garbage! I showed that note to Mayor Wipple yest’day. So there’s no need
of you tearin’ it all up like that, Shunkie. I figgered I might make it
more amoosin’ for you if I let you catch Chum before I sprung the note
on you.
“I’m sure obleeged to you, Chum, son, for rollin’ on his coat just when
you happened to be able to roll that note out’n it. You’re one wise
pup!”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR: The Tracker
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration]
FOUR: The Tracker
The child’s parents were going to Europe for three months, that winter.
The child himself was getting over a nervous ailment. The doctors had
advised he be kept out of school for a term; and be sent to the country.
His mother was afraid the constant travel from place to place, in
Europe, might be too much for him. So she asked leave of the Mistress
and the Master,—one of whom was her distant relative—for the
convalescent to stay at the Place during his parents’ absence.
That was how it all started.
The youngster was eleven years old; lank and gangling, and blest with a
fretful voice and with far less discipline and manners than a
three-month collie pup. His name was Cyril. Briefly, he was a pest,—an
unspeakable pest.
For the first day or two at the Place, the newness of his surroundings
kept Cyril more or less in bounds. Then, as homesickness and novelty
alike wore off, his adventurous soul expanded.
He was very much at home;—far more so than were his hosts, and
infinitely more pleased than they with the situation general. He had an
infinite genius for getting into trouble. Not in the delightfully normal
fashion of the average growing boy; but in furtively crafty ways that
did not belong to healthy childhood.
Day by day, Cyril impressed his odd personality more and more on
everything around him. The atmosphere of sweet peace which had brooded,
like a blessing, over the whole Place, was dispersed.
The cook,—a marvel of culinary skill and of long service,—gave tearful
warning, and departed. This when she found the insides of all her
cooking utensils neatly soaped; and the sheaf of home-letters in her
work-box replaced by cigar-coupons.
One of the workmen threw over his job with noisy blasphemy; when his
room above the stables was invaded by stealth and a comic-paper picture
of a goat’s head substituted for his dead mother’s photograph in the
well-polished little bronze frame on his bureau.
And so on, all along the line.
The worst and most continuous sufferer from Cyril’s loathed presence on
the Place was the massive collie, Lad.
The child learned, on the first day of his visit, that it would be
well-nigh as safe to play with a handful of dynamite as with Lad’s
gold-and-white mate, Lady. Lady did not care for liberties from any one.
And she took no pains to mask her snappish first-sight aversion to the
lanky Cyril. Her fiery little son, Wolf, was scarce less formidable than
she, when it came to being teased by an outsider. But gallant old Lad
was safe game.
He was safe game for Cyril, because Lad’s mighty heart and soul were
miles above the possibility of resenting anything from so pitifully weak
and defenceless a creature as this child. He seemed to realise, at a
glance, that Cyril was an invalid and helpless and at a physical
disadvantage. And, as ever toward the feeble, his big nature went out in
friendly protection to this gangling wisp of impishness.
Which was all the good it did him.
In fact, it laid the huge collie open to an endless succession of
torment. For the dog’s size and patience seemed to awaken every atom of
bullying cruelty in the small visitor’s nature.
Cyril, from the hour of his arrival, found acute bliss in making Lad’s
life a horror. His initial step was to respond effusively to the
collie’s welcoming advances; so long as the Mistress and the Master
chanced to be in the room. As they passed out, the Mistress chanced to
look back.
She saw Cyril pull a bit of cake from his pocket and, with his left
hand, proffer it to Lad. The tawny dog stepped courteously forward to
accept the gift. As his teeth were about to close daintily on the cake,
Cyril whipped it back out of reach; and with his other hand rapped Lad
smartly across the nose.
Had any grown man ventured a humiliating and painful trick of that sort
on Lad, the collie would have been at the tormentor’s throat, on the
instant. But it was not in the great dog’s nature to attack a child.
Shrinking back, in amaze, his abnormally sensitive feelings jarred, the
collie retreated majestically to his beloved “cave” under the music-room
piano.
To the Mistress’s remonstrance, Cyril denied most earnestly that he had
done the thing. Nor was his vehemently tearful denial shaken by her
assertion that she had seen it all.
Lad soon forgave the affront. And he forgave a dozen other and worse
maltreatments which followed. But, at last, the dog took to shunning the
neighbourhood of the pest. That availed him nothing; except to make
Cyril seek him out in whatsoever refuge the dog had chosen.
