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[Pg 72] 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 frequent-ly, 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.
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The Master sat down very suddenly on the veranda floor beside the dirt-encrusted brute, and caught it in his arms, sputtering dis-jointedly:
"Lad!--Laddie!--Old friend! You're alive again! You're--you're--alive!"
Yes, Lad had known enough to creep away to[Pg 73] 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." [Pg 74]
CHAPTER IV
HIS LITTLE SON
Lad's mate Lady was the only one of the Little People about The Place who refused to look on Lad with due reverence. In her
frolic-moods she teased him unmercifully; in a prettily imperious way she bossed and bullied him--for all of which Lad adored her. He had other reasons, too, for loving Lady--not only because she was dainty and beautiful, and was caressingly fond of him, but because he had won her in fair mortal combat with the younger and showier Knave.
For a time after Knave's routing, Lad was blissfully happy in Lady's undivided comradeship. Together they ranged the forests beyond The Place in search of rabbits. Together they sprawled shoulder to shoulder on the disreputable old fur rug in front of the living-room fire. Together they did joyous homage to their gods, the Mistress and the Master.
Then in the late summer a new rival appeared--to be accurate, three rivals. And they took up all of Lady's time and thought and love. Poor old[Pg 75] Lad was made to feel terribly out in the cold. The trio of rivals that had so suddenly claimed Lady's care were fuzzy and roly-poly, and about the size of month-old kittens. In brief, they were three thoroughbred collie puppies.
Two of them were tawny brown, with white forepaws and chests. The third was not like Lad in color, but like the mother--at least, all of him not white was of the indeterminate yellowish mouse-gray which, at three months or earlier, turns to pale gold.
When they were barely a fortnight old--almost as soon as their big mournful eyes opened--the two brown puppies died. There seemed no particular reason for their death, except the fact that a collie is always the easiest or else the most impossible breed of dog to raise.
The fuzzy grayish baby alone was left--the puppy which was soon to turn to white and gold. The Mistress named him "Wolf." Upon Baby Wolf the mother-dog lavished a ridiculous lot of attention--so much that Lad was miserably lonely. The great collie
would try with pathetic eagerness, a dozen times a day, to lure his mate into a woodland ramble or into a romp on the lawn, but Lady
met his wistful advances with absorbed indifference or with a snarl. Indeed when Lad ventured overnear the fuzzy baby, he was warned off by a querulous growl from the mother or by a slash of her shiny white teeth.
[Pg 76]
Lad could not at all understand it. He felt no particular interest--only a mild and disapproving curiosity--in the shapeless little whimpering ball of fur that nestled so helplessly against his beloved mate's side. He could not understand the mother-love that kept Lady with Wolf all day and all night. It was an impulse that meant nothing to Lad.
After a week or two of fruitless effort to win back Lady's interest, Lad coldly and wretchedly gave up the attempt. He took long solitary walks by himself in the forest, retired for hours at a time to sad brooding in his favorite "cave" under the living-room piano, and
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tried to console himself by spending all the rest of his day in the company of the Mistress and the Master. And he came thoroughly to disapprove of Wolf. Recognizing the baby intruder as the cause of Lady's estrangement from himself, he held aloof from the puppy.
The latter was beginning to emerge from his newborn shapelessness. His coat's texture was changing from fuzz to silk. Its color was turning from gray into yellow. His blunt little nose was lengthening and growing thin and pointed. His butter-ball body was elongat-ing, and his huge feet and legs were beginning to shape up. He looked more like a dog now, and less like an animated muff. Also within Wolf 's youthful heart awoke the devil of mischief, the keen urge of play. He found Lady a pleasant-enough playfellow up to
a certain point. But a painfully sharp pinch from her[Pg 77] teeth or a reproving and breath-taking slap from one of her forepaws was likely to break up every game that she thought had gone far enough; when Wolf 's clownish roughness at length got on her hair-trigger nerves.
So, in search of an additional playmate, the frolicsome puppy turned to Lad, only to find that Lad would not play with him at all. Lad
made it very, very clear to everyone--except to the fool puppy himself--that he had no desire to romp or to associate in any way with this creature which had ousted him from Lady's heart! Being cursed with a soul too big and gentle to let him harm anything so helpless as Wolf, he did not snap or growl, as did Lady, when the puppy teased. He merely walked away in hurt dignity.
Wolf had a positive genius for tormenting Lad. The huge collie, for instance, would be snoozing away a hot hour on the veranda or under the wistaria vines. Down upon him, from nowhere in particular, would pounce Wolf.
The puppy would seize his sleeping father by the ear, and drive his sharp little milk-teeth fiercely into the flesh. Then he would brace
himself and pull backward, possibly with the idea of dragging Lad along the ground.
Lad would wake in pain, would rise in dignified unhappiness to his feet and start to walk off--the puppy still hanging to his ear. As Wolf was a collie and not a bulldog, he would lose his grip as[Pg 78] his fat little body left
