Lad: A Dog (22 page)

The Wall Street Farmer and the English trainer had delayed the Event for several minutes while they went through a strenuous dispute. As the Mistress came up she heard Glure end the argument by booming:

“I tell you that's all rot. Why shouldn't he ‘work' foi me just as well as he'd ‘work' for you? I'm his Master, ain't I?”

“No, sir,” replied the trainer, glumly. “Only his
owner.”

“I've had him a whole week,” declared the Wall Street Farmer, “and I've put him through those rounds a dozen times. He knows me and he goes through it all like clockwork for me. Here! Give me his leash!”

He snatched the leather cord from the protesting trainer and, with a yank at it, started with Lochinvar toward the central post. The aristocratic Merle resented the uncalledfor tug by a flash of teeth. Then he thought better of the matter, swallowed his resentment and paced along beside his visibly proud owner.

A murmur of admiration went through the crowd at sight . of Lochinvar as he moved forward. The dog was a joy to look on. Such a dog as one sees perhaps thrice in a lifetime. Such a dog for perfect beauty, as were Southport Sample, Grey Mist, Howgill Rival, Sunnybank Goldsmith or Squire of Tytton. A dog, for looks, that was the despair of all competing dogdom.

Proudly perfect in carriage, in mist-gray coat, in a hundred points—from the noble pale-eyed head to the long massy brush—Lochinvar III made people catch their breath and stare. Even the Mistress' heart went out—though with a tinge of shame for disloyalty to Lad—at his beauty.

Arrived at the central post, the Wall Street Farmer un-snapped the leash. Then, one hand on the Merle's head and the other holding a half-smoked cigar between two pudgy fingers, he smiled upon the tense onlookers.

This was his Moment. This was the supreme moment which had cost him nearly ten thousand dollars in all. He was due, at last, to win a trophy that would be the talk of all the sporting universe. These countryfolk who had won lesser prizes from under his very nose—how they would stare, after this, at his gun-room treasures!

“Ready, Mr. Glure?” asked the Judge.

“All ready!” graciously returned the Wall Street Farmer.

Taking a pull at his thick cigar, and replacing it between the first two fingers of his right hand, he pointed majestically with the same hand to the first post.

No word of command was given; yet Lochinvar moved off at a sweeping run directly in the line laid out by his owner's gesture.

As the Merle came alongside the post the Wall Street Farmer snapped his fingers. Instantly Lochinvar dropped to a halt and stood moveless, looking back for the next gesture.

This “next gesture” was wholly impromptu. In snapping his fingers the Wall Street Farmer had not taken sufficient account of the cigar stub he held. The snapping motion had brought the fire end of the stub directly between his first and second fingers, close to the palm. The red coal bit deep into those two tenderest spots of all the hand.

With a reverberating snort the Wall Street Farmer dropped the cigar butt and shook his anguished hand rapidly up and down, in the first sting of pain. The loose fingers slapped together like the strands of an obese cat-o'-nine-tails.

And this was the gesture which Lochinvar beheld, as he turned to catch the signal for his next move.

Now, the frantic St. Vitus shaking of the hand and arm, accompanied by a clumsy step-dance and a mouthful of rich oaths, forms no signal known to the very cleverest of “working”collies. Neither does the inserting of two burned fingers into the signaler's mouth—which was the second motion the Merle noted.

Ignorant as to the meaning of either of these unique signals the dog stood, puzzled. The Wall Street Farmer recovered at once from his fit of babyish emotion, and motioned his dog to go on to the next post.

The Merle did not move. Here, at last, was a signal he understood perfectly well. Yet, after the manner of the best-taught “working” dogs, he had been most rigidly trained from earliest days to finish the carrying out of one order before giving heed to another.

He had received the signal to go in one direction. He had obeyed. He had then received the familiar signal to halt and to await instructions. Again he had obeyed. Next he had received a wildly emphatic series of signals whose meaning he could not read. A long course of training told him he must wait to have these gestures explained to him before undertaking to obey the simple signal that had followed.

This, in his training kennel, had been the rule. When a pupil did not understand an order he must stay where he was until he could be made to understand. He must not dash away to carry out a later order that might perhaps be intended for some other pupil.

Wherefore, the Merle stood stock-still. The Wall Street Farmer repeated the gesture of pointing toward the next post. Inquiringly, Lochinvar watched him. The Wall Street Farmer made the gesture a third time—to no purpose other than to deepen the dog's look of inquiry. Lochinvar was abiding, steadfastly, by his hard-learned lessons of the Scottish moorland days.

Someone in the crowd tittered. Someone else sang out delightedly:

“Lad wins!”

The Wall Street Farmer heard. And he proceeded to mislay his easily losable self-control. Again, these inferior countryfolk seemed about to wrest from him a prize he had deemed all his own, and to rejoice in the prospect.

“You mongrel cur!” he bellowed. “Get along there!'

This diction meant nothing to Lochinvar, except that his owner's temper was gone—and with it his scanty authority.

Glure saw red—or he came as near to seeing it as can anyone outside a novel. He made a plunge across the quadrangle, seized the beautiful Merle by the scruff of the neck and kicked him.

Now, here was something the dog could understand with entire ease. This loud-mouthed vulgarian giant, whom he had disliked from the first, was daring to lay violent hands on him—on Champion Lochinvar III, the dog-aristocrat that had always been handled with deference and whose ugly temper had never been trained out of him.

As a growl of hot resentment went up from the onlookers, a far more murderously resentful growl went up from the depths of Lochinvar's furry throat.

