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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Bruce, by Albert Payson Terhune
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Bruce
+
+Author: Albert Payson Terhune
+
+Posting Date: March 27, 2009 [EBook #2391]
+Release Date: November, 2000
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BRUCE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dianne Bean.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Bruce
+
+
+by
+
+Albert Payson Terhune
+
+
+
+
+TO MY TEN BEST FRIENDS:
+
+Who are far wiser in their way and far better in every way, than I; and
+yet who have not the wisdom to know it
+
+Who do not merely think I am perfect, but who are calmly and
+permanently convinced of my perfection;--and this in spite of fifty
+disillusions a day
+
+Who are frantically happy at my coming and bitterly woebegone in my
+absence
+
+Who never bore me and never are bored by me
+
+Who never talk about themselves and who always listen with rapturous
+interest to anything I may say
+
+Who, having no conventional standards, have no respectability; and who,
+having no conventional consciences, have no sins
+
+Who teach me finer lessons in loyalty, in patience, in true courtesy,
+in unselfishness, in divine forgiveness, in pluck and in abiding good
+spirits than do all the books I have ever read and all the other models
+I have studied
+
+Who have not deigned to waste time and eyesight in reading a word of
+mine and who will not bother to read this verbose tribute to themselves
+
+In short, to the most gloriously satisfactory chums who ever appealed
+to human vanity and to human desire for companionship
+
+TO OUR TEN SUNNYBANK COLLIES MY STORY IS GRATEFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY
+DEDICATED
+
+
+
+BRUCE
+
+by
+
+Albert Payson Terhune
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+   I.  The Coming Of Bruce
+  II.  The Pest
+ III.  The War Dog
+  IV.  When Eyes Were No Use
+   V.  The Double Cross
+  VI.  The Werewolf
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. The Coming Of Bruce
+
+She was beautiful. And she had a heart and a soul--which were a curse.
+For without such a heart and soul, she might have found the tough
+life-battle less bitterly hard to fight.
+
+But the world does queer things--damnable things--to hearts that are so
+tenderly all-loving and to souls that are so trustfully and forgivingly
+friendly as hers.
+
+Her "pedigree name" was Rothsay Lass. She was a collie--daintily
+fragile of build, sensitive of nostril, furrily tawny of coat. Her
+ancestry was as flawless as any in Burke's Peerage.
+
+If God had sent her into the world with a pair of tulip ears and with a
+shade less width of brain-space she might have been cherished and
+coddled as a potential bench-show winner, and in time might even have
+won immortality by the title of "CHAMPION Rothsay Lass."
+
+But her ears pricked rebelliously upward, like those of her earliest
+ancestors, the wolves. Nor could manipulation lure their stiff
+cartilages into drooping as bench-show fashion demands. The average
+show-collie's ears have a tendency to prick. By weights and plasters,
+and often by torture, this tendency is overcome. But never when the
+cartilage is as unyielding as was Lass's.
+
+Her graceful head harked back in shape to the days when collies had to
+do much independent thinking, as sheep-guards, and when they needed
+more brainroom than is afforded by the borzoi skull sought after by
+modern bench-show experts.
+
+Wherefore, Lass had no hope whatever of winning laurels in the
+show-ring or of attracting a high price from some rich fancier. She was
+tabulated, from babyhood, as a "second"--in other words, as a faulty
+specimen in a litter that should have been faultless.
+
+These "seconds" are as good to look at, from a layman's view, as is any
+international champion. And their offspring are sometimes as perfect as
+are those of the finest specimens. But, lacking the arbitrary "points"
+demanded by show-judges, the "seconds" are condemned to obscurity, and
+to sell as pets.
+
+If Lass had been a male dog, her beauty and sense and lovableness would
+have found a ready purchaser for her. For nine pet collies out of ten
+are "seconds"; and splendid pets they make for the most part.
+
+But Lass, at the very start, had committed the unforgivable sin of
+being born a female. Therefore, no pet-seeker wanted to buy her. Even
+when she was offered for sale at half the sum asked for her less
+handsome brothers, no one wanted her.
+
+A mare--or the female of nearly any species except the canine--brings
+as high and as ready a price as does the male. But never the female
+dog. Except for breeding, she is not wanted.
+
+This prejudice had its start in Crusader days, some thousand years ago.
+Up to that time, all through the civilized world, a female dog had been
+more popular as a pet than a male. The Mohammedans (to whom, by creed,
+all dogs are unclean) gave their European foes the first hint that a
+female dog was the lowest thing on earth.
+
+The Saracens despised her, as the potential mother of future dogs. And
+they loathed her accordingly. Back to Europe came the Crusaders,
+bearing only three lasting memorials of their contact with the Moslems.
