back home, old Squire Kirby, Bob Kelley, John Davis--led them out of the
town, up the shaded road across which slanting sunbeams gently sifted.
He led them to that car he had followed secretly through the days and
watched without sleep through the nights. Only his master's low-voiced
command held him back with them.
"Steady, Frank! Steady, old man!"
But they must have made some noise, quiet as they tried to be. For
before they reached the car the heavy man scrambled out, stared for a
moment in stupid bewilderment, then threw both hands high up over his
head.
"Don't shoot!" he pleaded hoarsely, his heavy face aquiver. "We ain't
done the kid no harm!"
Then it was that Frank broke away and rushed at last to that curtained
car. With shining eyes he sprang into the front, over the seat, into the
rear. Tommy's arms were about his neck, Tommy was crying over and over
to the woman, all out of breath:
"It's F'ank, Nita! He didn't go home. I saw him in the bushes!"
"It's your mother, too," she said. "Come after you." She tried to smile.
"I told you it would be to-day--didn't I?" She snatched him to her and
kissed him fiercely. She opened the door. "Good-bye, old scout," she
whispered. Then she turned to Frank. "Go!" she panted and her lips
trembled. "Go!"
Outside the car Frank stood by, quivering with pride while the boy
passed from the mother's high up into the father's arms. He saw the
light in their faces, the flash of the sun on the boy's curls, the
smiles of the men who looked on. Then the shadow of terrible days and
nights fell across his happiness and for the second time that day he saw
red. For the woman had stepped out of the car, and the big sheriff had
caught her by the arm.
The dog glanced up, bewildered, into the faces about him. But none of
them had seen. He ran to the woman; he took his stand beside her,
looking up at the sheriff with fierce, pleading eyes. But the sheriff
still held her arm, and the dog growled, partly in anger, partly in
trouble. Then Tommy saw, too. He wriggled loose from his father; he
came running to their help.
"Let go of her!" he screamed, and caught the woman's skirt with both
hands, "Papa, make him let her go!"
But it was his mistress who understood, who came to them with shining
face and caught the woman by both hands. He knew it was all right now,
even when the woman sank down on the car step and sobbed brokenly, her
face buried in her hands. For the sheriff had stepped back, and his
mistress was at her side, an arm about her shoulder.
"No, Sheriff," she said, looking up at him, and the sun sparkled in her
eyes.
"We won't say anything about this, gentlemen," Earle said quietly to the
men.
That night Frank lay in the crowded lobby of the hotel, ears pricked
toward the wide-screened dining-room door. He had already had his
supper, out in the rear courtyard near the kitchen where many dishes
rattled.
"Two porterhouse steaks--raw," Steve Earle had said.
"And a big dish of ice cream," Marian Earle had added with a smile, for
old Frank was an epicure in his way.
And now the sheriff was telling the crowd about him.
"He followed that car for two hundred miles. That was nothin'--been
huntin' all his life. But he kept out of sight--that's the thing! They
never saw him, and he never left them. That's what put us on the trail.
That's the reason the boy's eatin' supper with his father and mother in
there instead of bein' out in the woods with them brutes."
He puffed at his cigar.
"Some men fishing in the mountains passed him. He tried to flag 'em.
Yes, sir--that's what he tried to do. But they didn't catch on. Might
have, but didn't. Next day they read in the papers about a boy and Irish
setter being lost. Then they caught on and telephoned Mr. Earle."
"The woman that came in with the mother and went upstairs with her,"
asked a man, "who's she?"
The big sheriff took the cigar out of his mouth and looked at the
questioner with narrow, disapproving eyes.
"She didn't have a thing to do with it, sir!" he declared.
From the dining room came the sound of chairs pushed back, and Frank
rose to his feet. He met them at the door, he stood beside the boy while
the people gathered around, he went upstairs with them, the boy holding
tight to his heavy red mane.
"That old Joe!" Tommy was saying breathlessly, as they went down the
carpeted hall. "He can't get us any more. The sheriff he locked him up
in a jail. He can't get Nita, either. Mama's goin' to take care of her.
Mama says so!"
He was still talking, his eyes big, when they went into a brightly
lighted room where a little bed set beside a big one. He was still
talking while his mother undressed him. Then before he got into bed a
spasm of virtuous reaction seized him. He and F'ank were never going to
leave the yard any more, he declared. They never were going to get in
any more automobiles with people!
