Lad: A Dog (19 page)

Ten miles to northward of The Place, among the mountains of this same North Jersey hinterland, a man named Glure had bought a rambling old wilderness farm. By dint of much money, more zeal and most dearth of taste, he had caused the wilderness to blossom like the Fifth Proposition of Euclid. He had turned bosky wildwood into chaste picnic-grove plaisaunces, lush meadows into sunken gardens, a roomy colonial farmstead into something between a feudal castle and a roadhouse. And, looking on his work, he had seen that it was good.

This Beautifier of the Wilderness was a financial giantlet, who had lately chosen to amuse himself, after work hours, by what he called “farming.” Hence the purchase and renovation of the five-hundred-acre tract, the building of model farms, the acquisition of priceless livestock, and the hiring of a battalion of skilled employees. Hence, too, his dearly loved and self-given title of “Wall Street Farmer.” His name, I repeat, was Glure.

Having established himself in the region, the Wall Street Farmer undertook most earnestly to reproduce the story-book glories of the life supposedly led by mid- Victorian country gentlemen. Not only in respect to keeping open house and in alternately patronizing and bullying the peasantry, but in filling his gun-room shelves with cups and other trophies won by his livestock.

To his “open house” few of the neighboring families came. The local peasantry—Jersey mountaineers of Revolutionary stock, who had not the faintest idea they were “peasantry” and who, indeed, had never heard of the word —alternately grinned and swore at the Wall Street Farmer's treatment of them, and mulcted him of huge sums for small services. But Glure's keenest disappointment—a disappointment that crept gradually up toward the monomania point—was the annoyingly continual emptiness of his trophy shelves.

When, for instance, he sent to the Paterson Livestock Show a score of his pricelessly imported merino sheep, under his more pricelessly imported Scotch shepherd, Mr. McGillicuddy—the sheep came ambling back to Glure Towers Farm bearing no worthier guerdon than a single third-prize yellow silk rosette and a “Commended” ribbon. First and second prizes, as well as the challenge cup, had gone to flocks owned by vastly inferior folk—small farmers who had no money wherewith to import the pick of the Scottish moors—farmers who had bred and developed their own sheep, with no better aid than personal care and personal judgment.

At the Hohokus Fair, too, the Country Gentleman's imported Holstein bull, Tenebris, had had to content himself with a measly red rosette in token of second prize, while the silver cup went to a bull owned by an elderly North Jersey-man of low manners, who had bred his own entry and had bred the latter's ancestors for forty years back.

It was discouraging, it was mystifying. There actually seemed to be a vulgar conspiracy among the down-at-heel rural judges—a conspiracy to boost second-rate stock and to turn a blind eye to the virtues of overpriced transatlantic importations.

It was the same in the poultry shows and in hog exhibits. It was the same at the County Fair horse trots. At one of these trots the Wall Street Farmer, in person, drove his $9,000 English colt. And a rangy Hackensack gelding won all three heats. In none of the three did Glure's colt get within hailing distance of the wire before at least two other trotters had clattered under it.

(Glure's English head groom was called on the carpet to explain why a colt that could do a neat 2.13 in training was beaten out in a 2.17 trot. The groom lost his temper and his place. For he grunted, in reply, “The colt was all there. It was the driving did it.”)

The gun room's glassed shelves in time were gay with ribbon. But only two of the three primary colors were represented there—blue being conspicuously absent. As for cups —the burglar who should break into Glure Towers in search of such booty would find himself the worse off by a wage-less night's work.

Then it was that the Wall Street Farmer had his Inspiration. Which brings us by easy degrees to the Hampton Dog Show.

Even as the Fiery Cross among the Highland crags once flashed signal of War, so, when the World War swirl sucked nation after nation into its eddy, the Red Cross flamed from one end of America to the other, as the common rallying point for those who, for a time, must do their fighting on the hither side of the gray seas. The country bristled with a thousand money-getting functions of a thousand different kinds; with one objective—the Red Cross.

So it happened at last that North Jersey was posted, on state road and byway, with flaring placards announcing a Mammoth Outdoor Specialty Dog Show, to be held under the auspices of the Hampton Branch of the American National Red Cross, on Labor Day.

Mr. Hamilcar Q. Glure, the announcement continued, had kindly donated the use of his beautiful grounds for the Event, and had subscribed three hundred dollars toward its running expenses and prizes.

. Not only were the usual dog classes to be judged, but an added interest was to be supplied by the awarding of no less than fifteen Specialty Trophies.

Mr. Glure, having offered his grounds and the initial three hundred dollars, graciously turned over the details of the Show to a committee, whose duty it was to suggest popular Specialties and to solicit money for the cups.

Thus, one morning, an official letter was received at The Place, asking the Master to enter all his available dogs for the Show—at one dollar apiece for each class—and to contribute, if he should so desire, the sum of fifteen dollars besides, for the purchase of a Specialty Cup.

The Mistress was far more excited over the coming event than was the Master. And it was she who suggested the nature of the Specialty for which the fifteen-dollar cup should be offered.

The next outgoing mail bore the Master's check for a cup. “To be awarded to the oldest and best-cared-for dog, of any breed, in the Show.”

It was like the Mistress to think of that, and to reward the dog owner whose pet's old age had been made happiest. Hers was destined to be the most popular Specialty of the entire Show.

The Master, at first, was disposed to refuse the invitation to take any of his collies to Hampton. The dogs were, for the most part, out of coat. The weather was warm. At these amateur shows—as at too many professional exhibits—there was always danger of some sick dog spreading epidemic. Moreover, the living-room trophy shelf at The Place was already comfortably filled with cups, won at similar contests. Then, too, the Master had somehow acquired a most causeless and cordial dislike for the Wall Street Farmer.