+One of the three was a sneering contempt for all female dogs.
+
+There is no other pet as loving, as quick of wit, as loyal, as
+staunchly brave and as companionable as the female collie. She has all
+the male's best traits and none of his worst. She has more in common,
+too, with the highest type of woman than has any other animal alive.
+(This, with all due respect to womanhood.)
+
+Prejudice has robbed countless dog-lovers of the joy of owning such a
+pal. In England the female pet dog has at last begun to come into her
+own. Here she has not. The loss is ours.
+
+And so back to Lass.
+
+When would-be purchasers were conducted to the puppy-run at the Rothsay
+kennels, Lass and her six brethren and sisters were wont to come
+galloping to the gate to welcome the strangers. For the pups were only
+three months old--an age when every event is thrillingly interesting,
+and everybody is a friend. Three times out of five, the buyer's eye
+would single Lass from the rollicking and fluffy mass of puppyhood.
+
+She was so pretty, so wistfully appealing, so free from fear (and from
+bumptiousness as well) and carried herself so daintily, that one's
+heart warmed to her. The visitor would point her out. The kennel-man
+would reply, flatteringly--
+
+"Yes, she sure is one fine pup!"
+
+The purchaser never waited to hear the end of the sentence, before
+turning to some other puppy. The pronoun, "she," had killed forever his
+dawning fancy for the little beauty.
+
+The four males of the litter were soon sold; for there is a brisk and a
+steady market for good collie pups. One of the two other females died.
+Lass's remaining sister began to "shape up" with show-possibilities,
+and was bought by the owner of another kennel. Thus, by the time she
+was five months old, Lass was left alone in the puppy-run.
+
+She mourned her playmates. It was cold, at night, with no other cuddly
+little fur-ball to snuggle down to. It was stupid, with no one to help
+her work off her five-months spirits in a romp. And Lass missed the
+dozens of visitors that of old had come to the run.
+
+The kennel-men felt not the slightest interest in her. Lass meant
+nothing to them, except the work of feeding her and of keeping an extra
+run in order. She was a liability, a nuisance.
+
+Lass used to watch with pitiful eagerness for the attendants'
+duty-visits to the run. She would gallop joyously up to them, begging
+for a word or a caress, trying to tempt them into a romp, bringing them
+peaceofferings in the shape of treasured bones she had buried for her
+own future use. But all this gained her nothing.
+
+A careless word at best--a grunt or a shove at worst were her only
+rewards. For the most part, the men with the feed-trough or the
+water-pail ignored her bounding and wrigglingly eager welcome as
+completely as though she were a part of the kennel furnishings. Her
+short daily "exercise scamper" in the open was her nearest approach to
+a good time.
+
+Then came a day when again a visitor stopped in front of Lass's run. He
+was not much of a visitor, being a pallid and rather shabbily dressed
+lad of twelve, with a brand-new chain and collar in his hand.
+
+"You see," he was confiding to the bored kennel-man who had been
+detailed by the foreman to take him around the kennels, "when I got the
+check from Uncle Dick this morning, I made up my mind, first thing, to
+buy a dog with it, even if it took every cent. But then I got to
+thinking I'd need something to fasten him with, so he wouldn't run away
+before he learned to like me and want to stay with me. So when I got
+the check cashed at the store, I got this collar and chain."
+
+"Are you a friend of the boss?" asked the kennel-man.
+
+"The boss?" echoed the boy. "You mean the man who owns this place? No,
+sir. But when I've walked past, on the road, I've seen his 'Collies for
+Sale' sign, lots of times. Once I saw some of them being exercised.
+They were the wonderfulest dogs I ever saw. So the minute I got the
+money for the check, I came here. I told the man in the front yard I
+wanted to buy a dog. He's the one who turned me over to you. I
+wish--OH!" he broke off in rapture, coming to a halt in front of Lass's
+run. "Look! Isn't he a dandy?"
+
+Lass had trotted hospitably forward to greet the guest. Now she was
+standing on her hind legs, her front paws alternately supporting her
+fragile weight on the wire of the fence and waving welcomingly toward
+the boy. Unknowingly, she was bidding for a master. And her wistful
+friendliness struck a note of response in the little fellow's heart.
+For he, too, was lonesome, much of the time, as is the fate of a sickly
+only child in an overbusy home. And he had the true craving of the
+lonely for dog comradeship.
+
+He thrust his none-too-clean hand through the wire mesh and patted the
+puppy's silky head. Lass wiggled ecstatically under the unfamiliar
+caress. All at once, in the boy's eyes, she became quite the most
+wonderful animal and the very most desirable pet on earth.
+
+"He's great!" sighed the youngster in admiration; adding naively: "Is
+he Champion Rothsay Chief--the one whose picture was in The Bulletin
+last Sunday?"
