Lad: A Dog (25 page)

A bull plunging at a nearby object shuts both eyes. A cow does not. Which may—or may not—explain the Spanish theory that bullfights are safer than cow-nghts. To this eye-closing trait many a hard-pressed matador has owed his life.

Tenebris, both eyes screwed shut, hurled his 2,000-pound bulk at the prostrate groom. Head down, nose in, short horns on a level with the earth and barely clearing it, he made his rush.

But at the very first step he became aware that something was amiss with his pleasantly anticipated charge. It did not follow specifications or precedent.

All because a heavy something had flung its weight against the side of his lowered head, and a new and unbearable pain was torturing his blood-filled nostrils.

Tenebris swerved. He veered to one side, throwing up his head to clear it of this unseen torment.

As a result, the half-lifted horns grazed the fallen man. The pointed hoofs missed him altogether. At the same moment the weight was gone from against the bull's head, and the throbbing stab from his nostrils.

Pausing uncertainly, Tenebris opened his eyes and glared about him. A yard or two away a shaggy dog was rising from the tumble caused by the jerky uptossing of the bull's head.

Now, were this a fiction yarn, it would be interesting to devise reasons why Lad should have flown to the rescue of a human whom he loathed, and arrayed himself against a fellow beast toward which he felt no hatred at all.

To dogs all men are gods. And perhaps Lad felt the urge of saving even a detested god from the onslaught of a beast. Or perhaps not. One can go only by the facts. And the facts were that the collie had checked himself in the reluctant journey toward the Mistress and had gone to his foe's defense.

With a flash of speed astonishing in so large and sedate a dog, he had flown at the bull in time—in the barest time—to grip the torn nostrils and turn the whirlwind charge.

And now Tenebris shifted his baleful glare from the advancing dog to the howling man. The dog could wait. The bull's immediate pleasure and purpose were to kill the man.

He lowered his head again. But before he could launch his enormous bulk into full motion—before he could shut his eyes—the dog was between him and his quarry.

In one spring Lad was at the bull's nose. And again his white eyeteeth slashed the ragged nostrils. Tenebris halted his own incipient rush and strove to pin the collie to the ground. It would have been as easy to pin a whizzing hornet.

Tenebris thrust at the clinging dog, once more seeking to smash Lad against the sod with his battering-ram forehead and his short horns. But Lad was not there. Instead, he was to the left, his body clean out of danger, his teeth in the bull's left ear.

A lunge of the tortured head sent Lad rolling over and over. But by the time he stopped rolling he was on his feet again. Not only on his feet, but back to the assault. Back, before his unwieldy foe could gauge the distance for another rush at the man. And a keen nip in the bleeding nostrils balked still one more charge.

The bull, snorting with rage, suddenly changed his plan of campaign. Apparently his first ideas had been wrong. It was the man who could wait, and the dog that must be gotten out of the way.

Tenebris wheeled and made an express-train rush at Lad. The collie turned and fled. He did not flee with tail down, as befits a beaten dog. Brush waving aloft, he gamboled along at top speed, just a stride or two ahead of the pursuing bull. He even looked back encouragingly over his shoulder as he went.

Lad was having a beautiful time. Seldom had he been so riotously happy. All the pent-up mischief in his soul was having a glorious airing.

The bull's blind charge was short, as a bull's charge always is. When Tenebris opened his eyes he saw the dog, not ten feet in front of him, scampering for dear life toward the river. And again Tenebris charged.

Three such charges, one after another, brought pursuer and pursued to within a hundred feet of the water.

Tenebris was not used to running. He was getting winded. He came to a wavering standstill, snorting loudly and pawing up great lumps of sod.

But he had not stood thus longer than a second before Lad was at him. Burnished shaggy coat abristle, tail delightedly wagging, the dog bounded forward. He set up an ear-splitting fanfare of barking.