"No," smiled Earle from his great height down at the little figure in
borrowed pyjamas, "I guess you're cured, old man!"
The rug beside Tommy's bed was very soft, and Frank was very tired. But
sometime in the silent darkness of that night he barked hoarsely in the
agony of a dream. For they were on top of a mountain, and a weird moon
had risen, and a woman had screamed.
V
AN ACT OF GOD
There must have been something prophetic in Mac's fear of thunder when
he was a puppy. For, though all puppies are afraid of it, and most grown
dogs for that matter, still, Mac's fear, according to Tom Jennings, his
master, was more than that of the ordinary dog. That is, until the blow
came. After that it was different with Mac.
Maybe he thought, having smitten him once, that lightning would smite
him no more. Maybe some change had taken place in his nature which we
humans cannot analyze or understand. Let this be as it may, the fact is
that Mac, after his second year, feared thunder no more.
In law a stroke of lightning is known as an Act of God. If such is the
case, it seems strange that this stroke should have fallen on Sunday
night and in a God-fearing and God-serving household. As a matter of
fact, Tom Jennings, his wife and three children had just driven home
from church at Breton Junction and Tom, assisted by Frank, his boy of
sixteen, had put up the horses. Then, as the cloud was an unusually
threatening one, they all gathered in the parlour.
It was the ordinary parlour of country people who are self-respecting
but neither well-to-do nor educated. There was a fancy organ, a flowered
carpet; there were gaudy vases and solemn-looking enlarged crayon
portraits. Near a stiffly curtained window was a sort of family altar--a
table on which lay a family Bible. This Bible, a ponderous embossed
volume with brass guards and clasps, reposed on a blue-velvet table
cover that almost reached the floor. On the cover was worked a cross and
a crown with the legend: "He Must Bear a Cross Who Would Wear a Crown."
When, the storm having burst on this household, Mac scratched at the
door, Tom Jennings himself, a tall, raw-boned, sunburnt man, rose and
let him in with some good-humoured remark. Mac was a young setter, with
white, silken, curly coat and black, silken, curly ears. He looked
self-consciously into the faces of the family, who were smiling at his
fears; then, with a queer expression on his face, as if he, too, knew it
was funny, he went to the family altar, pushed aside the embossed velvet
cover, and lay down under the table. The children laughed, Tom Jennings
and Frank, a lanky, handsome, serious-faced lad smiled. Mac always did
this in a thunderstorm.
Just before the blow came, they heard him, as if he were still
reflecting humorously upon his fears, tap the floor with his tail.
Immediately there was the shiver of broken glass, a crash, a child's
suppressed scream, and for a moment, as the lamp went out, blackness.
But only for a moment; for next, above the shining brass trimmings of
the Bible, there glowed for several vivid seconds blue-and-white flames
like a halo.
There was no very clear recollection of what happened afterward. Having
assured himself that wife and children were safe, Tom Jennings, followed
by the boy Frank, ran out into the yard by the side door which they left
open, and looked at the roof of the house. If any fire had started it
had been drowned at once by deluges of rain. When father and son
returned, Mrs. Jennings had lit another lamp. Here they all were, with
white faces. Only Mac was gone.
For the better part of three days they searched for him, in the attic,
in the cellar, in the barns and outhouses, in the woods near by. On the
afternoon of the third day, Jennings stooped down and peered underneath
the corn crib. It was set low to the ground, and two sides were boarded
up. On the unboarded side weeds had grown. It was quite dark underneath.
At first he could not be sure what that dim suggestion of white he made
out could be. Then he pushed aside the weeds and peered more closely,
his eyes the while growing more accustomed to the dark. Finally he
straightened up and called loudly:
"Here he is, folks!"
They all came running, Mrs. Jennings leaving her supper to burn if need
be, Frank dropping his ax at the woodpile. When they reached him, Tom
Jennings was stooping down and pleading:
"Come, Mac! Come, old man! We are all here."
But the white figure did not stir.
At last Frank wormed his long, adolescent body underneath the sleepers
of the crib, caught hold of the front paws, and pulled the setter gently
forth. They examined him all over, but at first they could find no sign
of injury. It was Frank who saw and understood. Frank had always had a
way of knowing what was the matter with animals.
