Lad: A Dog Part 35

"Wolf's _not_ a mutt!" flashed the Boy, hotly. "He's no more of a mutt than Bruce or Lad, or Grey Mist, or Southport Sample, or any of the best ones. He has as good blood as all of them. Lad's his father, and Squire of Tytton was his grandfather, and Wishaw Clinker was his----"

"I'm sorry, son," interposed the Master, catching his wife's eye and dropping his tone of banter. "I apologize to you and Wolf. He's not a 'mutt.' There's no better blood in colliedom than his, on both sides. But Mother is right. You'd only be putting him up to be beaten, and you wouldn't like that. He hasn't a single point that isn't hopelessly bad from a judge's view. We've never taken a loser to a show from The Place. You don't want us to begin now, do you?"

"He has more brains that any dog alive, except Lad!" declared the Boy, sullenly. "That ought to count."

"It ought to," agreed the Mistress, soothingly, "and I wish it did. If it did, I know he'd win."

"It makes me sick to see a bushel of cups go to dogs that don't know enough to eat their own dinners," snorted the Boy. "I'm not talking about Lad and Bruce, but the thoroughbreds that are brought up in kennels and that have all their sense sacrificed for points. Why, Wolf's the cleverest--best--and he'll never even have one cup to show for it. He----"

He choked, and began to eat at top speed. The Master and the Mistress looked at each other and said nothing. They understood their son's chagrin, as only a dog-lover could understand it. The Mistress reached out and patted the Boy gently on the shoulder.

Next morning, directly after early breakfast, Lad and Bruce were put into the tonneau of the car. The Mistress and the Master and the Boy climbed in, and the twelve-mile journey to Ridgewood began.

Wolf, left to guard The Place, watched the departing show-goers until the car turned out of the gate, a furlong above. Then, with a sigh, he curled up on the porch mat, his nose between his snowy little paws, and prepared for a day of loneliness.

The Red Cross dog show, that Fourth of July, was a triumph for The Place.

Bruce won ribbon after ribbon in the collie division, easily taking "Winners" at the last, and thus adding another gorgeous silver cup to his collection. Then, the supreme event of the day--"Best dog in the show"--was called. And the winners of each breed were led into the ring. The judges scanned and handled the group of sixteen for barely five minutes before awarding to Bruce the dark-blue rosette and the "Best Dog" cup.

The crowd around the ring's railing applauded loudly. But they applauded still more loudly a little later, when, after a brief survey of nine aged thoroughbreds, the judge pointed to Lad, who was standing like a mahogany statue at one end of the ring.

These nine dogs of various breeds had all been famed prize-winners in their time. And above all the rest, Lad was adjudged worthy of the "veteran cup!" There was a haze of happy tears in the Mistress' eyes as she led him from the ring. It seemed a beautiful climax for his grand old life. She wiped her eyes, unashamed, whispering praise the while to her stately dog.

"Why don't you trundle your car into the ring?" one disgruntled exhibitor demanded of the Mistress. "Maybe you'd win a cup with _that_, too. You seem to have gotten one for everything else you brought along."

It was a celebration evening for the two prize dogs, when they got home, but everybody was tired from the day's events, and by ten o'clock the house was dark. Wolf, on his veranda mat, alone of all The Place's denizens, was awake.

Vaguely Wolf knew the other dogs had done some praiseworthy thing. He would have known it, if for no other reason, from the remorseful hug the Boy had given him before going to bed.

Well, some must win honors and petting and the right to sleep indoors; while others must plod along at the only work they were fit for, and must sleep out, in thunderstorm or clear, in heat or freezing cold. That was life. Being only a dog, Wolf was too wise to complain of life. He took things as he found them, making the very best of his share.

He snoozed, now, in the warm darkness. Two hours later he got up, stretched himself lazily fore and aft, collie-fashion, and trotted forth for the night's first patrol of the grounds.

A few minutes afterward he was skirting the lake edge at the foot of the lawn, a hundred yards below the house. The night was pitch dark, except for pulses of heat-lightning, now and then, far to westward. Half a mile out on the lake two men in an anch.o.r.ed scow were cat-fishing.

A small skiff was slipping along very slowly, not fifty feet off sh.o.r.e.

Wolf did not give the skiff a second glance. Boats were no novelty to him, nor did they interest him in the least--except when they showed signs of running ash.o.r.e somewhere along his beat.

This skiff was not headed for land, but was paralleling the sh.o.r.e. It crept along at a snail-pace and in dead silence. A man, its only occupant, sat at the oars, scarcely moving them as he kept his boat in motion.

A dog is ridiculously near-sighted. More so than almost any other beast. Keen hearing and keener scent are its chief guides. At three hundred yards' distance it cannot, by eye, recognize its master, nor tell him from a stranger. But at close quarters, even in the darkest night, a dog's vision is far more piercing and accurate than man's under like conditions.

Wolf thus saw the skiff and its occupant, while he himself was still invisible. The boat was no concern of his; so he trotted on to the far end of The Place, where the forest joined the orchard.

On his return tour of the lake edge he saw the skiff again. It had shifted its direction and was now barely ten feet off sh.o.r.e--so near to the bank that one of the oars occasionally grated on the pebbly bottom. The oarsman was looking intently toward the house.