+
+The kennel-man laughed noisily. Then he checked his mirth, for
+professional reasons, as he remembered the nature of the boy's quest
+and foresaw a bare possibility of getting rid of the unwelcome Lass.
+
+"Nope," he said. "This isn't Chief. If it was, I guess your Uncle
+Dick's check would have to have four figures in it before you could
+make a deal. But this is one of Chief's daughters. This is Rothsay
+Lass. A grand little girl, ain't she? Say,"--in a confidential
+whisper,--"since you've took a fancy for her, maybe I could coax the
+old man into lettin' you have her at an easy price. He was plannin' to
+sell her for a hundred or so. But he goes pretty much by what I say. He
+might let her go for--How much of a check did you say your uncle sent
+you?"
+
+"Twelve dollars," answered the boy,--"one for each year. Because I'm
+named for him. It's my birthday, you know. But--but a dollar of it went
+for the chain and the collar. How much do you suppose the gentleman
+would want for Rothsay Lass?"
+
+The kennel-man considered for a moment. Then he went back to the house,
+leaving the lad alone at the gate of the run. Eleven dollars, for a
+high-pedigreed collie pup, was a joke price. But no one else wanted
+Lass, and her feed was costing more every day. According to Rothsay
+standards, the list of brood-females was already complete. Even as a
+gift, the kennels would be making money by getting rid of the
+prick-eared "second." Wherefore he went to consult with the foreman.
+
+Left alone with Lass, the boy opened the gate and went into the run. A
+little to his surprise Lass neither shrank from him nor attacked him.
+She danced about his legs in delight, varying this by jumping up and
+trying to lick his excited face. Then she thrust her cold nose into the
+cup of his hand as a plea to be petted.
+
+When the kennel-man came back, the boy was sitting on the dusty ground
+of the run, and Lass was curled up rapturously in his lap, learning how
+to shake hands at his order.
+
+"You can have her, the boss says," vouchsafed the kennel-man. "Where's
+the eleven dollars?"
+
+By this graceless speech Dick Hazen received the key to the Seventh
+Paradise, and a life-membership in the world-wide Order of Dog-Lovers.
+
+The homeward walk, for Lass and her new master, was no walk at all, but
+a form of spiritual levitation. The half-mile pilgrimage consumed a
+full hour of time. Not that Lass hung back or rebelled at her first
+taste of collar and chain! These petty annoyances went unfelt in the
+wild joy of a real walk, and in the infinitely deeper happiness of
+knowing her friendship-famine was appeased at last.
+
+The walk was long for various reasons--partly because, in her frisking
+gyrations, Lass was forever tangling the new chain around Dick's thin
+ankles; partly because he stopped, every block or so, to pat her or to
+give her further lessons in the art of shaking hands. Also there were
+admiring boy-acquaintances along the way, to whom the wonderful pet
+must be exhibited.
+
+At last Dick turned in at the gate of a cheap bungalow on a cheap
+street--a bungalow with a discouraged geranium plot in its
+pocket-handkerchief front yard, and with a double line of drying
+clothes in the no larger space behind the house.
+
+As Dick and his chum rounded the house, a woman emerged from between
+the two lines of flapping sheets, whose hanging she had been
+superintending. She stopped at sight of her son and the dog.
+
+"Oh!" she commented with no enthusiasm at all. "Well, you did it, hey?
+I was hoping you'd have better sense, and spend your check on a nice
+new suit or something. He's kind of pretty, though," she went on, the
+puppy's friendliness and beauty wringing the word of grudging praise
+from her. "What kind of a dog is he? And you're sure he isn't savage,
+aren't you?"
+
+"Collie," answered Dick proudly. "Pedigreed collie! You bet she isn't
+savage, either. Why, she's an angel. She minds me already. See--shake
+hands, Lass!" "Lass!" ejaculated Mrs. Hazen. "'SHE!' Dick, you don't
+mean to tell me you've gone and bought yourself a--a FEMALE dog?"
+
+The woman spoke in the tone of horrified contempt that might well have
+been hers had she found a rattlesnake and a brace of toads in her son's
+pocket. And she lowered her voice, as is the manner of her kind when
+forced to speak of the unspeakable. She moved back from the puppy's
+politely out-thrust forepaw as from the passing of a garbage cart.
+
+"A female dog!" she reiterated. "Well, of all the chuckle-heads! A
+nasty FEMALE dog, with your birthday money!"
+
+"She's not one bit nasty!" flamed Dick, burying the grubby fingers of
+his right hand protectively in the fluffy mass of the puppy's
+half-grown ruff. "She's the dandiest dog ever! She--"
+
+"Don't talk back to me!" snapped Mrs. Hazen. "Here! Turn right around
+and take her to the cheats who sold her to you. Tell them to keep her
+and give you the good money you paid for her. Take her out of my yard
+this minute! Quick!"