Round and round the bull he whirled, never letting up on that deafening volley of barks; nipping now at ears, now at nose, now at heels; dodging in and out under the giant's clumsy body; easily avoiding the bewildering awkward kicks and lunges of his enemy. Then, forefeet crouching and muzzle close to the ground, like a playful puppy, he waved his plumed tail violently and, in a new succession of barks, wooed his adversary to the attack.

It was a pretty sight. And it set Tenebris into active motion at once.

The bull doubtless thought he himself was doing the driving, by means of his panting rushes, and by his lurches to one side or another to keep away from the dog's sharp bites. But he was not. It was Lad who chose the direction in which they went. And he chose it deliberately.

Presently the two were but fifteen feet away from the river, at a point where the bank shelved, clifflike, for two or three yards, down to a wide pool.

Feinting for the nose, Lad induced Tenebris to lower his head. Then he sprang lightly over the threatening horns, and landed, ascramble, with all four feet, on the bull's broad shoulders.

Scurrying along the heaving back, the dog nipped Tenebris on the hip, and dropped to earth again.

The insult, the fresh pain, the astonishment combined to make Tenebris forget his weariness. Beside himself with maniac wrath, he shut both eyes and launched himself forward. Lad slipped, eel-like, to one side. Carried by his own blind momentum, Tenebris shot over the bank edge.

Too late the bull looked. Half-sliding, half-scrambling, he crashed down the steep sides of the bank and into the river.

Lad, tongue out, jogged over to the top of the bank, where, with head to one side and ears cocked, he gazed interestedly down into the wildly churned pool.

Tenebris had gotten to his feet after the ducking; and he was floundering pastern-deep in stickily soft mud. So tightly bogged down that it later took the efforts of six farm hands to extricate him, the bull continued to flounder and to bellow.

A stream of people were running down the meadow toward the river. Lad hated crowds. He made a loping detour of the nearest runners and sought to regain the spot where last he had seen the Mistress and Master. Also, if his luck held good, he might have still another bout with the man he had once treed. Which would be an ideal climax to a perfect day.

He found all the objects of his quest together. The groom, hysterical, was swaying on his feet, supported by Glure.

At sight of the advancing collie the bitten man cried aloud in fear and clutched his employer for protection.

“Take him away, sir!” he babbled in mortal terror. “He'll kill me! He hates me, the ugly hairy devil! He hates me. He tried to kill me once before! He—”

“H'm!” mused the Master. “So he tried to kill you once before, eh? Aren't you mistaken?”

“No, I ain't!” wept the man. “I'd know him in a million! That's why he went for me again today. He remembered me. I seen he did. That's no dog. It's a
devil!”

“Mr. Glure,” asked the Master, a light dawning, “when this chap applied to you for work, did he wear grayish tweed trousers? And were they in bad shape?”

“His trousers were in rags,” said Glure. “I remember that. He said a savage dog had jumped into the road from a farmhouse somewhere and gone for him. Why?”

“Those trousers,” answered the Master, “weren't entire strangers to you. You'd seen the missing parts of them—on a tree and on the ground near it, at The Place. Your ‘treasure' is the harness thief Lad treed the day you came to see me. So-”

“Nonsense!” fumed Glure. Why, how absurd! He—”

“I hadn't stolen nothing! ” blubbered the man. “I was coming cross-lots to a stable to ask for work. And the brute went for me. I had to run up a tree and—”

“And it didn't occur to you to shout for help?” sweetly urged the Master. “I was within call. So was Mr. Glure. So was at least one of my men. An honest seeker for work needn't have been afraid to halloo. A thief would have been afraid to. In fact, a thief was!”

“Get out of here, you!” roared Glure, convinced at last. “You measly sneak thief! Get out or I'll have you jailed! You're an impostor! A panhandler! A—”

The thief waited to hear no more. With an apprehensive glance to see that Lad was firmly held, he bolted for the road.