Lad, trotting hungrily to his dinner dish, would find his food
thick-strewn with cayenne pepper or else soaked in reeking gasoline.
Lad, seeking peace and solitude in his piano cave, would discover his
rug, there, cleverly scattered with carpet tacks, points upward.
Lad, starting up from a snooze at the Mistress’s call, would be deftly
tripped as he started to bound down the veranda steps, and would risk
bruises and fractures by an ugly fall to the driveway below.
Wherever Lad went, whatever Lad did, there was a cruel trick awaiting
him. And, in time, the dog’s dark eyes took on an expression of puzzled
unhappiness that went straight to the hearts of the two humans who loved
him.
All his life, Lad had been a privileged character on the Place. Never
had he known nor needed whip or chain. Never had he,—or any of the
Place’s other dogs,—been wantonly teased by any human. He had known, and
had given, only love and square treatment and stanch friendliness. He
had ruled as benevolent monarch of the Place’s Little People; had given
leal service to his two deities, the Mistress and the Master; and had
stood courteously aloof from the rest of mankind. And he had been very,
very happy.
Now, in a breath, all this was changed. Ever at his heels, ever waiting
to find some new way to pester him, was a human too small and too weak
to attack;—a human who was forever setting the collie’s highstrung
nerves on edge or else actively hurting him. Lad could not understand
it. And as the child gained in health and strength, Lad’s lot grew
increasingly miserable.
The Mistress and the Master were keenly aware of conditions. And they
did their best,—a useless best,—to mitigate them for the dog. They
laboured over Cyril, to make him leave Lad alone. They pointed out to
him the mean cowardice of his course of torture. They even threatened to
send him to nearer relatives until his parents’ return. All in vain.
Faced with the most undeniable proofs, the child invariably would lie.
He denied that he had ever ill-used Lad in any way; and would weep, in
righteous indignation, at the charges. What was to be done?
“I thought it would brighten up the house so, to have a child in it
again!” sighed the Mistress as she and her husband discussed the matter,
uselessly, for the fiftieth time, after one of these scenes. “I looked
forward so much to his coming here! But he’s—oh, he isn’t like any child
I ever heard of before!”
“If I could devote five busy minutes a day to him,” grunted the Master,
“with an axe-handle or perhaps a balestick—”
“You wouldn’t do it!” denied his wife. “You wouldn’t harm him; any more
than Lad does. That’s the trouble. If Cyril belonged to us, we could
punish him. Not with a—a balestick, of course. But he needs a good
wholesome spanking, more than any one else I can think of. That or some
other kind of punishment that would make an impression on him. But what
can we do? He isn’t ours—”
“Thank God!” interpolated the Master, piously.
“And we can’t punish other people’s children,” she finished. “I don’t
know what we _can_ do. I wouldn’t mind half so much about the other
sneaky things he does; if it wasn’t for the way he treats Laddie. I—”
“Suppose we send Lad to the boarding kennels, at Ridgewood, till the
brat is gone?” suggested the Master. “I hate to do it. And the good old
chap will be blue with homesickness there. But at least he’ll get kind
treatment. When he comes over to me and looks up into my eyes in that
terribly appealing way, after Cyril has done some rotten thing to
him,—well, I feel like a cur, not to be able to justify his faith that I
can make things all right for him. Yes, I think I’ll send him to the
boarding kennels. And, if it weren’t for leaving you alone to face
things here, I’d be tempted to hire a stall at the kennels for myself,
till the pest is gone.”
The next day, came a ray of light in the bothered gloom. And the
question of the boarding kennels was dropped. The Mistress received a
letter from Cyril’s mother. The European trip had been cut short, for
business reasons; and the two travellers expected to land in New York on
the following Friday.
“Who dares say Friday is an unlucky day?” chortled the Master in glee,
as his wife reached this stage of the letter.
“And,” the Mistress read on, “we will come out to the Place, on the noon
train; and take darling Cyril away with us. I wish we could stay longer
with you; but Henry must be in Chicago on Saturday night. So we must
catch a late afternoon train back to town, and take the night train
West. Now, I—”
“Most letters are a bore,” interpolated the Master. “Or else they’re a
bother. But this one is a pure rapture. Read it more slowly, won’t you,
dear? I want to wallow in every blessèd word of hope it contains. Go
ahead. I’m sorry I interrupted. Read on. You’ll never have such another
enthusiastic audience.”