"He's blind," said the youth.
Some of the neighbours, when they heard, said Jennings ought to put him
out of his misery. But no such thought ever entered the head of any
member of the Jennings family. They built him a kennel underneath the
bedroom window. They taught him where to find his plate of food on the
kitchen steps. Soon he learned to find his way about the yard.
At first he ran into things--into the corner of the house, into the
woodpile, or into the chicken coops. He never whimpered when he did so,
but looked humbled and ashamed. At last he located each object,
calculated respective distances, and before the summer was over he
avoided obstacles as if he had had eyes.
You would not have known he was blind but for the fact that when he drew
near the steps or near a door--he learned to open screen doors with his
paws--he would raise his front foot, and feel about like a blind man
with a stick.
One day at dinner Jennings spoke to his family. "I don't want any of you
children ever to leave anything about the yard that he can stumble over.
Mother, whenever you move a chicken coop, call him and show him where it
is, hear?"
They all agreed.
Then Mac began to follow his master to the field and to Tom Belcher's
store up the road. Neighbours grinned and said they had often heard of a
blind man led by a dog, but never before of a blind dog led by a man.
They never said this, though, in Tom Jennings's presence.
As summer waned and hunting season approached, Tom Jennings, a great
hunter, bought a pointer to take the place of Mac in the field, and in
order that there might be no jealousy and no quarrelling, he bought a
female.
It was hard to have to leave Mac at home on the first day of the
winter's hunting. Though Tom had tried to keep the matter of his going a
secret, the blind dog had sensed the preparations. He had smelled the
oiling of boots. He had heard the click of shells dropped into
hunting-coat pockets. And at the end, the frantic barkings of the
pointer, whom Tom had tried in vain to keep silent, told him as plainly
as a shout. Mac tried to follow and they had to chain him up.
In the middle of the afternoon Mrs. Jennings turned him loose. He stayed
close to her skirts for a while, following her in and out of the kitchen
and about the yard. But as the time drew near for the return of the
hunters, he began to sniff the air in every direction, his nose held
high.
At last he smelled them coming across the fields and made his way
eagerly through the yard and toward them. And now it was, as he saw the
blind dog coming, that a happy thought struck Tom Jennings. Instead of
coming to the house he waited at the edge of the yard; and when Mac
reached him, he took out of his hunting coat a quail and handed it to
the dog.
"Take it to the missus," he said.
Straight to the kitchen wing and up the steps the dog went, happy and
proud. Mrs. Jennings opened the door, face beaming. The children all ran
out to see. And though it consumed time Tom remained where he was and
handed the blind dog bird after bird. After that, this procedure came to
be a regular part of Tom Jennings's hunts.
Soon Mac learned to rear gently up on the kitchen table and place the
birds on the top. Each bird he placed near the preceding one, rooting
them gently with his nose into a conical pile. "Mac's pile" it came to
be called by the children, returning from school and hurrying into the
kitchen. And while they talked to him and bragged about what a nice
regular pile he had made, he would stand with wagging tail, his
sightless eyes raised to their faces as if he saw.
Another summer passed, a summer of other thunderstorms, of which he was
afraid no more. Another bird season rolled around. And then, one day, he
begged so hard with his unseeing eyes that Tom let him go. After that
Tom always let him go. For a wonderful thing had happened. Blind Mac was
no longer useless! He could hunt birds!
First he seemed to be backstanding Nell, the pointer; that is, when she
set, he advanced slightly in front of Tom and set, too. But since he
could not see, it was plain that it was the birds themselves he was
setting and not Nell. Then, a little later in the same day, and while
Nell was nowhere in sight, he suddenly trotted ahead and came to a
beautiful stand. All excited, Tom advanced, and a covey of birds rose.
The gun barked twice and two birds tumbled. "Fetch, Mac!" cried Tom. And
straight to the dead birds the unerring nose took him, and he retrieved
them both, trembling with joy.
From this time he was an object of charity no more. Had Tom Jennings
not been a man of tender heart, but only a hunter out after meat, he
still would have taken Mac along. Just as in people when one sense is
destroyed others grow more than normally keen, so with Mac. Never,
declared Tom, could a dog smell birds so far; never did bird dog have a
nose that told him so exactly where they were.
