with ropes. Then pine trees were passing swiftly overhead. One man was
lashing the mule. The other was standing up, looking back.
"See anybody?"
"No."
"Reckon he's one of them thousand-dollar dogs, Jim?"
"Reckon so! Look at him!"
All day the wagon wheels ground the sand. All day old Frank, tied in the
bottom of the wagon, sullenly watched those two men in the seat. Once or
twice, at the sound of other wheels approaching along the unfrequented
road, they pulled aside into the woods and waited. At dusk they turned
into a dirty yard. On the porch of an unpainted shack stood a woman,
beyond stretched level fields of broomstraw, then the flat blue line of
forest, and above the forest a dark-red glow.
They unfastened all the ropes but the one about his neck, pulled him out
of the wagon, dragged him off to the log corncrib, shoved him in, untied
the rope, and bolted the door. Then the burly man shoved in a pone of
cornbread and a pan of water.
"You go to town to-morrow, Sam," he said as he rebolted the door. "Just
hang around and listen. See if there's any reward in the paper--big red
Irish setter. His owner might telegraph the paper to-night. Sooner we
make the deal, the better."
Inside the crib the captive stood listening with shrewdly pricked ears
while the mumble of voices died away toward the shack, steps stamped up
on the porch, and the door slammed. Then he went cautiously round his
prison, whiffing the sides, rearing up on the log walls. Across the rear
corner was a pile of boxes. He climbed up on them. They rattled and he
jumped quickly down.
But later, after all sound had ceased in the shack and the lights he had
been watching through a chink in the logs had gone out, he climbed
carefully over behind these boxes. There was space to stand in back
here; the floor was of broad boards. Through the cracks he could see
that the crib was set up off the ground.
He began to scratch the corner board, then to gnaw. All night long at
intervals he sounded like a big rat in a barn. Sometimes he rested,
panting hard, then went back to work.
At the first sound of movement in the shack next morning he leaped back
over the boxes, and when the burly man opened the door to shove in bread
and water he lay in the middle of the floor and looked upon his captor
with sullen dignity.
That night he gnawed, and the next. But the surface of the board
offered little hold for claws or teeth. Industry, patience, a good
cause, do not make boards less hard, nails less maddening. He saw the
third day dawn, he heard steps stumping about in the shack, he saw the
other man ride into the dirty yard, and he sank down panting on his
prison floor, his head between his paws, dismay in his heart.
They brought him his breakfast and there was talk before his prison.
"Two hundred dollars, hell!" said the burly man. "Is that all they're
offering? They'll give a thousand but what they'll git that dog!"
"Well," said the other, "I told Fred to watch the papers, and if the
reward went up to send us one. You goin' to keep him stopped up in
thar?"
"No. I'm goin' to hunt him--over 'bout the swamps where nobody's apt to
see him. Then s'pose questions is asked? We don't read no papers. We
just found a lost dog and took care of him--see?"
"S'pose he sneaks off on a hunt?"
"Don't let him. If he tries to git out of sight, fill him full of shot."
"The whole thing's risky, Jim."
"Well, what is it ain't risky?"
Old Frank had always associated with gentlemen, hunted with sportsmen.
Now he was to find what it means to be threatened, browbeaten, harassed
in his work by inferiors.
On the first hunt, as soon as he got out in the field, he was yelled
at. He turned in bewilderment. The men hunted on mules, their guns
across the pommels of their saddles, and now they were gesticulating
angrily for him to come in. He ran to them, looking up into their faces
with apologetic eyes, for, however scornful he might be of them in his
prison, in the field his professional reputation, his bird-dog honour,
were at stake.
"You hunt close!" ordered the burly man.
After that he tried shrewdly to get away, to manoeuvre out of sight
under pretext of smelling birds. But the burly man called him in, got
down off his mule, cut a big stick, and threatened him. Again, an
enraged yell full of danger made him turn to find both guns pointed
straight at him and the face of the burly man crimson. He came in, tail
tucked, ears thrown back, eyes wild.
"You look here, Jim," said the man called Sam, "you better be satisfied.
They're offering four hundred dollars now, and that looks good to me.
It's been more'n a week. They ain't goin' to raise it any higher."
"They'll give a thousand!" yelled the burly man.