+
+A hot mist of tears sprang into the boy's eyes. Lass, with the queer
+intuition that tells a female collie when her master is unhappy, whined
+softly and licked his clenched hand.
+
+"I--aw, PLEASE, Ma!" he begged chokingly. "PLEASE! It's--it's my
+birthday, and everything. Please let me keep her. I--I love her better
+than 'most anything there is. Can't I please keep her? Please!"
+
+"You heard what I said," returned his mother curtly.
+
+The washerwoman, who one day a week lightened Mrs. Hazen's household
+labors, waddled into view from behind the billows of wind-swirled
+clothes. She was an excellent person, and was built for endurance
+rather than for speed. At sight of Lass she paused in real interest.
+
+"My!" she exclaimed with flattering approval. "So you got your dog, did
+you? You didn't waste no time. And he's sure a handsome little critter.
+Whatcher goin' to call him?"
+
+"It's not a him, Irene," contradicted Mrs. Hazen, with another modest
+lowering of her strong voice. "It's a HER. And I'm sending Dick back
+with her, to where she came from. I've got my opinion of people who
+will take advantage of a child's ignorance, by palming off a horrid
+female dog on him, too. Take her away, Dick. I won't have her here
+another minute. You hear me?"
+
+"Please, Ma!" stammered Dick, battling with his desire to cry. "Aw,
+PLEASE! I--I--"
+
+"Your ma's right, Dick," chimed in the washerwoman, her first
+interested glance at the puppy changing to one of refined and lofty
+scorn. "Take her back. You don't want any female dogs around. No nice
+folks do."
+
+"Why not?" demanded the boy in sudden hopeless anger as he pressed
+lovingly the nose Lass thrust so comfortingly into his hand. "WHY don't
+we want a female dog around? Folks have female cats around them, and
+female women. Why isn't a female dog--"
+
+"That will do, Dick!" broke in his shocked mother. "Take her away."
+
+"I won't," said the boy, speaking very slowly, and with no excitement
+at all.
+
+A slap on the side of his head, from his mother's punitive palm, made
+him stagger a little. Her hand was upraised for a second installment of
+rebellion-quelling--when a slender little body flashed through the air
+and landed heavily against her chest. A set of white puppy-teeth all
+but grazed her wrathful red face.
+
+Lass, who never before had known the impulse to attack, had jumped to
+the rescue of the beaten youngster whom she had adopted as her god. The
+woman screeched in terror. Dick flung an arm about the furry whirlwind
+that was seeking to avenge his punishment, and pulled the dog back to
+his side.
+
+Mrs. Hazen's shriek, and the obbligato accompaniment of the
+washerwoman, made an approaching man quicken his steps as he strolled
+around the side of the house. The newcomer was Dick's father,
+superintendent of the local bottling works. On his way home to lunch,
+he walked in on a scene of hysteria.
+
+"Kill her, sir!" bawled the washerwoman, at sight of him. "Kill her!
+She's a mad dog. She just tried to kill Miz' Hazen!"
+
+"She didn't do anything of the kind!" wailed Dick. "She was pertecting
+me. Ma hit me; and Lass--"
+
+"Ed!" tearily proclaimed Mrs. Hazen, "if you don't send for a policeman
+to shoot that filthy beast, I'll--"
+
+"Hold on!" interrupted the man, at a loss to catch the drift of these
+appeals, by reason of their all being spoken in a succession so rapid
+as to make a single blurred sentence. "Hold on! What's wrong? And where
+did the pup come from? He's a looker, all right a cute little cuss.
+What's the row?"
+
+With the plangently useless iterations of a Greek chorus, the tale was
+flung at him, piecemeal and in chunks, and in a triple key. When
+presently he understood, Hazen looked down for a moment at the
+puppy--which was making sundry advances of a shy but friendly nature
+toward him. Then he looked at the boy, and noted Dick's hero-effort to
+choke back the onrush of babyish sobs. And then, with a roughly
+tolerant gesture, he silenced the two raucous women, who were beginning
+the tale over again for the third time.
+
+"I see," he said. "I see. I see how it is. Needn't din it at me any
+more, folks. And I see Dicky's side of it, too. Yes, and I see the
+pup's side of it. I know a lot about dogs. That pup isn't vicious. She
+knows she belongs to Dick. You lammed into him, and she took up and
+defended him. That's all there is to the 'mad-dog' part of it."
+
+"But Ed--" sputtered his wife.