Wolf paused, uncertain. The average watchdog, his attention thus attracted, would have barked. But Wolf knew the lake was public property. Boats were often rowed as close to sh.o.r.e as this without intent to trespa.s.s. It was not the skiff that caught Wolf's attention as he paused there on the brink, it was the man's furtive scrutiny of the house.

A pale flare of heat-lightning turned the world, momentarily, from jet black to a dim sulphur-color. The boatman saw Wolf standing, alert and suspicious, among the lakeside gra.s.ses, not ten feet away. He started slightly, and a soft, throaty growl from the dog answered him.

The man seemed to take the growl as a challenge, and to accept it. He reached into his pocket and drew something out. When the next faint glow of lightning illumined the sh.o.r.e, the man lifted the thing he had taken from his pocket and hurled it at Wolf.

With all the furtive swiftness bred in his wolf-ancestry, the dog shrank to one side, readily dodging the missile, which struck the lawn just behind him. Teeth bared in a ferocious snarl, Wolf dashed forward through the shallow water toward the skiff.

But the man apparently had had enough of the business. He rowed off with long strokes into deep water, and, once there, he kept on rowing until distance and darkness hid him.

Wolf stood, chest deep in water, listening to the far-off oar-strokes until they died away. He was not fool enough to swim in pursuit; well knowing that a swimming dog is worse than helpless against a boatman.

Moreover, the intruder had been scared away. That was all which concerned Wolf. He turned back to sh.o.r.e. His vigil was ended for another few hours. It was time to take up his nap where he had left off.

Before he had taken two steps, his sensitive nostrils were full of the scent of raw meat. There, on the lawn ahead of him, lay a chunk of beef as big as a fist. This, then, was what the boatman had thrown at him!

Wolf p.r.i.c.ked up his ears in appreciation, and his brush began to vibrate. Trespa.s.sers had once or twice tried to stone him, but this was the first time any of them had pelted him with delicious raw beef. Evidently, Lad and Bruce were not the only collies on The Place to receive prizes that day.

Wolf stooped over the meat, sniffed at it, then caught it up between his jaws.

Now, a dog is the easiest animal alive to poison, just as a cat is the hardest, for a dog will usually bolt a mouthful of poisoned meat without pausing to chew or otherwise investigate it. A cat, on the contrary, smells and tastes everything first and chews it scientifically before swallowing it. The slightest unfamiliar scent or flavor warns her to sheer off from the feast.

So the average dog would have gulped this toothsome windfall in a single swallow; but Wolf was not the average dog. No collie is, and Wolf was still more like his eccentric forefathers of the wilderness than are most collies.

He lacked the reasoning powers to make him suspicious of this rich gift from a stranger, but a queer personal trait now served him just as well.

Wolf was an epicure; he always took three times as long to empty his dinner dish as did the other dogs, for instead of gobbling his meal, as they did, he was wont to nibble affectedly at each morsel, gnawing it slowly into nothingness; and all the time showing a fussily dainty relish of it that used to delight the Boy and send guests into peals of laughter.

This odd little trait that had caused so much ridicule now saved Wolf's life.

He carried the lump of beef gingerly up to the veranda, laid it down on his mat, and prepared to revel in his chance banquet after his own deliberate fashion.

Holding the beef between his forepaws, he proceeded to devour it in mincing little squirrel-bites. About a quarter of the meat had disappeared when Wolf became aware that his tongue smarted and that his throat was sore; also that the interior of the meat-ball had a ranky pungent odor, very different from the heavenly fragrance of its outside and not at all appetizing.

He looked down at the chunk, rolled it over with his nose, surveyed it again, then got up and moved away from it in angry disgust.

Presently he forgot his disappointment in the knowledge that he was very, very ill. His tongue and throat no longer burned, but his body and brain seemed full of hot lead that weighed a ton. He felt stupid, and too weak to stir. A great drowsiness gripped him.

With a grunt of discomfort and utter fatigue, he slumped down on the veranda floor to sleep off his sick la.s.situde. After that, for a time, nothing mattered.

For perhaps an hour Wolf lay sprawling there, dead to his duty, and to everything else. Then faintly, through the fog of dullness that enwrapped his brain, came a sound--a sound he had long ago learned to listen for. The harshly sc.r.a.ping noise of a boat's prow drawn up on the pebbly sh.o.r.e at the foot of the lawn.

Instinct tore through the poison vapors and roused the sick dog. He lifted his head. It was strangely heavy and hard to lift.

The sound was repeated as the prow was pulled farther up on the bank. Then came the crunch of a human foot on the waterside gra.s.s.

Heredity and training and lifelong fidelity took control of the lethargic dog, dragging him to his feet and down the veranda steps through no volition of his own.

Every motion tired him. He was dizzy and nauseated. He craved sleep; but as he was just a thoroughbred dog and not a wise human, he did not stop to think up good reasons why he should shirk his duty because he did not feel like performing it.

To the brow of the hill he trotted--slowly, heavily, shakily. His sharp powers of hearing told him the trespa.s.ser had left his boat and had taken one or two stealthy steps up the slope of lawn toward the house.