"All right, Jim--I've warned you!"
Day after day they hunted over the same ground, along the border of a
great swamp, where there were no houses, no roads, no cultivated fields.
Day after day they grew watchful, until he was almost afraid to get out
of the shadows cast by the mule. His tail that he had always carried so
proudly began to droop, the gallop that used to carry him swiftly over
fields and hills and woodland gave way to a spiritless trot. Fields and
woods stretched all about him, the sky was overhead; but he was tied to
these ragged men on mules as if by an invisible rope, which to break
meant death.
At intervals during the silent nights he still gnawed at his board
behind the boxes, but he could not hunt all day and stay awake at night.
Sheer weariness of body and spirit made him welcome any rest, even that
of his hard prison floor. And there were times when it seemed that he
had never known any life but the one he was living now.
At first he had expected Lancaster to find him. He had thought of the
men about the fireplace of the lodge. They would not desert him. Then as
time passed he forgot them. Only a small part of his life had they ever
filled. His master and mistress and the boy, his home far away in
another world--more and more these filled his thoughts and his desires.
Thus sometimes after a hunt, as he lay on the few shucks he had
scratched together into a meagre bed, there came to him from the shack
the smell of cooking meat; and he saw a big warm kitchen with a cat
dozing by the stove, and a fat old negro mammy bending over steaming
kettles and sputtering skillets. Then hungry saliva dripped from his
mouth to the floor and he choked and swallowed.
Again, on chilly nights, when he glimpsed through the chinks a glow in
the windows of the shack, there came into his mind a roaring fire of oak
logs and a big living room, with a man and a woman and a little boy
around the fire, and a gun standing in the corner with a hunting coat
draped over it. Then he raised his big head and looked about his prison
with eyes that glowed in the dark. It was at these times that he leaped
over the boxes and began to gnaw fiercely at his board.
But maybe even old Frank's stout spirit would have broken, for hope
deferred makes the heart of a dog, as well as the heart of man, sick;
maybe he would have ceased to gnaw at his board behind the boxes; maybe
he would have yielded to the men at last, submissive in spirit as well
as in act, if he had not seen the train and the woman and the little
boy.
They had taken an unusually long hunt, out of their accustomed course.
He had managed to get some distance ahead, pretending not to hear the
shouts above the wind; the bird shot they had sent after him had only
stung his rump, bringing from him a little involuntary yelp, but not
causing him to turn. The wildness of the day had infected him. A high
wind blowing out of a sunny, cloudless sky ran in waves over the tawny
level fields of broomstraw, and from a body of pines to his right rose
a great shouting roar.
Suddenly out of the south a whistle came screaming melodiously on the
wind. He galloped at an angle to intercept it. Out of the body of pines
a long train shot and rushed past, the sun flashing on its sides, its
roar deadened by the roar in the pines. Just behind it, among leaves and
trash stirred into life and careering madly, along he leaped on the
track.
A glimpse he caught of the brass-railed rear platform, where a woman
rose quickly from a chair, snatched up a boy smaller than Tommy, and
held him high in her arms. The boy waved at him, the woman smiled
brilliantly, and he ran after them, leaping into the air, barking his
hungry soul out.
But the waving woman and the smiling boy whirled away, and in that
desolate country a big Irish setter stood between the rails, and looked
with straining eyes after the vanishing rear of the northbound Florida
Limited, overhung by coils of smoke.
That was what had brought him down here. Those long, flashing rails led
home! He stood oblivious of everything else. He did not hear the shouts,
he did not see the burly man jump off his mule, cut a stick, and hurry
toward him, gun in hand.
He had endured much during those evil days. But what followed was that
which neither man nor dog can ever forgive or forget. At the first blow
he sprang about, mad with rage, but the man held the gun--to spring was
to spring to death. He dropped down at the man's feet and laid his head
over the rail. He did not cry out. But the blows sounded hollow on his
gaunt ribs, they ached sickeningly into his very vitals.
It could have had but one ending. Another blow, and he would have leaped
at the man's throat and to death. But the other man was rushing at them.
"Great God, Jim," he cried, "let up! You want to kill him?" White of
face, he had grabbed the stick, and the two stood facing one another.
From the pines still rose the great shouting roar.