“And now,” the Mistress continued her reading, “I am going to ask both
of you not to say a single word to precious Cyril about our coming home
so soon. We want to surprise him. Oh, to think what his lovely face will
be like, when he sees us walking in!”
“And to think what _my_ lovely face will be like, when I see him walking
out!” exulted the Master. “Laddie, come over here. We’ve got the
gorgeousest news ever! Come over and be glad!”
Lad, at the summons, came trotting out of his cave, and across the room.
Like every good dog who has been much talked to, he was as adept as any
dead-beat in reading the varying shades of the human voice. The voices
and faces alike of his two adored deities told him something wonderful
had happened. And, as ever, he rejoiced in their gladness. Lifting his
magnificent head, he broke into a salvo of trumpeting barks;—the oddly
triumphant form of racket he reserved for great moments.
“What’s Laddie doing?” asked Cyril, from the threshold. “He sounds as if
he was going mad or something.”
“He’s happy,” answered the Mistress.
“Why’s he happy?” queried the child.
“Because his Master and I are happy,” patiently returned the Mistress.
“Why are _you_ happy?” insisted Cyril.
“Because to-day is Thursday,” put in the Master. “And that means
to-morrow will be Friday.”
“And on Friday,” added the Mistress, “there’s going to be a beautiful
surprise for you, Cyril. We can’t tell you what it is, but—”
“Why can’t you tell me?” urged the child. “Aw, go ahead and tell me! I
think you might.”
The Master had gone over to the nearest window; and was staring out into
the grey-black dusk. Midwinter gripped the dead world; and the twilight
air was deathly chill. The tall naked treetops stood gaunt and
wraithlike against a leaden sky.
To the north, the darkness was deepest. Evil little puffs of gale
stirred the powdery snow into myriads of tiny dancing white devils. It
had been a fearful winter, thus far; colder than for a score of years;
so cold that many a wild woodland creature, which usually kept far back
in the mountains, had ventured down nearer to civilisation for forage
and warmth.
Deer tracks a-plenty had been seen, close up to the gates of the Place.
And, two days ago, in the forest, half a mile away, the Master had come
upon the half-human footprints of a young bear. Starvation stalked
abroad, yonder in the white hills. And need for provender had begun to
wax stronger among the folk of the wilderness than their inborn dread of
humans.
“There’s a big snowstorm coming up,” ruminated the Master, as he scanned
the grim weather-signs. “A blizzard, perhaps. I—I hope it won’t delay
any incoming steamers. I hope at least one of them will dock on
schedule. It—”
He turned back from his musings, aware for the first time that a right
sprightly dialogue was going on. Cyril was demanding for the eighth
time:
“_Why_ won’t you tell me? Aw, I think you might! What’s going to happen
that’s so nice, Friday?”
“Wait till Friday and see,” laughed the Mistress.
“Shucks!” he snorted. “You might tell me, now. I don’t want to wait and
get s’prised. I want to know now. Tell me!”
Under her tolerant smile, the youngster’s voice scaled to an impatient
whine. He was beginning to grow red.
“Let it go at that!” ordained the Master. “Don’t spoil your own fun, by
trying to find out, beforehand. Be a good sportsman.”
“Fun!” snarled Cyril. “What’s the fun of secrets? I want to know—”
"It’s snowing," observed the Mistress, as a handful of flakes began to
drift past the windows, tossed along on a puff of wind.
“I want to _know!_” half-wept the child; angry at the change of subject,
and noting that the Mistress was moving toward the next room, with Lad
at her heels. “Come back and tell me!”
He stamped after her to bar her way. Lad was between the irate Cyril and
the Mistress. In babyish rage at the dog’s placid presence in his path,
he drew back one ungainly foot and kicked the astonished collie in the
ribs.
At the outrage, Lad spun about, a growl in his throat. But he forbore to
bite or even to show his teeth. The growl had been of indignant protest
at such unheard-of treatment; not a menace. Then the dog stalked
haughtily to his cave, and lay down there.
But the human witnesses to the scene were less forbearing;—being only
humans. The Mistress cried out, in sharp protest at the little brute’s
action. And the Master leaned forward, swinging Cyril clear of the
ground. Holding the child firmly, but with no roughness, the Master
steadied his own voice as best he could; and said:
“This time you’ve not even bothered to wait till our backs were turned.
