Lad: A Dog (20 page)

“I won't say good-by to it,” refused the Mistress. “I won't do anything of the sort. Lad's every bit as beautiful as that dog. Every single bit.”

“But not from the show judge's view,” said the Master. “This Merle's a gem. Where in blazes did he drop from, I wonder? These ‘no-point' out-of-town Specialty Shows don't attract the stars of the Kennel Club circuits. Yet, this is as perfect a dog as ever Grey Mist was. It's a pleasure to see such an animal. Or,” he corrected himself, “it would be, if he wasn't pitted against dear old Lad. I'd rather be kicked than take Lad to a show to be beaten. Not for my sake or even for yours. But for his. Lad will be sure to know. He knows everything. Laddie, old friend, I'm sorry. Dead
sorry.”

He stooped down and patted Lad's satin head. Both Master and Mistress had always carried their fondness for Lad to an extent that perhaps was absurd. Certainly absurd to the man or woman who has never owned such a superdog as Lad. As not one man or woman in a thousand has.

Together, the Mistress and the Master made their way along the collie section, trying to be interested in the line of barking or yelling entries.

“Twenty-one collies in all,” summed up the Master, as they reached the end. “Some quality dogs among them, too. But not one of the lot, except the Merle, that I'd be afraid to have Lad judged against. The Merle's our Waterloo. Lad is due for his first defeat. Well, it'll be a fair one. That's one comfort.”

“It doesn't comfort
me,
in the very least,” returned the Mistress, adding:

“Look! There is the trophy table. Let's go over. Perhaps the Gold Cup is there. If it isn't too precious to leave out in the open.”

The Gold Cup was there. It was plainly—or, rather, flamingly—visible. Indeed, it smote the eye from afar. It made the surrounding array of pretty silver cups and engraved medals look tawdrily insignificant. Its presence had, already, drawn a goodly number of admirers—folk at whom the guardian village constable, behind the table, stared with sour distrust.

The Gold Cup was a huge bowl of unchased metal, its softly glowing surface marred only by the script words:

There could be no shadow of doubt as to the genuineness of the claim that the trophy was of eighteen-karat gold. Its value spoke for itself. The vessel was like a half melon in contour and was supported by four severely plain claws. Its rim flared outward in a wide curve.

“It's—it's all the world like an inverted derby hat!” exclaimed the Mistress, after one long dumb look at it. “And it's every bit as big as a derby hat. Did you ever see anything so ugly—and so Croesusful? Why, it must have cost—it must have cost—”

“Just sixteen hundred dollars, Ma'am,” supplemented the constable, beginning to take pride in his office of guardian to such a treasure. “Sixteen hundred dollars, flat. I heard Mr. Glure sayin' so myself. Don't go handlin' it, please.”

“Handling it?” repeated the Mistress. “I'd as soon think of handling the National Debt!”

The Superintendent of the Show strolled up and greeted the Mistress and the Master. The latter scarce heard the neighborly greeting. He was scowling at the precious trophy as at a personal foe.

“I see you've entered Lad for the Gold Cup,” said the Superintendent. “Sixteen collies, in all, are entered for it. The conditions for the Gold Cup contest weren't printed till too late to mail them. So I'm handing out the slips this morning. Mr. Glure took charge of their printing. They didn't get here from the job shop till half an hour ago. And I don't mind telling you they're causing a lot of kicks. Here's one of the copies. Look it over, and see what Lad's up against.”

“Who's the Hon. Hugh Lester Maury, of New York?” suddenly demanded the Master, rousing himself from his glum inspection of the Cup. “I mean the man who donated that—that Gold Hat?”

“Gold Hat!” echoed the Superintendent, with a chuckle of joy. “Gold Hat! Now you say so, I can't make it look like anything else. A derby, upside down, with four—”

“Who's Maury?” insisted the Master.