“Thanks for telling me,” said Glure. “He might have stolen everything at Glure Towers if I hadn't found out. He-”

“Yes. He might even have stolen more than the cost of our nonutilitarian Lad's keep,” unkindly suggested the Master. “For that matter, if it hadn't been for a nonutilitarian dog, that mad bull's horns, instead of his nostrils, would be red by this time. At least one man would have been killed. Perhaps more. So, after all—”

He stopped. The Mistress was tugging surreptitiously at his sleeve. The Master, in obedience to his wife's signal, stepped aside, to light a cigar.

“I wouldn't say any more, dear, if I were you,” the Mistress was whispering. “You see, if it hadn't been for Lad, the bull would never have broken loose in the first place. By another half hour that fact may dawn on Mr. Glure, if you keep rubbing it in. Let's go over to the grandstand. Come, Lad!”

ONE OF THE JOLLIEST MINUTES IN LAD'S DAILY CROSS-COUNTRY tramp with the Mistress and the Master was his dash up Mount Pisgah. This “mount” was little more than a foothill. It was treeless, and covered with short grass and mullein; a slope where no crop but buckwheat could be expected to thrive. It rose out of the adjoining mountain forests in a long and sweeping ascent.

Here, with no trees or undergrowth to impede him, Lad, from puppyhood, had ordained a racecourse of his own. As he neared the hill he would always dash forward at top speed; flying up the rise like a tawny whirlwind, at unabated pace, until he stopped, panting and gloriously excited, on the summit, to await his slower-moving human escorts.

One morning in early summer, Lad, as usual, bounded ahead of the Mistress and the Master, as they drew near to the treeless “mount.” And, as ever, he rushed gleefully forward for his daily breather, up the long slope. But, before he had gone fifty yards, he came to a scurrying halt, and stood at gaze. His back was bristling and his lips curled back from his white teeth in sudden annoyance.

His keen nostrils, even before his eyes, told him something was amiss with his cherished race track. The eddying shift of the breeze, from west to north, had brought to his nose the odor which had checked his onrush; an odor that wakened all sorts of vaguely formless memories far back in Lad's brain; and which he did not at all care for.

Scent is ten times stronger, to a dog, than is sight. The best dog is nearsighted. And the worst dog has a magic sense of smell. Wherefore, a dog almost always uses his nose first and his eyes last. Which Lad now proceeded to do.

Above him was the pale green hillside, up which he loved to gallop. But its surface was no longer smoothly unencumbered. Instead, it was dotted and starred—singly or in groups —with fluffy grayish- white creatures.

Lad was almost abreast of the lowest group of sheep when he paused. Several of the feeding animals lifted their heads, snortingly, from the short herbage, at sight of him, and fled up the hill. The rest of the flock joined them in the silly stampede.

The dog made no move to follow. Instead, his forehead creased and his eyes troubled, he stared after the gray-white surge that swept upward toward the summit of his favored coursing ground. The Mistress and the Master, too, at sight of the woolly avalanche, stopped and stared.

From over the brow of Mount Pisgah appeared the non-picturesque figure of a man in blue denim overalls—one Titus Romaine, owner of the sparse-grassed hill. Drawn by the noisy multiple patter of his flock's hoofs, he emerged from under a hilltop boulder's shade to learn the cause of their flight.

Now, in all his life, Lad had seen sheep just once before. That one exception had been when Hamilcar Q. Glure, “the Wall Street Farmer,” had corralled a little herd of his prize merinos, overnight, at The Place, on the way to the Paterson Livestock Show. On that occasion, the sheep had broken from the corral, and Lad, acting on ancestral instinct, had rounded them up, without injuring or scaring one of them.

The memory was not pleasing to Lad, and he wanted nothing more to do with such stupid creatures. Indeed, as he looked now upon the sheep that were obstructing his run, he felt a distinct aversion to them. Whining a little, he, trotted back to where stood the Mistress and the Master. And, as they waited, Titus Romaine bore wrathfully down upon them.