Lad: A Dog (15 page)

The muzzle protruded nearly an inch beyond his nose. Either through faulty adjustment or from his own futile efforts to scrape it off, the awkward steel hinge had become jammed and would not open. Lad could not get his teeth a half inch apart.

After much effort he managed to protrude the end of his pink tongue and to touch the water with it, but it was a painful and drearily slow process absorbing water drop by drop in this way. More through fatigue than because his thirst was slaked, he stopped at last and turned away from the lake.

The next half hour was spent in a diligent and torturing and wholly useless attempt to rid himself of his muzzle.

After which the dog lay panting and athirst once more; his tender nose sore and bruised and bleeding; the muzzle as firmly fixed in place as ever. Another journey to the lake and another Tantalus effort to drink—and the pitifully harassed dog's uncanny brain began to work.

He no longer let himself heed the muzzle. Experience of the most painful sort had told him he could not dislodge it nor, in that clamorous and ill-smelling city beyond the park wall, could he hope to find the Mistress and the Master. These things being certain, his mind went on to the next step, and the next step was—Home!

Home! The Place where his happy, beautiful life had been spent, where his two gods abode, where there were no clang and reek and peril as here in New York. Home—The House of Peace!

Lad stood up. He drew in great breaths of the muggy air, and he turned slowly about two or three times, head up, nostrils aquiver. For a full minute he stood thus. Then he lowered his head and trotted westward. No longer he moved uncertainly, but with as much sureness as if he were traversing the forest behind The Place—the forest that had been his roaming-ground since puppyhood.

(Now, this is not a fairy story, nor any other type of fanciful yarn, so I do not pretend to account for Lad's heading unswervingly toward the northwest in the exact direction of The Place, thirty miles distant, any more than I can account for the authenticated case of a collie who, in 1917, made his way four hundred miles from the home of a new owner in southern Georgia to the doorstep of his former and better loved master in the mountains of North Carolina; any more than I can account for the flight of a homing pigeon or for that of the northbound duck in spring. God gives to certain animals a whole set of mystic traits which He withholds utterly from humans. No dog student can doubt that, and no dog student or deep-delving psychologist can explain it.)

Northwestward jogged Lad, and in half a mile he came to the low western wall of Central Park. Without turning aside to seek a gateway, he cleared the wall and found himself on Eighth Avenue in the very middle of a block.

Keeping on the sidewalk and paying no heed to the few pedestrians, he moved along to the next westward street and turned down it toward the Hudson River. So calmly and certainly did he move that none would have taken him for a lost dog.

Under the roaring elevated road at Columbus Avenue he trotted, his ears tormented by the racket of a train that reverberated above him, his sense so blurred by the sound that he all but forgot to dodge a southbound trolley car.

Down the cross street to Amsterdam Avenue he bore. A patrolman on his way to the West Sixty-ninth Street police station to report for night duty was so taken up by his own lofty thoughts that he quite forgot to glance at the big mud-spattered dog that padded past him.

For this lack of observation the patrolman was destined to lose a good opportunity for fattening his monthly pay. Because, on reaching the station, he learned that a distressed man and woman had just been there in a car to offer a fifty-dollar reward for the finding of a big mahogany-and-white collie answering to the name of “Lad.”

As the dog reached Amsterdam Avenue a high little voice squealed delightedly at him. A three-year-old baby—a mere fluff of gold and white and pink—was crossing the avenue convoyed by a fat woman in black. Lad was jogging by the mother and child when the latter discovered the passing dog.

With a shriek of joyous friendliness the baby flung herself upon Lad and wrapped both arms about his shaggy neck.

“Why
doggie!”
she shrilled, ecstatically. “Why, dear,
dear
doggie!”

Now Lad was in dire haste to get home, and Lad was in dire misery of mind and body, but his big heart went out in eagerly loving answer to the impulsive caress. He worshiped children, and would cheerfully endure from them any amount of mauling.

At the baby embrace and the baby voice, he stopped short in his progress. His plumy tail wagged in glad friendliness; his muzzled nose sought wistfully to kiss the pink little face on a level with his own. The baby tightened her hug, and laid her rose-leaf cheek close to his own.

“I love you, Miss Doggie!” she whispered in Lad's ear.

Then the fat woman in black bore down upon them. Fiercely, she yanked the baby away from the dog. Then, seeing that the mud on Lad's shoulder had soiled the child's white coat, she whirled a string-fastened bundle aloft and brought it down with a resounding thwack over the dog's head.

Lad winced under the heavy blow, then hot resentment blazed through his first instant of grieved astonishment. This unpleasant fat creature in black was not a man, wherefore Lad contented himself by baring his white teeth, and with growling deep menace far down in his throat.

The woman shrank back scared, and she screamed loudly. On the instant the station-bound patrolman was beside her.

“What's wrong, ma'am?” asked the bluecoat.

The woman pointed a wobbly and fat forefinger at Lad, who had taken up his westward journey again and was halfway across the street.

“Mad dog!” she sputtered, hysterically. “He—he bit me! Bit
at
me, anyhow!”

Without waiting to hear the last qualifying sentence, the patrolman gave chase. Here was a chance for honorable blotter mention at the very least. As he ran he drew his pistol.

Lad had reached the westward pavement of Amsterdam Avenue and was in the side street beyond. He was not hurrying, but his short wolf-trot ate up ground in deceptively quick time.

By the time the policeman had reached the west corner of street and avenue the dog was nearly a half block ahead. The officer, still running, leveled his pistol and fired.