“He's the original Man of Mystery,” returned the Superintendent, dropping his voice to exclude the constable. “I wanted to get in touch with him about the delayed set of conditions. I looked him up. That is, I tried to. He is advertised in the premium list, as a New Yorker. You'll remember that, but his name isn't in the New York City Directory or in the New York City telephone book or in the suburban telephone book. He can afford to give a sixteen-hundred-dollar cup for charity, but it seems he isn't important enough to get his name in any directory. Funny, isn't it? I asked Glure about him. That's all the good it did me.”

“You don't mean—?” began the Mistress, excitedly. “I don't mean anything,” the Superintendent hurried to forestall her. “I'm paid to take charge of this Show. It's no affair of mine if—”

“If Mr. Glure chooses to invent Hugh Lester Maury and make him give a Gold Hat for a collie prize?” suggested the Mistress. “But—”

“I didn't say so,” denied the Superintendent. “And it's none of my business, anyhow. Here's—”

“But why should Mr. Glure do such a thing?” asked the Mistress, in wonder. “I never heard of his shrinking coyly behind another name when he wanted to spend money. I don't understand why he—”

“Here is the conditions list for the Maury Specialty Cup,” interposed the Superintendent with extreme irrelevance, as he handed her a pink slip of paper. “Glance over it.”

The Mistress took the slip and read aloud for the benefit of the Master who was still glowering at the Gold Hat:

“That single clause has barred out eleven of the sixteen entrants,” commented the Superintendent. “You see, most of the dogs at these local shows are pets, and hardly any of them have been to Madison Square Garden or to any of the other A.K.C. shows. The few that have been to them seldom got a Blue.”

“Lad did!” exclaimed the Mistress joyfully. “He took two Blues at the Garden last year; and then, you remember, it was so horrible for him there we broke the rules and brought him home without waiting for—”

“I know,” said the Superintendent, “but read the rest.”

“
‘Second,'”
read the Mistress.
“ ‘Each contestant must have a certified five-generation pedigree, containing the names of at least ten champions.'
Lad had twelve in his pedigree,” she added, “and it's certified.”

“Two more entrants were killed out by that clause,” remarked the Superintendent, “leaving only three out of the original sixteen. Now go ahead with the clause that puts poor old Lad and one other out of the running. I'm sorry.”

“
‘Third,'
” the Mistress read, her brows crinkling and her voice trailing as she proceeded. “
‘Each contestant must go successfully through. the preliminary maneuvers prescribed by the Kirkaldie Association, Inc., of Great Britain, for its Working Sheep-dog Trials.'—
But,” she protested, “Lad isn't a ‘working' sheep dog! Why, this is some kind of a joke! I never heard of such a thing-even in a Specialty Show.”

“No,” agreed the Superintendent, “nor anybody else. Naturally, Lad isn't a ‘working' sheep dog. There probably haven't been three ‘working' sheep dogs born within a hundred miles of here, and it's a mighty safe bet that no ‘working' sheep dog has ever taken a ‘Blue' at an A.K.C. Show. A ‘working' dog is almost never a show dog. I know of only one either here or in England; and he's a freak—a miracle. So much so, that he's famous all over the dog world.”

“Do you mean Champion Lochinvar III?” asked the Mistress. “The dog the Duke of Hereford used to own?”

“That's the dog. The only-”

“We read about him in the
Collie Folio,”
said the Mistress. “His picture was there, too. He was sent to Scotland when he was a puppy, the
Folio
said, and trained to herd sheep before ever he was shown. His owner was trying to induce other collie fanciers to make their dogs useful and not just Show exhibits. Lochinvar is an international champion, too, isn't he?”

The Superintendent nodded.

“If the Duke of Hereford lived in New Jersey,” pursued the Mistress, trying to talk down her keen chagrin over Lad's mishap, “Lochinvar might have a chance to win a nice Gold Hat.”

“He has,” replied the Superintendent. “He has every chance, and the only chance.”

“
Who
has?” queried the puzzled Mistress.

“Champion Lochinvar III,” was the answer. “Glure bought him by cable. Paid $7,000 for him. That eclipses Untermeyer's record price of $6,500 for old Squire of Tytton. The dog arrived last week. He's here. A big Blue Merle. You ought to look him over. He's a wonder. He—”

“Oh!”
exploded the Mistress. “You can't mean it. You
can't!
Why, it's the most—the most hideously unsportsmanlike thing I ever heard of in my life! Do you mean to tell me Mr. Glure put up this sixteen-hundred-dollar cup and then sent for the only dog that could fulfill the Trophy's conditions? It's unbelievable!”