So don’t waste breath by crying and saying you didn’t do it. You’re not
my child; so I have no right to punish you. And I’m not going to. But I
want you to know you’ve just kicked something that’s worth fifty of
you.”
“You let me down!” Cyril snarled.
“Lad is too white and clean and square to hurt anything that can’t hit
back,” continued the Master. “And you are not. That’s the difference
between you. One of the several million differences,—all of them in
Lad’s favour. When a child begins life by being cruel to dumb animals,
it’s a pretty bad sign for the way he’s due to treat his fellow-humans
in later years,—if ever any of them are at his mercy. For your own sake,
learn to behave at least as decently as a dog. If—”
“You let me down, you big bully!” squalled Cyril, bellowing with
impotent fury. “You let me down! I—”
“Certainly,” assented the Master, lowering him to the floor. “I didn’t
hurt you. I only held you so you couldn’t run out of the room, before
I’d finish speaking; as you did, the time I caught you putting red
pepper on Lad’s food. He—”
"You wouldn’t dare touch me, if my folks were here, you big bully!"
screeched the child, in a veritable mania of rage; jumping up and down
and actually foaming at the mouth. “But I’ll tell ’em on you! See if I
don’t! I’ll tell ’em how you slung me around and said I was worse’n a
dirty dog like Lad. And Daddy’ll lick you for it. See if he don’t! He—”
The Master could not choke back a laugh; though the poor Mistress looked
horribly distressed at the maniac outburst, and strove soothingly to
check it. She, like the Master, remembered now that Cyril’s doting
mother had spoken of the child’s occasional fits of red wrath. But this
was the first glimpse either of them had had of these. Hitherto, craft
had served Cyril’s turn better than fury.
At sound of the Master’s unintentional laugh the unfortunate child went
quite beside himself in his transport of rage.
“I won’t stay in your nasty old house!” he shrieked. “I’m going to the
very first house I can find. And I’m going to tell ’em how you hammered
a little feller that hasn’t any folks here to stick up for him. And I’ll
get ’em to take me in and send a tel’gram to Daddy and Mother to come
save me. I—”
To the astonishment of both his hearers, Cyril broke off chokingly in
his yelled tirade; caught up a bibelot from the table, hurled it with
all his puny force at Lad, the innocent cause of the fracas, and then
rushed from the room and from the house.
The Mistress stared after him, dumbfounded; his howls and the jarring
slam of the house door echoing direfully in her ears. It was the Master
who ended the instant’s hush of amaze.
“Whenever I’ve heard a grown man say he wished he was a boy again,” he
mused, “I always set him down for a liar. But, for once in my life, I
honestly wish I was a boy, once more. A boy one day younger and one inch
shorter and one pound lighter than Cyril. I’d follow him out of doors,
yonder, and give him the thrashing of his sweet young life. I’d—”
“Oh, do call him back!” begged the Mistress. “He’ll catch his death of
cold, and—”
“Why will he?” challenged the Master, without stirring. “For all his
noble rage, I noticed he took thought to grab up his cap and his
overcoat from the hall, as he wafted himself away. And he still had his
arctics on, from this afternoon. He won’t—”
“But suppose he should really go over to one of the neighbours,” urged
the Mistress, “and tell such an awful story as he threatened to? Or
suppose—”
“Not a chance!” the master reassured her. “Now that the summer people
are away, there isn’t an occupied house within half a mile of here. And
he’s not going to trudge a half-mile through the snow, in this bitter
cold, for the joy of telling lies. No, he’s down at the stables or else
he’s sneaked in through the kitchen; the way he did that other time when
he made a grandstand exit after I’d ventured to lecture him on his
general rottenness. Remember how worried about him you were, that time;
till we found him sitting in the kitchen and pestering the maids? He—”
“But that time, he was only sulky,” said the Mistress. “Not insanely
angry, as he is now. I do hope—”
“Stop worrying!” adjured the Master. “He’s all right.”
Which proved, for perhaps the trillionth time in history, that a woman’s
intuitions are better worth following than a man’s saner logic. For
Cyril was not all right. And, at every passing minute he was less and
less all right; until presently he was all wrong.