Fortunately, the route over which Tom hunted lay in extensive river
bottoms, cultivated in corn. There were few fences and Mac soon learned
where they were. There were no woods, and only an occasional thicket
that Mac could circle with a fair degree of safety. The pointer did all
the wide ranging.
Now and then Mac fell into a ditch or creek. It was always pitiful to
Tom Jennings to see this. But each time the blind dog found his way out
and went on undaunted, head high, tail wagging as if with a perpetual
and inward joy.
"I've seen some blind folks," said Tom once to his wife, "that looked
happier than folks with eyes. Mac looks happier to me than dogs that can
see. It's funny."
So the years passed, and blind Mac came to be a familiar figure, and the
children grew, and Tom Jennings worked hard on his farm to give them an
education.
First Frank, the lad, outgrew the country schools, just as he outgrew
his clothes. He was a hardworking, serious-minded, intelligent boy.
Then the girls, both bright, reached the next to the last grade in the
country school. And Tom Jennings and Martha Jennings his wife determined
that each of them should have a college education. So Tom worked very
hard and Martha saved very closely. And the fall day came when Frank
left home to go to college in Greenville; then another day, the fall
following, when the girls left, also. Thus Martha and Tom and Mac were
left alone on the farm.
"You know," said Tom once (he was a simple, religious man), "I sometimes
think it's a strange thing, Mother, that that poor dog should have been
struck while he was takin' shelter under the Word of God. I know he
ain't nothin' but a dog, but I reckon God made him. I don't see why God
struck him."
"Maybe there was purpose in it, Tom," said his wife.
Then hard luck came to Tom Jennings just at the time when the bills for
the children's second matriculation were due. First, the river rose and
drowned some of his cattle and ruined a good deal of corn that had not
been gathered. He worked hard, even desperately, to save what he could
and not let the children know. Then Tom himself was taken with a queer
feeling in the chest, a feeling of tightness and dull pain and shortness
of breath. Martha pleaded with him a long time to consult a doctor in
Greenville before he consented to do so.
The doctor listened with a stethoscope placed on the farmer's chest.
"Sit down, Jennings," he said at last. "Jennings, your heart leaks.
You've overstrained it. You must never do any more hard manual work."
"But, Doctor----" Tom began.
"No buts about it. You are too good a man to drop off. You must go slow.
You mustn't even walk fast. You must never run, and you must not lift
heavy weights. Why don't you sell your farm and move to town?"
"But the children, Doctor. I'm trying to give 'em a better chance than I
had or their mother."
"That's all right, Jennings. But we have to trim our sails to meet life
as it is. Your heart leaks, man! You've done what you could for your
children. They'll just have to shift for themselves."
Tom Jennings drove slowly home. Martha, not knowing the purpose of his
visit to town that day, had gone to see Mrs. Taylor, a neighbour. Even
Mac was not in the yard to welcome him. He put up his horse, then sat
down on the back steps to do the hardest thinking he had ever done.
At first it seemed to him like providence that just recently Tom Belcher
had offered to buy the farm. In fact, he was calling him up every day
about it. He could sell it to-morrow and then he could move to
Greenville. The children were paying part of their expenses. But without
his help, two of them at least would have to leave college. What was
more, they would have to go to work to help him now. The interest from
what he could get for the farm would not keep him going--and farming was
the only thing he knew how to do.
But why shouldn't they help him? He had already done for them more than
any neighbour had done for his children. True, his greatest ambition
would be unrealized. But, as the doctor said, you had to trim your sails
in this life. Why should he carry on a fight when he had been stricken?
God did not expect a crippled man to run a race.
Also, he was frightened for his life. He carried within his body an
enemy that might strike him down at any moment. Then, rather pleasantly,
he forecast his life in town. He had fought hard, and now he could lay
his armour down, and no one would think any the less of him.
And so he sat pondering, thinking first of his children, for whom he had
had such high ambitions, then of himself, who would like to live his
allotted span, when across the pasture he saw blind Mac coming. It was a
hot September afternoon, and he had evidently been to the creek to cool
off and to get away from flies. He came steadily along, and though
nobody was near his tail was gently wagging.
The rear lot gate had been left open so the cattle could go to pasture,
and the dog came through the gate and across the barn lot. This brought
him to the fence that separated the lot from the yard, and before this
fence he stopped and felt about with his foot, tail still wagging. Tom
Jennings did not speak but watched him with queer emotions.