+
+"Now, you let ME do the talking, Sade!" he insisted, half-grinning, yet
+more than half grimly. "I'm the boss here. If I'm not, then it's safe
+to listen to me till the boss gets here. And we're goin' to do whatever
+I say we are--without any back-talk or sulks, either. It's this way:
+Your brother gave the boy a birthday check. We promised he could spend
+it any way he had a mind to. He said he wanted a dog, didn't he? And I
+said, 'Go to it!' didn't I? Well, he got the dog. Just because it
+happens to be a she, that's no reason why he oughtn't to be allowed to
+keep it. And he can. That goes."
+
+"Oh, Dad!" squealed Dick in grateful heroworship. "You're a brick! I'm
+not ever going to forget this, so long as I live. Say, watch her shake
+hands, Dad! I've taught her, already, to--"
+
+"Ed Hazen!" loudly protested his wife. "Of all the softies! You haven't
+backbone enough for a prune. And if my orders to my own son are going
+to be--"
+
+"That'll be all, Sade!" interposed the man stiffly--adding: "By the
+way, I got a queer piece of news to tell you. Come into the kitchen a
+minute."
+
+Grumbling, rebellious, scowling,--yet unable to resist the lure of a
+"queer piece of news," Mrs. Hazen followed her husband indoors, leaving
+Dick and his pet to gambol deliriously around the clothes-festooned
+yard in celebration of their victory.
+
+"Listen here, old girl!" began Hazen the moment the kitchen door was
+shut behind them. "Use some sense, can't you? I gave you the wink, and
+you wouldn't catch on. So I had to make the grandstand play. I'm no
+more stuck on having a measly she-dog around here than you are. And
+we're not going to have her, either. But--"
+
+"Then why did you say you were going to? Why did you make a fool of me
+before Irene and everything?" she demanded, wrathful yet bewildered.
+
+"It's the boy's birthday, isn't it?" urged Hazen. "And I'd promised
+him, hadn't I? And, last time he had one of those 'turns,' didn't Doc
+Colfax say we mustn't let him fret and worry any more'n we could help?
+Well, if he had to take that dog back to-day, it'd have broke his
+heart. He'd have felt like we were his enemies, and he'd never have
+felt the same to us again. And it might have hurt his health too--the
+shock and all. So--"
+
+"But I tell you," she persisted, "I won't have a dirty little female--"
+
+"We aren't going to," he assured her. "Keep your hair on, till I've
+finished. Tonight, after Dick's asleep, I'm going to get rid of her.
+He'll wake up in the morning and find she's gone; and the door'll be
+open. He'll think she's run away. He'll go looking for her, and he'll
+keep on hoping to find her. So that'll ease the shock, you see, by
+letting him down bit by bit, instead of snatching his pet away from him
+violent-like. And he won't hold it up against US, either, as he would
+the other way. I can offer a reward for her, too."
+
+There was a long and thought-crammed pause. The woman plunged deep into
+the silences as her fat brain wrought over the suggestion. Then--
+
+"Maybe you HAVE got just a few grains of sense, after all, Ed,"
+grudgingly vouchsafed Mrs. Hazen. "It isn't a bad idea. Only he'll
+grieve a lot for her."
+
+"He'll be hoping, though," said her husband. "He'll be hoping all the
+while. That always takes the razor-edge off of grieving. Leave it to
+me."
+
+That was the happiest day Dick Hazen had ever known. And it was the
+first actively happy day in all Lass's five months of life.
+
+Boy and dog spent hours in a ramble through the woods. They began
+Lass's education--which was planned to include more intricate tricks
+than a performing elephant and a troupe of circus dogs could hope to
+learn in a lifetime. They became sworn chums. Dick talked to Lass as if
+she were human. She amazed the enraptured boy by her cleverness and
+spirits. His initiation to the dog-masters' guild was joyous and
+complete.
+
+It was a tired and ravenous pair of friends who scampered home at
+dinner-time that evening. The pallor was gone from Dick's face. His
+cheeks were glowing, and his eyes shone. He ate greedily. His parents
+looked covertly at each other. And the self-complacency lines around
+Hazen's mouth blurred.
+
+Boy and dog went to bed early, being blissfully sleepy and full of
+food--also because another and longer woodland ramble was scheduled for
+the morrow.
+
+Timidly Dick asked leave to have Lass sleep on the foot of his cot-bed.
+After a second telegraphing of glances, his parents consented. Half an
+hour later the playmates were sound asleep, the puppy snuggling deep in
+the hollow of her master's arm, her furry head across his thin chest.
+
+It was in this pose that Hazen found them when, late in the evening, he
+tiptoed into Dick's cubby-hole room. He gazed down at the slumberous
+pair for a space, while he fought and conquered an impulse toward fair
+play. Then he stooped to pick up the dog.