“I believe I'll send an extra ten dollars,” he told the Mistress, “and save the dogs a day of torment. What do you think?”

By way of answer, the Mistress sat down on the floor where Lad was sprawled, asleep. She ran her fingers through his forest of ruff. The great dog's brush pounded drowsily against the floor at the loved touch; and he raised his head for further caress.

“Laddie's winter coat is coming in beautifully,” she said at last. “I don't suppose there'll be another dog there with such a coat. Besides, it's to be outdoors, you see. So he won't catch any sickness. If it were a four-day show—if it were anything longer than a one-day show—he shouldn't go a step. But, you see, I'd be right there with him all the time. And I'd take him into the ring myself, as I did at Madison Square Garden. And he won't be unhappy or lonely or—or anything. And I always love to have people see how splendid he is. And those Specialty Trophies are pretty, sometimes. So—so we'll do just whatever you say about it.”

Which, naturally, settled the matter, once and for all.

When a printed copy of the Specialty Lists arrived, a week later, the Mistress and the Master scanned eagerly its pages.

There were cups offered for the best tricolor collie, for the best mother and litter, for the collie with the finest under and outer coat, for the best collie exhibited by a woman, for the collie whose get had won most prizes in other shows. At the very bottom of the section, and in type six points larger than any other announcement on the whole schedule, were the words:

“A gold cup!” sighed the Mistress, yielding to delusions of grandeur, “A
gold
cup! I never heard of such a thing, at a dog show. And—and won't it look perfectly gorgeous in the very center of our Trophy Shelf, there—with the other cups radiating from it on each side? And—”

“Hold on!” laughed the Master, trying to mask his own thrill, man-fashion, by wetblanketing his wife's enthusiasm. “Hold on! We haven't got it, yet. I'll enter Lad for it, of course. But so will every other collie owner who reads that. Besides, even if Lad should win it, we'd have to buy a microscope to see the thing. It will probably be about half the size of a thimble. Gold cups cost gold money, you know. And I don't suppose this ‘Hon. Hugh Lester Maury of New York City' is squandering more than ten or fifteen dollars at most on a country dog show. Even for the Red Cross. I suppose he's some Wall Street chum that Glure has wheedled into giving a Specialty. He's a novelty to me. I never heard of him before. Did you?”

“No,” admitted the Mistress. “But I feel I'm beginning to love him. Oh, Laddie,” she confided to the dog, “I'm going to give you a bath in naphtha soap every day till then; and brush you, two hours every morning; and feed you on liver and-”

“ ‘Conditions announced later,' ” quoted the Master, studying the big-type offer once more. “I wonder what that means. Of course, in a Specialty Show, anything goes. But-”

“I don't care what the conditions are,” interrupted the Mistress, refusing to be disheartened. “Lad can come up to them. Why, there isn't a greater dog in America than Lad. And you know it.”

“I know it,” assented the pessimistic Master. “But will the Judge? You might tell him so.”

“Lad will tell him,” promised the Mistress. “Don't worry.”

On Labor Day morning a thousand cars, from a radius of fifty miles, were converging upon the much-advertised village of Hampton; whence, by climbing a tortuous first-speed hill, they presently chugged into the still-more-advertised estate of Hamilcar Q. Glure, Wall Street Farmer.

There, the sylvan stillness was shattered by barks in every key, from Pekingese falsetto to St. Bernard bass thunder. An open stretch of shaded sward—backed by a stable that looked more like a dissolute cathedral—had been given over to ten double rows of “benches,” for the anchorage of the Show's three hundred exhibits. Above the central show ring a banner was strung between two treetops. It bore a blazing red cross at either end. In its center was the legend:

The Wall Street Farmer, as I have hinted, was a man of much taste—of a sort.

Lad had enjoyed the ten-mile spin through the cool morning air, in the tonneau of The Place's only car—albeit the course of baths and combings of the past week had long since made him morbidly aware that a detested dog show was somewhere at hand. Now, even before the car entered the fearsome feudal gateway of Glure Towers, the collie's ears and nose told him the hour of ordeal was at hand.

His zest in the ride vanished. He looked reproachfully at the Mistress and tried to bury his head under her circling arm. Lad loathed dog shows; as does every dog of high-strung nerves and higher intelligence. The Mistress, after one experience, had refrained from breaking his heart by taking him to those horrors known as “two-or-more-day shows.” But, as she herself took such childish delight in the local one-day contests, she had schooled herself to believe Lad must enjoy them, too.

Lad, as a matter of fact, preferred these milder ordeals, merely as a man might prefer one day of jail or toothache to two or more days of the same misery. But—even as he knew many lesser things—he knew the adored Mistress and Master reveled in such atrocities as dog shows; and that he, for some reason, was part of his two gods' pleasure in them. Therefore, he made the best of the nuisance. Which led his owners to a certainty that he had grown to like it.

Parking the car, the Mistress and Master led the unhappy dog to the clerk's desk, received his number tag and card, and were shown where to bench him. They made Lad as nearly comfortable as possible, on a straw-littered raised stall, between a supercilious Merle and a fluffily disconsolate sable-and-white six-month puppy that howled ceaselessly in an agony of fright.

The Master paused for a moment in his quest of water for Lad, and stared open-mouthed at the Merle.

“Good Lord!” he mumbled, touching the Mistress' arm and pointing to the gray dog. “That's the most magnificent collie I ever set eyes on. It's farewell to poor old Laddie's hopes, if he is in any of the same classes with that marvel. Say good-by, right now, to your hopes of the Gold Cup; and to ‘Winners' in the regular collie division.”