A MIRACLE OF TWO
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 dogs and 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 Its finger-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 the weak 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, _do_ drive 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 the Master 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! Come _here!_"
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 shall _not_ kiss 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-scrubbing process. "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 from _Beauty and the Beast_, to _Fairy
Princess and Dragon_.
Whether as _Beast_ (to her _Beauty_) or in the more complex and
exacting role of _Dragon_, 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, she paused, 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, _pretty_ Doggie!"
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 little girl'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. "He
_growled_ at 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. "Take my 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,
_very_ unhappy. 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, with the 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 hillside and 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 be ordered 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. Now everything 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 the stony 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 perhaps _only_ two 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, _sickly_ afraid. 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 large as 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's own 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 had _walked!_--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 case in 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. Lad knows
everything--_knew_ everything, 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 always successful, 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!_--Old _friend!_ You're alive again!
You're--you're--_alive!_"
Yes, Lad had known enough to creep away to the 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--but _whole_.
"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."