+
+Lass, waking at the slight creak of a floorboard, lifted her head. At
+sight of the figure leaning above her adored master, the lip curled
+back from her white teeth. Far down in her throat a growl was born.
+Then she recognized the intruder as the man who had petted her and fed
+her that evening. The growl died in her throat, giving place to a
+welcoming thump or two of her bushy tail. Dick stirred uneasily.
+
+Patting the puppy lightly on her upraised head, Hazen picked up Lass in
+his arms and tiptoed out of the room with her. Mistaking this move for
+a form of caress, she tried to lick his face. The man winced.
+
+Downstairs and out into the street Hazen bore his trustful little
+burden, halting only to put on his hat, and for a whispered word with
+his wife. For nearly a mile he carried the dog. Lass greatly enjoyed
+the ride. She was pleasantly tired, and it was nice to be carried thus,
+by some one who was so considerate as to save her the bother of walking.
+
+At the edge of the town, Hazen set her on the ground and at once began
+to walk rapidly away in the direction of home. He had gone perhaps
+fifty yards when Lass was gamboling merrily around his feet. A kick
+sent the dismayed and agonized puppy flying through the air like a
+whimpering catapult, and landed her against a bank with every atom of
+breath knocked out of her. Before she had fairly struck ground,--before
+she could look about her,--Hazen had doubled around a corner and had
+vanished.
+
+At a run, he made for home, glad the unpleasant job was over. At the
+door his wife met him.
+
+"Well," she demanded, "did you drown her in the canal, the way you
+said?"
+
+"No," he confessed sheepishly, "I didn't exactly drown her. You see,
+she nestled down into my arms so cozy and trusting-like, that I--well,
+I fixed it so she'll never show up around here again. Trust me to do a
+job thoroughly, if I do it at all. I--"
+
+A dramatic gesture from Mrs. Hazen's stubby forefinger interrupted him.
+He followed the finger's angry point. Close at his side stood Lass,
+wagging her tail and staring expectantly up at him.
+
+With her keen power of scent, it had been no exploit at all to track
+the man over a mile of unfamiliar ground. Already she had forgiven the
+kick or had put it down to accident on his part. And at the end of her
+eager chase, she was eager for a word of greeting.
+
+"I'll be--" gurgled Hazen, blinking stupidly.
+
+"I guess you will be," conceded his wife. "If that's the 'thorough' way
+you do your jobs at the factory--"
+
+"Say," he mumbled in a sort of wondering appeal, "is there any HUMAN
+that would like to trust a feller so much as to risk another
+ribcracking kick, just for the sake of being where he is? I almost
+wish--"
+
+But the wish was unspoken. Hazen was a true American husband. He feared
+his wife more than he loved fairness. And his wife's glare was full
+upon him. With a grunt he picked Lass up by the neck, tucked her under
+his arm and made off through the dark.
+
+He did not take the road toward the canal, however. Instead he made for
+the railroad tracks. He remembered how, as a lad, he had once gotten
+rid of a mangy cat, and he resolved to repeat the exploit. It was far
+more merciful to the puppy--or at least, to Hazen's conscience,--than
+to pitch Lass into the slimy canal with a stone tied to her neck.
+
+A line of freight cars--"empties"--was on a siding, a short distance
+above the station. Hazen walked along the track, trying the door of
+each car he passed. The fourth he came to was unlocked. He slid back
+the newly greased side door, thrust Lass into the chilly and black
+interior and quickly slid shut the door behind her. Then with the silly
+feeling of having committed a crime, he stumbled away through the
+darkness at top speed.
+
+A freight car has a myriad uses, beyond the carrying of legitimate
+freight. From time immemorial, it has been a favorite repository for
+all manner of illicit flotsam and jetsam human or otherwise.
+
+Its popularity with tramps and similar derelicts has long been a theme
+for comic paper and vaudeville jest. Though, heaven knows, the inside
+of a moving box-car has few jocose features, except in the imagination
+of humorous artist or vaudevillian!
+
+But a far more frequent use for such cars has escaped the notice of the
+public at large. As any old railroader can testify, trainhands are
+forever finding in box-cars every genus and species of stray.
+
+These finds range all the way from cats and dogs and discarded white
+rabbits and canaries, to goats. Dozens of babies have been discovered,
+wailing and deserted, in box-car recesses; perhaps a hundred miles from
+the siding where, furtively, the tiny human bundle was thrust inside
+some conveniently unlatched side door.
+
+A freight train offers glittering chances for the disposal of the
+Unwanted. More than once a slain man or woman has been sent along the
+line, in this grisly but effective fashion, far beyond the reach of
+recognition.
+
+Hazen had done nothing original or new in depositing the luckless
+collie pup in one of these wheeled receptacles. He was but following an
+old-established custom, familiar to many in his line of life. There was
+no novelty to it,--except to Lass.