In a flash, the Merle had wrenched free from his owner's neck grip. And, in practically the same moment, his curved eyeteeth were burying themselves deep in the calf of the Wall Street Farmer's leg.

Then the trainer and the Judge seized on the snarlingly floundering pair. What the outraged trainer said, as he ran up, would have brought a blush to the cheek of a waterside bartender. What the Judge said (in tone of no regret, whatever) was:

“Mr. Glure, you have forfeited the match by moving more than three feet from the central post. But your dog had already lost it by refusing to ‘work' at your command. Lad wins the Maury Trophy.”

So it was that the Gold Hat, as well as the modest little silver “Best Collie” cup, went to The Place that night. Setting the golden monstrosity on the trophy shelf, the Master surveyed it for a moment, then said:

“That Gold Hat is even bigger than it looks. It is big enough to hold a thousand yards of surgical dressings; and gallons of medicine and broth, besides. And that's what it is going to hold. Tomorrow I'll send it to Vanderslice, at the Red Cross Headquarters.”

“Good!” applauded the Mistress. “Oh,
good!
Send it in Lad's name.”

“I shall. I'll tell Vanderslice how it was won; and I'll ask him to have it melted down to buy hospital supplies. If that doesn't take off its curse of unsportsmanliness, nothing will. I'll get you something to take its place, as a trophy.”

But there was no need to redeem that promise. A week later, from Headquarters, came a tiny scarlet enamel cross, whose silver back bore the inscription:

 

“Its face-value is probably fifty cents, Lad, dear,” commented the Mistress, as she strung the bit of scarlet on the dog's shaggy throat. “But its heart value is at least a billion dollars. Besides—you can wear it. And nobody, outside a nightmare, could possibly have worn kind, good Mr. Hugh Lester Maury's Gold Hat. I must write to Mr. Glure and tell him about it. How tickled he'll be! Won't he, Laddie?”

THE MAN HUDDLED FROWZILY IN THE TREE CROTCH, LIKE A rumpled and sick raccoon. At times he would crane his thin neck and peer about him, but more as if he feared rescue than as though he hoped for it.

Then, before slumping back to his sick-raccoon pose, he would look murderously earthward and swear with lurid fervor.

At the tree foot the big dog wasted neither time nor energy in frantic barking or in capering excitedly about. Instead, he lay at majestic ease, gazing up toward the treed man with grave attentiveness.

Thus, for a full half hour, the two had remained—the treer and the treed. Thus, from present signs, they would continue to remain until Christmas.

There is, by tradition, something intensely comic in the picture of a man treed by a dog. The man, in the present case, supplied the only element of comedy in the scene. The dog was anything but comic, either in looks or in posture.

He was a collie, huge of bulk, massive of shoulder, deep and shaggy of chest. His forepaws were snowy and absurdly small. His eyes were seal-dark and sorrowful—eyes that proclaimed not only an uncannily wise brain, but a soul as well. In brief, he was Lad; official guard of The Place's safety.

It was in this role of guard that he was now serving as jailer to the man he had seen slouching through the undergrowth of the forest which grew close up to The Place's outbuildings.

From his two worshiped deities—the Mistress and the Master—Lad had learned in puppyhood the simple provisions of the Guest Law. He knew, for example, that no one openly approaching the house along the driveway from the furlong-distant highroad was to be molested. Such a visitor's advent—especially at night—might lawfully be greeted by a salvo of barks. But the barks were a mere announcement, not a threat.

On the other hand, the Law demanded the instant halting of all prowlers, or of anyone seeking to get to the house from road or lake by circuitous and stealthy means. Such roundabout methods spell Trespass. Every good watchdog knows that. But wholly good watchdogs are far fewer than most people—even their owners—realize. Lad was one of the few.

Today's trespasser had struck into The Place's grounds from an adjoining bit of woodland. He had moved softly and obliquely and had made little furtive dashes from one bit of cover to another, as he advanced toward the outbuildings a hundred yards north of the house.

He had moved cleverly and quietly. No human had seen or heard him. Even Lad, sprawling half-asleep on the veranda, had not seen him. For, in spite of theory, a dog's eye by daylight is not so keen or so farseeing as is a human's. But the wind had brought news of a foreign presence on The Place—a presence which Lad's hasty glance at driveway and lake edge did not verify.

So the dog had risen to his feet, stretched himself, collie, fashion, fore and aft, and trotted quickly away to investigate. Scent, and then sound, taught him which way to go.

Two minutes later he changed his wolf trot to a slow and unwontedly stiff-legged walk, advancing with head lowered, and growling softly far down in his throat. He was making straight for a patch of sumac, ten feet in front of him and a hundred feet behind the stables.

Now, when a dog bounds toward a man, barking and with head up, there is nothing at all to be feared from his approach. But when the pace slackens to a stiff walk and his head sinks low, that is a very good time, indeed, for the object of his attentions to think seriously of escape or of defense.

Instinct or experience must have imparted this useful truth to the lurker in the sumac patch, for as the great dog drew near the man incontinently wheeled and broke cover. At the same instant Lad charged.

The man had a ten-foot start. This vantage he utilized by flinging himself bodily at a low-forked hickory tree directly in his path.

Up the rough trunk to the crotch he shinned with the speed of a chased cat. Lad arrived at the tree bole barely in time to collect a mouthful of cloth from the climber's left trouser ankle.

After which, since he was not of the sort to clamor noisily for what lurked beyond his reach, the dog yawned and lay down to keep guard on his arboreal prisoner. For half an hour he lay thus, varying his vigil once or twice by sniffing thoughtfully at a ragged scrap of trouser cloth between his little white forepaws. He sniffed the thing as though trying to commit its scent to memory.