For the best part of an hour, in pursuance of her husband’s counsel, the
Mistress sat and waited for the prodigal’s return. Then,
surreptitiously, she made a round of the house; sent a man to ransack
the stables, telephoned to the gate lodge, and finally came into the
Master’s study, big-eyed and pale.
“He isn’t anywhere around,” she reported, frightened. “It’s dinner time.
He’s been gone an hour. Nobody’s seen him. He isn’t on the Place. Oh, I
wonder if—”
"H’m!" grumbled her husband. “He’s engineering an endurance contest, eh?
Well, if he can stand it, we can.”
But at sight of the deepening trouble in his wife’s face, he got up from
his desk. Going out into the hall, he summoned Lad.
“We might shout our heads off,” he said, “and he’d never answer; if he’s
really trying to scare us. That’s part of his lovable nature. There’s
just one way to track him, in double time. _Lad!_”
The Master had been drawing on his mackinaw and hip-boots as he spoke.
Now he opened the front door.
“Laddie!” he said, very slowly and incisively to the expectantly eager
collie. “Cyril! Find _Cyril!_ _Find_ him!”
To the super-wise collie, there was nothing confusing in the command.
Like many another good dog, he knew the humans of the household by their
names; as well as did any fellow-human. And he knew from long experience
the meaning of the word, “Find!”
Countless times that word had been used in games and in earnest. Its
significance, now, was perfectly plain to him. The master wanted him to
hunt for the obnoxious child who so loved to annoy and hurt him.
Lad would rather have found any one else, at the Master’s behest. But it
did not occur to the trained collie to disobey. With a visible
diminishing of his first eager excitement, but with submissive haste,
the big dog stepped out on to the veranda and began to cast about in the
drifts at the porch edge.
Immediately, he struck Cyril’s shuffling trail. And, immediately, he
trotted off along the course.
The task was less simple than ordinarily. For, the snow was coming down
in hard-driven sheets; blotting out scent almost as effectively as
sight. But not for naught had a thousand generations of Lad’s
thoroughbred ancestors traced lost sheep through snowstorms on the
Scottish moors. To their grand descendant they had transmitted their
weird trailing power, to the full. And the scent of Cyril, though faint
and fainter, and smothered under swirling snow, was not too dim for
Lad’s sensitive nostrils to catch and hold it.
The Master lumbered along, through the rising drifts, as fast as he
could. But the way was rough and the night was as black dark as it was
cold. In a few rods, the dog had far outdistanced him. And, knowing how
hard must be the trail to follow by sense of smell, he forbore to call
back the questing collie, lest Lad lose the clue altogether. He knew the
dog was certain to bark the tidings when he should come up with the
fugitive.
The Master by this time began to share his wife’s worry. For the trail
Lad was following led out of the grounds and across the highway, toward
the forest.
The newborn snowstorm was developing into a very promising little
blizzard. And the icy lash of the wind proved the fallacy of the old
theory, “too cold to snow.” Even by daylight it would have been no light
task to steer a true course through the whirling and blinding storm. In
the darkness the man found himself stumbling along with drunkenly zigzag
steps; his buffeted ears strained through the noise of the wind for
sound of Lad’s bark.
But no such sound came to him. And, he realised that snow and adverse
winds can sometimes muffle even the penetrating bark of a collie. The
man grew frightened. Halting, he shouted with all the power of his
lungs. No whimper from Cyril answered the hail. Nor, at his Master’s
summons, did Lad come bounding back through the drifts. Again and again,
the Master called.
For the first time in his obedient life, Lad did not, respond to the
call. And the Master knew his own voice could not carry, for a single
furlong, against wind and snowfall.
“I’ll go on for another half-hour,” he told himself, as he sought to
discern the dog’s all-but obliterated footsteps through the deepening
snow. “And then I’ll go back and raise a search party.”
He came to a bewildered stop. Fainter and more indistinguishable had
Lad’s floundering tracks become. Now,—by dint of distance and snow,—they
ceased to be visible in the welter of drifted whiteness under the glare
of the Master’s flashlight.
“This means a search party,” decided the man.
And he turned homeward, to telephone for a posse of neighbours.
Lad, being only a dog, had no such way of sharing his burden. He had
been told to find the child. And his simple code of life and of action
left him no outlet from doing his duty; be that duty irksome or easy. So
he kept on. Far ahead of the Master, his keen ears had not caught the
sound of the shouts. The gale and the snow muffled them and drove them
back into the shouter’s throat.