Having located the fence the blind dog backed off, looked up as if
trying to see, started to spring, hesitated, started again, and finally
leaped. His front paws hooked over the top plank, and he pulled himself
up, remained balanced another moment, then jumped into the yard. It was
as neatly done as if he were not blind. Tail still wagging, he came
across the yard.
But Martha had forgotten at last: in the middle of the yard was a
chicken coop she had recently moved there. Tom started to call out a
warning, then for some queer reason did not. Over the unexpected
obstacle the dog stumbled and came near falling. He let out no cry. He
simply went to the coop, felt it, as if to locate it for the future,
then came on toward the house. His head was bowed, though, as if with
that shame he seemed always to feel when because of his affliction he
happened to have an accident. But his tail was still wagging.
"Mac!" It broke from the man.
The blind dog raised his head and whiffed the air. Then he located his
master and came toward him. He laid his head on Tom Jennings's knee, and
Tom Jennings laid his big hard hand on the blind dog's head.
"God struck you!" he said hoarsely, "an' you never give up. God put out
yo' eyes, and still you do your work. An' you're only a dumb brute, an'
I was made in the image of God!"
The rural telephone in the hall suddenly gave his ring, and he rose and
went into the house.
"Yes--I've decided, Tom," he said. "I ain't goin' to sell the farm."
After that there came, perforce, a change in Jennings's method of
farming. Years ago Frank had besought him to diversify his crops, to
study his soil, to take advantage of the information the agricultural
college and the Government were so glad to send.
But to the older Jennings thinking had always been harder than physical
toil. Brought up right after the Civil War in a section left
poverty-stricken, he could just read and write--that was all; for when
he was twelve his service between the plough handles had begun, and
there he had served ever since.
Now, from necessity, he began to think and plan. He asked the
agricultural college for information, and they sent not only pamphlets
but a representative from an experiment station to consult with him and
advise him. He sold a bit of land and bought farm machinery. He built a
tenant house and installed help. And all the time Frank (who did not
know of the leaking heart) also advised him by letters, and when he
came home in the summer, helped wonderfully--both by hard work and by
mental initiative.
No great prosperity followed. But Tom Jennings did a shade better than
he had done before, and the children stayed at college. Not even Martha
knew the extent of what the doctor had told him that day. Only to Mac
did he talk freely.
"When yo' eyes was put out, ol' codger, you whetted yo' nose," he would
say; "and when my muscles lost their engine power I whetted my ol' rusty
brain."
His children all did well at college. Frank finished an academic course
(Tom and Martha saw him graduate), then went off to a medical college.
Mary, the older girl, was studying library work; the younger girl had
come to no conclusion yet. The three of them came home in summer for at
least part of the season, and always came at Christmas. They brought
with them a different atmosphere--the atmosphere of a wider world. But
the girls helped the mother in the kitchen and Frank advised with the
father about the farm. There was no feeling of shame on one side, or of
apology on the other. It was the kind of thing that has happened on
thousands of American farms.
Sometimes at night Tom spoke of his children to Martha: "They are goin'
to pass us by, Mother. They are goin' to amount to more than we have."
And then he would go to the window and raise the sash.
"Old man?" he would say.
And from the kennel would come a tap-tap that told he was heard.
And Tom continued to hunt with Mac, alone now, for Nell had died of
pneumonia. It was a good combination, the man with the damaged heart and
the dog with the sightless eyes. Tom had to go slow; so did Mac.
Gradually Tom worked out a series of signals which the dog understood.
If there were a ditch ahead Tom would blow once very sharp on his
whistle; if the dog was to turn to the right, he would blow twice, to
the left, three times. Sometimes, of course, the signals got crossed,
and Mac tumbled into a ditch or ran into a tree. Then there would be a
choke in Tom's throat. But these things didn't happen often.
It got to be a familiar sight in the community. Men from the Northern
Hunt Club, men who attended the field trials on the Earle plantation,
came to see the blind dog hunt. Never was such a nose, sportsmen said;
never such intelligence and sagacity.
"Shake hands with the gentlemen, Mac," the proud master would say. "They
speak well of you."
And the setter would go from one to the other and raise his paw, his
head held high after the manner of the blind.