+
+The car was dark and cold and smelly. Lass hated it. She ran to its
+door. Here she found a gleam of hope for escape and for return to the
+home where every one that day had been so kind to her. Hazen had shut
+the door with such vehemence that it had rebounded. The hasp was down,
+and so the catch had not done its duty. The door had slid open a few
+inches from the impetus of Hazen's shove.
+
+It was not wide enough open to let Lass jump out, but it was wide
+enough for her to push her nose through. And by vigorous thrusting,
+with her triangular head as a wedge, she was able to widen the
+aperture, inch by inch. In less than three minutes she had broadened it
+far enough for her to wriggle out of the car and leap to the side of
+the track. There she stood bewildered.
+
+A spring snow was drifting down from the sulky sky. The air was damp
+and penetrating. By reason of the new snow the scent of Hazen's
+departing footsteps was blotted out. Hazen himself was no longer in
+sight. As Lass had made the journey from house to tracks with her head
+tucked confidingly under her kidnaper's arm, she had not noted the
+direction. She was lost.
+
+A little way down the track the station lights were shining with misty
+warmth through the snow. Toward these lights the puppy trotted.
+
+Under the station eaves, and waiting to be taken aboard the almost-due
+eleven-forty express, several crates and parcels were grouped. One
+crate was the scene of much the same sort of escape-drama that Lass had
+just enacted.
+
+The crate was big and comfortable, bedded down with soft sacking and
+with "insets" at either side containing food and water. But commodious
+as was the box, the unwonted confinement did not at all please its
+occupant--a temperamental and highly bred young collie in process of
+shipment from the Rothsay Kennels to a purchaser forty miles up the
+line.
+
+This collie, wearying of the delay and the loneliness and the strange
+quarters, had begun to plunge from one side of the crate to the other
+in an effort to break out. A carelessly nailed slat gave away under the
+impact. The dog scrambled through the gap and proceeded to gallop
+homeward through the snow.
+
+Ten seconds later, Lass, drawn by the lights and by the scent of the
+other dog, came to the crate. She looked in. There, made to order for
+her, was a nice bed. There, too, were food and drink to appease the
+ever-present appetite of a puppy. Lass writhed her way in through the
+gap as easily as the former occupant had crawled out.
+
+After doing due justice to the broken puppy biscuits in the
+inset-trough, she curled herself up for a nap.
+
+The clangor and glare of the oncoming express awakened her. She cowered
+in one corner of the crate. Just then two station-hands began to move
+the express packages out to the edge of the platform. One of them
+noticed the displaced board of the crate. He drove home its loosened
+nails with two sharp taps from a monkey-wrench, glanced inside to make
+certain the dog had not gotten out, and presently hoisted the crate
+aboard the express-car.
+
+Two hours later the crate was unloaded at a waystation. At seven in the
+morning an expressman drove two miles with it to a country-home, a mile
+or so from the village where Lass had been disembarked from the train.
+
+An eager knot of people--the Mistress, the Master and two
+gardeners--crowded expectantly around the crate as it was set down on
+the lawn in front of The Place's veranda. The latch was unfastened, and
+the crate's top was lifted back on its hinges.
+
+Out stepped Lass,--tired, confused, a little frightened, but eagerly
+willing to make friends with a world which she still insisted on
+believing was friendly. It is hard to shake a collie pup's inborn faith
+in the friendliness of mankind, but once shaken, it is more than
+shaken. It is shattered beyond hope of complete mending.
+
+For an instant she stood thus, looking in timid appeal from one to
+another of the faces about her. These faces were blank enough as they
+returned her gaze. The glad expectancy was wiped from them as with a
+sponge. It was the Master who first found voice.
+
+"And THAT'S Rothsay Princess!" he snorted indignantly. "That's the pup
+worth two hundred dollars at eight months, 'because she has every
+single good point of Champion Rothsay Chief and not a flaw from nostril
+to tail-tip'! Rothsay wrote those very words about her, you remember.
+And he's supposed to be the most dependable man in the collie business!
+Lord! She's undersized--no bigger than a five monther! And she's
+prick-eared and apple-domed; and her head's as wide as a church door!"
+
+Apparently these humans were not glad to see her. Lass was grieved at
+their cold appraisal and a little frightened by the Master's tone of
+disgust. Yet she was eager, as ever, to make a good impression and to
+lure people into liking her. Shyly she walked up to the Mistress and
+laid one white little paw on her knee.
+
+Handshaking was Lass's one accomplishment. It had been taught her by
+Dick. It had pleased the boy. He had been proud of her ability to do
+it. Perhaps it might also please these strangers. And after the odd
+fashion of all new arrivals who came to The Place, Lass picked out the
+Mistress, rather than any one else, as a potential friend.