They came home through the dusk, a silent procession: the burly man rode
in front, then the other man, and behind, with drooped head and tail,
trotted old Frank. Now and then in the gathering gloom the men looked
back at him, but not once did he raise his eyes to them.
"I guess I learned him his lesson, Sam."
Sam did not reply.
"I'm gettin' tired of waitin', anyhow."
Still Sam did not reply.
And his silence must have had its effect; for when they reached home the
burly man made the dog come into the shack. The wind had ceased, the
night turned chilly, and they let him lie down before the fire of pine
knots. The woman brought him a pot of hominy; the men felt his ribs as
gently as they could. He shrank from the touch more than from the pain.
Kindness had come too late, even for a dog.
He lay before the hearth, indifferent to all that happened in this
shabby room, for the sight of this fire had made him see another and
kindlier fire, in another and kindlier world. These people did not
notice his growing restlessness, his furtive glances, his panting
breaths, the burning light in his eyes. For steps had come up on the
porch; somebody had knocked at the door; the night of their fortune was
here!
The burly man hurried to answer, shaking the floor. The open door showed
a Negro who handed in a paper. Somebody had sent it from town, he
explained, and was gone. The woman snatched the paper. Heads close
together, the three stood about a smoking kerosene lamp. The woman was
reading in a whiny, excited drawl: "'One thousand dollars reward
for----'"
"I told you so!" burst from the burly man.
"Shut up! Listen!" cried the other.
"'Irish setter,'" she read. "'Answers to name Frank. Notify R. A.
Lancaster'--Oh, here's a lot of streets and numbers--'New York City.'"
"I told you!" the burly man was shouting. "I told you I knew a dog when
I saw one! Look at him, Sam! Look at that head! Look at that dome above
the ears! Look at that hair--like silk! The mould that dog was made in
is broke!"
"One thousand dollars!" gasped the woman. "One thousand dollars!"
When the two men came out with him to his prison the excitement was
still rising. The woman had already gone into another room, and the men
had got out a bottle. Their voices as they bolted his door and propped a
pole against it sounded loud and thick. They stamped up the steps, and
he could hear them laughing and shouting in the shack. Surely they could
not hear him gnawing--gnawing frantically at his board behind the boxes.
They could not hear him jerking at the end of the board, freed at last
from the sleeper below. They could not hear the board give way, throwing
him on his haunches. Surely they could not hear the little bark that
escaped him when the floor opened.
But out in the yard, free at last, he sank suddenly down flat, head
between his paws, very still. The back door of the shack had opened and
the light shone out across the littered yard, up the walls of his
prison, into his very eyes. The burly man had stepped out on the porch.
It was one of those hollow nights when sounds carry far, when a spoken
word is a shout.
"I don't hear nothin', Sam."
The other man staggered out.
"Maybe it was a rat," he said.
He could almost hear them breathing.
"Guess I imagined," said Sam.
"Sure," said the other.
Their figures darkened the doorway. The burly man clapped the other on
the back.
"What I tell you, Sam! One thousand----"
The door closed. The merriment would go on till morning. And old Frank,
muscles limbering as he ran, soreness passing out of his side, was
galloping through the night, toward the railroad--and home.
Morning found him loping easily along the railroad, nose pointed north
like a compass. Now and then he left the track to let a train pass,
looking at it, if it went north, with wistful eyes, then keeping in
sight of it as far as he could. He passed a few small stations with big
water tanks, he crossed long, low trestles over boundless marshes, he
came at dusk to a village.
Hungry, lonely, he approached an unpainted cottage on its outskirts. Two
dogs rushed at him; he faced them and they turned back. He trotted on,
hair risen in an angry tuft down his back. He slept curled up in an
abandoned shed, but not for long. The morning stars lingering low over
the flat horizon kept pace with him, then a sea of mottled pink clouds,
then the huge red face of the rising sun.
At midday he pounced on an animal like a muskrat that tried to cross the
track--a tough thing to kill, a tougher to eat. At dusk he drew near a
farmhouse, where a man was chopping wood. The man picked up a stick,
ordered him away, then went on chopping.
He made no more overtures after this, but many a farmer thought a fox
had been among his chickens. Habits of civilization had given way
perforce to habits of outlawry. Only as he galloped north day after day
his eyes still shone with the eager light of the bird dog's craving for
human companionship and love.