“It's Glure,” tersely replied the Superintendent. “Which perhaps comes to the same thing.”

“Yes!” spoke up the Master harshly, entering the talk for the first time, and tearing his disgusted attention from the Gold Hat. “Yes, it's Glure, and it's unbelievable! And it's worse than either of those, if anything can be. Don't you see the full rottenness of it all? Half the world is starving or sick or wounded. The other half is working its fingers off to help the Red Cross make Europe a little less like hell; and, when every cent counts in the work, this—this Wall Street Farmer spends sixteen hundred precious dollars to buy himself a Gold Hat; and he does it under the auspices of the Red Cross, in the holy name of charity. The unsportsmanlikeness of it is nothing to that. It's—it's an Unpardonable Sin, and I don't want to endorse it by staying here. Let's get Lad and go home.”

“I wish to heaven we could!” flamed the Mistress, as angry as he. “I'd do it in a minute if we were able to. I feel we're insulting loyal old Lad by making him a party to it all. But we can't go. Don't you see? Mr. Glure is unsportsmanlike, but that's no reason we should be. You've told me, again and again, that no true sportsman will back out of a contest just because he finds he has no chance of winning it.”

“She's right,” chimed in the Superintendent. “You've entered the dog for the contest, and by all the rules he'll have to stay in it. Lad doesn't know the first thing about ‘working.' Neither does the only other local entrant that the first two rules have left in the competition. And Lochinvar is perfect in every detail of sheep work. Lad and the other can't do anything but swell his victory. It's rank bad luck, but-”

“All right! All right!” growled the Master. “We'll go through with it. Does anyone know the terms of a ‘Kirkaldie Association's Preliminaries,' for ‘Working Sheep Dog Trials?' My own early education was neglected.”

“Glure's education wasn‘t,” said the Superintendent. “He has the full set of rules in his brand new Sportsman Library. That's no doubt where he got the idea. I went to him for them this morning, and he let me copy the laws governing the preliminaries. They're absurdly simple for a ‘working' dog and absurdly impossible for a nonworker. Here, I'll read them over to you.”

He fished out a folded sheet of paper and read aloud a few lines of pencil scribblings:

“Four posts shall be set up, at ninety yards apart, at the corners of a square enclosure. A fifth post shall be set in the center. At this fifth post the owner or handler of the contestant shall stand with his dog. Nor shall such owner or handler move more than three feet from the post until his dog shall have completed the trial.

“Guided only by voice and by signs, the dog shall go alone from the center-post to the post numbered ‘i.' He shall go thence, in the order named, to Posts 2, 3 and 4, without returning to within fifteen feet of the central post until he shall have reached Post 4.

“Speed and form shall count as seventy points in these evolutions. Thirty points shall be added to the score of the dog or dogs which shall make the prescribed tour of the posts directed wholly by signs and without the guidance of voice.”

“There,” finished the Superintendent, “you see it is as simple as a kindergarten game. But a child who had never been taught could not play ‘Puss-in-the-Corner.' I was talking to the English trainer that Glure bought along with the dog. The trainer tells me Lochinvar can go through those maneuvers and a hundred harder ones without a word being spoken. He works entirely by gestures. He watches the trainer's hand. Where the hand points he goes. A snap of the fingers halts him. Then he looks back for the next gesture. The trainer says it's a delight to watch him.”

“The delight is all his,” grumbled the Master. “Poor, poor Lad. He'll get bewildered and unhappy. He'll want to do whatever we tell him to, but he can't understand. It was different the time he rounded up Glure's flock of sheep—when he'd never seen a sheep before. That was ancestral instinct. A throwback. But ancestral instinct won't teach him to go to Post I and 2 and 3 and 4. He—”

“Hello, people!” boomed a jarringly cordial voice. “Welcome to the Towers!”