Now, anyone (but a very newly appointed patrolman or a movie hero) knows that to fire a shot when running is worse than fatal to any chance of accuracy. No marksman —no one who has the remotest knowledge of marksmanship—will do such a thing. The very best pistol expert cannot hope to hit his target if he is joggling his own arm and his whole body by the motion of running.

The bullet flew high and to the right, smashing a second-story window and making the echoes resound deafeningly through the narrow street.

“What's up?” excitedly asked a boy, who stood beside a barrel bonfire with a group of chums.

“Mad dog!” puffed the policeman as he sped past.

At once the boys joined gleesomely in the chase, outdistancing the officer, just as the latter fired a second shot.

Lad felt a while-hot ridge of pain cut along his left flank like a whiplash. He wheeled to face his invisible foe, and he found himself looking at a half dozen boys who charged whoopingly down on him. Behind the boys clumped a man in blue flourishing something bright.

Lad had no taste for this sort of attention. Always he had loathed strangers, and these new strangers seemed bent on catching him—on barring his homeward way.

He wheeled around again and continued his westward journey at a faster pace. The hue and cry broke into louder yells and three or four new recruits joined the pursuers. The yap of “Mad dog!
Mad
dog
!” filled the air.

Not one of these people—not even the policeman himself—had any evidence that the collie was mad. There are not two really rabid dogs seen at large in New York or in any other city in the course of a year. Yet, at the back of the human throat ever lurks that fool cry of “Mad dog!”—ever ready to leap forth into shouted words at the faintest provocation.

One wonders, disgustedly, how many thousand luckless and totally harmless pet dogs in the course of a year are thus hunted down and shot or kicked or stoned to death in the sacred name of Humanity, just because some idiot mistakes a hanging tongue or an uncertainty of direction for signs of that semi-phantom malady known as “rabies.”

A dog is lost. He wanders to and fro in bewilderment. Boys pelt or chase him. His tongue lolls and his eyes glaze with fear. Then, ever, rises the yell of “Mad dog!” And a friendly, lovable pet is joyfully done to death.

Lad crossed Broadway, threading his way through the trolley-and-taxi procession, and galloped down the hill toward Riverside Park. Close always at his heels followed the shouting crowd. Twice, by sprinting, the patrolman gained the front rank of the hunt, and twice he fired—both bullets going wide. Across West End Avenue and across Riverside Drive went Lad, hard-pressed and fleeing at top speed. The cross street ran directly down to a pier that jutted a hundred feet out into the Hudson River.

Along this pier flew Lad, not in panic terror, but none the less resolved that these howling New Yorkers should not catch him and prevent his going home.

Onto the pier the clattering hue and cry followed. A dock watchman, as Lad flashed by, hurled a heavy joist of wood at the dog. It whizzed past the flying hind legs, scoring the barest of misses.

And now Lad was at the pier end. Behind him the crowd raced, sure it had the dangerous brute cornered at last.

On the stringpiece the collie paused for the briefest of moments glancing to north and to south. Everywhere the wide river stretched away, unbridged. It must be crossed if he would continue his homeward course, and there was but one way for him to cross it.

The watchman, hard at his heels, swung upward the club he carried. Down came the club with murderous force—upon the stringpiece where Lad had been standing.

Lad was no longer there. One great bound had carried him over the edge and into the black water below.

Down he plunged into the river and far, far under it, fighting his way gaspingly to the surface. The water that gushed into his mouth and nostrils was salty and foul, not at all like the water of the lake at the edge of The Place. It sickened him. And the February chill of the river cut into him like a million ice needles.

To the surface he came, and struck out valorously for the opposite shore much more than a mile away. As his beautiful head appeared, a yell went up from the clustering riffraff at the pier end. Bits of wood and coal began to shower the water all around him. A pistol shot plopped into the river a bare six inches away from him.

But the light was bad and the stream was a tossing mass of blackness and of light blurs, and presently the dog swam, unscathed, beyond the range of missiles.

Now a swim of a mile or of two miles was no special exploit for Lad—even in ice-cold water, but this water was not like any he had swum in. The tide was at the turn for one thing, and while, in a way, this helped him, yet the myriad eddies and crosscurrents engendered by it turned and jostled and buffeted him in a most perplexing way. And there were spars and barrels and other obstacles that were forever looming up just in front of him or else banging against his heaving sides.

Once a revenue cutter passed not thirty feet ahead of him. Its wake caught the dog and sucked him under and spun his body around and around before he could fight clear of it.

His lungs were bursting. He was worn out. He felt as sore as if he had been kicked for an hour. The bullet graze along his flank was hurting him as the salt water bit into it, and the muzzle half-blinded, half-smothered him.

But, because of his hero heart rather than through his splendid strength and wisdom, he kept on.

For an hour or more he swam until at last his body and brain were numb, and only the mechanical action of his wrenched muscles held him in motion. Twice tugs narrowly escaped running him down, and in the wake of each he waged a fearful fight for life.

After a century of effort his groping forepaws felt the impact of a submerged rock, then of another, and with his last vestige of strength Lad crawled feebly ashore on a narrow sandspit at the base of the elephant-gray Palisades. There, he collapsed and lay shivering, panting, struggling for breath.

Long he lay there, letting Nature bring back some of his wind and his motive power, his shaggy body one huge pulsing ache.

When he was able to move, he took up his journey. Sometimes swimming, sometimes on ground, he skirted the Palisades' foot to northward, until he found one of the several precipice paths that Sunday picnickers love to climb. Up this he made his tottering way, slowly, conserving his strength as best he could.