coming to a standstill before going into reverse, they both sprang back. They would have sprung further had not the roped walls of the show ring checked them.

For Tenebris had taken a sudden and active part in the scene.

The gigantic Holstein during his career in Europe had trebly won his t.i.tle to champion. And during the three years before his exportation to America he had gored to death no fewer than three over-confident stable attendants. The bull's homicidal temper, no less than the dazzling price offered by Glure, had caused his owner to sell him to the transatlantic bidder.

A bull's nose is the tenderest spot of his anatomy. Next to his eyes, he guards its safety most zealously. Thus, with a stout leading-bar between him and his conductor, Tenebris was harmless enough.

But the conductor just now had let go of that bar, as Lad's weight had smitten him. Freed, Tenebris had stood for an instant in perplexity.

Fiercely he flung his gnarled head to one side to see the cause of the commotion. The gesture swung the heavy leading-bar, digging the nose ring cruelly into his sensitive nostrils. The pain maddened Tenebris. A final plunging twist of the head--and the bar's weight tore the nose ring free from the nostrils.

Tenebris bellowed thunderously at the climax of pain. Then he realized he had shaken off the only thing that gave humans a control over him. A second bellow--a furious pawing of the earth--and the bull lowered his head. His evil eyes glared about him in search of something to kill.

It was the sight of this motion which sent the Master and Glure recoiling against the show-ring ropes.

In almost the same move the Master caught up his wife and swung her over the top rope, into the ring. He followed her into that refuge's fragile safety with a speed that held no dignity whatever. Glure, seeing the action, wasted no time in wriggling through the ropes after him.

Tenebris did not follow them.

One thing and only one his red eyes saw: On the ground, not six feet away, rolled and moaned a man. The man was down. He was helpless. Tenebris charged.

A bull plunging at a near-by object shuts both eyes. A cow does not. Which may--or may not--explain the Spanish theory that bullfights are safer than cow-fights. To this eye-closing trait many a hard-pressed matador has owed his life.

Tenebris, both eyes screwed shut, hurled his 2000-pound bulk at the prostrate groom. Head down, nose in, short horns on a level with the earth and barely clearing it, he made his rush.

But at the very first step he became aware that something was amiss with his pleasantly antic.i.p.ated charge. It did not follow specifications or precedent.

All because a heavy something had flung its weight against the side of his lowered head, and a new and unbearable pain was torturing his blood-filled nostrils.