The number of tracks that branched out from the city whose environs he
skirted bewildered him for a minute; then he took the one that pointed
due north. All the days he travelled, part of the nights. Sometimes at
first he had wondered why he did not reach home, at last to travel
always north had become a habit, and he wondered no more.
But the time came when he could not keep on going as fast and as long as
formerly. There were days when he found hardly anything at all to eat.
The endless ties passing under him began to make him dizzy and faint.
His long hair was matted; his ribs showed; his eyes grew haggard. It was
a wonder the young man knew him for what he was.
He had come into the freight yards of a town at nightfall, in a cold,
driving rain, a bedraggled, forlorn figure, a stray dog. A passenger
train had just passed him, stopped at the station ahead, then pulled
out. A light glistened down wet rails into his hungry eyes and blinded
him. Rows of silent dripping box cars hid the man crossing the track at
the street. Frank almost ran into him. Both stopped. The man was
buttoned up to his neck in an overcoat and carried a satchel.
"Hello!" he said.
Frank started to slink back under a box car.
"Come here!" He stooped down and looked into the dog's eyes. "Where did
you drop from?" he said. "You come with me! Let's talk it over."
In a warm, firelit cottage room a young woman ran to meet the man--then
for the first time she saw the dog.
"Why, John!" she cried. "Where did you get him?"
"He got me," laughed the man, "on the way home from the station. He's
starving. Get him something to eat. Then I'll tell you about it."
She glanced at a cradle, whose covers were being suddenly and violently
agitated.
"I'll answer for this old fellow," assured the man. "He's seen better
days. I think I've seen him before."
Out in the bright little kitchen, where they scraped together all the
scraps they could find, he went on:
"Of course I may be mistaken. But at a little station where I sell goods
sometimes, I used to see a big red Irish setter following a tall man and
a little boy. I think they lived out in the country from there. The
kind of folks and the kind of dog you don't forget. If it wasn't so
far--hang it, I believe it's the dog, anyhow! Well, we'll take good care
of him, and next week when I go through I'll find out."
The young woman in a raincoat came out in the back yard and held the
streaming lantern while the man arranged some sacks underneath the porch
and closed and bolted the back gate. He heard them go up the back steps,
heard them moving about in the house. Like a decent old fellow he licked
the rain from his silken coat, smoothed out the matted strands, then
curled up comfortably in his dry bed and slept deep and long.
He stayed with them a week, while strength returned to his muscles, fire
to his eyes, courage to his heart. But as he lay before their hearth at
night he saw always in his mind that other fire--the fire of home. The
stars were still shining that morning when he scrambled over the high
back fence and was gone.
But it was with new life and confidence that he continued his journey.
He slunk no more on the outskirts of towns; he passed boldly through.
Fortune favoured him now; on the second day after he left them he ran
into snow, and rabbits are almost helpless before a swift pounce in the
snow.
The drifts grew deeper as he travelled north. Fields of dead cotton
stalks were varied by fields of withered corn stubble, yellow, broken
rows on white hills. There was an occasional big farmhouse now, a house
with white pillars like his master's, set in a grove of naked oaks. And
at last, following fence rows and hedges, lines of cylindrical cedars
climbed over and over high hills. The look of home was on the face of
nature, the smell of home was in the air.
It was a bitter cold afternoon when the mountains first took shape in
the distance. He could make them out, though the sky was heavily
overcast. Those were the mountains he saw every morning from the back
porch of his home. He barked at them as he ran. He would lie before his
own fire this night.
At dusk sudden hunger assailed him. On a hill was a big farmhouse, the
windows aglow, smoke veering wildly from the chimneys. And on the wind
came the smell of cooking meat. He stopped on an embankment, pricked his
ears, licked his chops. Then he scrambled down the embankment and like a
big fox made his way along a fence row toward that house from whence
came the smell of cooking meat. At the same time flakes of snow began to
drive horizontally across the white fields.
Suddenly from out the yard two stocky cream-coloured dogs rushed at him.
They came with incredible swiftness through the snow, considering their
short bench legs. Frank waited, head up, ears pricked. One was a female;
it was she who came first. He would not fight a female; he even wagged
his tail haughtily. But in a twinkling she was under him and had caught
his hind leg in a crushing, grinding grip. He lunged back, snarling, and
the other dog sprang straight at his throat.
