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 pipe-stem 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 rôle 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.