He was down in the snow, he was on his feet again, he was ripping the
short back of the dog at his throat into shreds, his fangs flashing in
the dusk. He was dragging them by sheer strength off toward the
railroad; but he could not tear that grip from his hind leg, nor that
other grip from his throat.
He did not cry out--he was no yelping cur. But it was growing dark, the
air was full of snow, the grip was tightening on his throat, the other
grip had pulled him down at last to his haunches. Then two men came
running toward them, the one white, the other black. The white man
grabbed the dog at his throat, the black man the dog under him. The
white man was pounding the dog's nose with his fist, was cramming snow
down his bloody mouth.
"They'll kill him, Will!" he panted. "Go get some water to throw in
their faces."
The black man disappeared running--came back running, a bucket in each
hand.
And now it was over, and off there the white man held both his dogs by
their collars. They were panting, their wrinkled eyes half closed, their
mouths dripping bloody foam. For many yards around the snow was churned
into little hillocks. And there lay old Frank, panting hard, head up,
eyes shining.
"Pick him up, Will!" said the white man. "His leg's broke."
"Cap'n," said the negro, "I'm afraid of him."
The white man swore, shaking his dogs angrily. That was some man's bird
dog, a fine one, too.
"I believe that's Steve Earle's setter, from Freedom Hill across the
river!" he cried above the wind. "By George, I believe that's just who
it is! We'll go and get the sled!"
But when they hurried back with the sled the wounded dog was gone. They
followed his bloodstained tracks across the field, up the embankment,
and to the railroad. They looked at them between the rails, fast filling
with snow. The white man put his hands to his ears.
"He'll freeze to-night," he said.
In the teeth of the wind, like a three-legged automaton, Frank was
fighting his way doggedly through the night. The wind almost blew him
off the embankments; the swirling waves of snow choked him. Maybe he
would have lain down, maybe it would have happened as the man said, if
it had not been for the spirit within him and for what he saw.
For just before him the superstructure of an iron trestle rose pencilled
in snow against the night. Far below a black river wound serpentine into
the mists. A mile to the left, he knew, was Squire Kirby's. In those
dim bottoms on either side of the trestle he and his master and the
squire had hunted a hundred times. The birds had scattered on those
wooded hills now vibrant with the blast. Out on the trestle he picked
his slow, hesitating way.
Suddenly he cried out sharply. A mighty gust of wind striking him in
mid-air and almost hurling him into the blackness below had caused him
to put down as a brace his wounded hind leg. Gasping, trembling, he lay
down for a minute on the whitened ties, one leg hanging through. Then he
rose and doggedly picked his way on.
On the high embankment at the other side of the trestle he stopped and,
in spite of the blood stiffened under his throat and the water frozen on
his shoulders, he raised his quivering nose. Beyond those misty bottoms,
to the left, over those storm-swept ridges, lay Freedom Hill.
Halfway down the embankment he cried out again. He had slipped in the
snow and fallen on his leg. Under shelter of the embankment he rested
for a moment, panting as if the night were hot. Then lunging, tottering,
falling, rising again, panting, gasping but with never another cry, old
Frank fought his way up the river bottoms, past the farm of John Davis,
across the field in front of Tom Belcher's store, now a dim smudge in
the blackness--dragged himself over the last ridge, dragged himself
home.
Belly deep in drifted snow he stood at the corner of the lot fence and
surveyed the white distance that lay between him and his kennel--more
unattainable to his weakness than a quarter of a continent had been to
his strength. And while he stood there the roaring of the wind in the
great oaks overhead, the cracking of their naked branches, the swirl of
snow against his nose and in his eyes, bewildered him, and suddenly
something deep within him whispered to him to lie down and rest.
But the sudden terror of death lurked in that whisper and, head dragging
in the snow, he staggered across the yard toward his kennel. In here he
would crawl and hide from that fearful thing that had told him to lie
down in the snow and rest. He reached the kennel, he touched it with his
eager nose, he tried to root his way in between the slats which he had
not known were there. Then gasping and helpless he sat down before it.
The door of his kennel was nailed up. The great hulk of the house loomed
dark and silent above it. Maybe his people were gone!