+
+The Mistress had ever roused the impatience of collie experts by
+looking past the showier "points" of a dog and into the soul and brain
+and disposition that lay behind them. So now she looked; and what she
+saw in Lass's darkly wistful eyes established the intruder's status at
+The Place.
+
+"Let her stay!" pleaded the Mistress as the Master growled something
+about bundling the dog into her crate again and sending her back to the
+Rothsay Kennels. "Let her stay, please! She's a dear."
+
+"But we're not breeding 'dears,'" observed the Master. "We planned to
+breed a strain of perfect collies. And this is a mutt!"
+
+"Her pedigree says there's no better collie blood in America," denied
+the Mistress. "And even if she happens to be a 'second,' that's no sign
+her puppies will be seconds. See how pretty and loving and wise she is.
+DO keep her!"
+
+Which of course settled the matter.
+
+Up the lawn, from his morning swim in the lake, strolled a great
+mahogany-and-white collie. At sight of Lass he lowered his head for a
+charge. He was king of The Place's dogs, this mighty thoroughbred,
+Sunnybank Lad. And he did not welcome canine intruders.
+
+But he halted midway in his dash toward the puppy who frisked forth so
+gayly to meet him. For he recognized her as a female. And man is the
+only animal that will molest the female of his species.
+
+The fiercely silent charge was changed in a trice to a coldly civil
+touching of noses, and the majestic wagging of a plumy tail. After
+which, side by side, the two collies--big and little--old and
+new--walked up to the veranda, to be petted by the humans who had so
+amusedly watched their encounter.
+
+"See!" exclaimed the Mistress, in triumph. "Lad has accepted her. He
+vouches for her. That ought to be enough for any one!"
+
+Thus it was that Lass found a home.
+
+As she never yet had been taught to know her name, she learned readily
+to respond to the title of "Princess." And for several months life went
+on evenly and happily for her.
+
+Indeed, life was always wondrous pleasant, there at The Place,--for
+humans and for animals alike. A fire-blue lake bordered the grounds on
+two sides. Behind stretched the forest. And on every side arose the
+soft green mountains, hemming in and brooding over The Place as though
+they loved it. In the winter evenings there was the huge library hearth
+with its blaze and warmth; and a disreputable fur rug in front of it
+that might have been ordained expressly for tired dogs to drowse on.
+And there were the Mistress and the Master. Especially the Mistress!
+The Mistress somehow had a way of making all the world seem worth while.
+
+Then, of a morning, when Lass was just eleven months old, two things
+happened.
+
+The Mistress and the Master went down to her kennel after breakfast.
+Lass did not run forth to greet them as usual. She lay still, wagging
+her tail in feeble welcome as they drew near. But she did not get up.
+
+Crowding close to her tawny side was a tiny, shapeless creature that
+looked more like a fat blind rat than like anything else. It was a
+ten-hour-old collie pup--a male, and yellowish brown of hue.
+
+"That's the climax!" complained the Master, breaking in on the
+Mistress's rhapsodies. "Here we've been planning to start a kennel of
+home-bred collies! And see what results we get! One solitary puppy! Not
+once in ten times are there less than six in a collie-litter. Sometimes
+there are a dozen. And here the dog you wheedled me into keeping has
+just one! I expected at least seven."
+
+"If it's a freak to be the only puppy in a litter," answered the
+Mistress, refusing to part with her enthusiasm over the miracle, "then
+this one ought to bring us luck. Let's call him 'Bruce.' You remember,
+the original Bruce won because of the mystic number, seven. This Bruce
+has got to make up to us for the seven puppies that weren't born. See
+how proud she is of him! Isn't she a sweet little mother?"
+
+The second of the morning's events was a visit from the foreman of the
+Rothsay Kennels, who motored across to The Place, intent on clearing up
+a mystery.
+
+"The Boss found a collie yesterday, tied in the front yard of a negro
+cabin a mile or two from our kennels," he told the Master. "He
+recognized her right away as Rothsay Princess. The negro claims to have
+found her wandering around near the railroad tracks, one night, six
+months ago. Now, what's the answer?"
+
+"The answer," said the Master, "is that your boss is mistaken. I've had
+Rothsay Princess for the past six months. And she's the last dog I'll
+ever get from the Rothsay Kennels. I was stung, good and plenty, on
+that deal.
+
+"My wife wanted to keep her, or I'd have made a kick in the courts for
+having to pay two hundred dollars for a cheeky, apple-domed, prick
+eared--"
+
+"Prick-eared!" exclaimed the foreman, aghast at the volleyed sacrilege.
+"Rothsay Princess has the best ears of any pup we've bred since
+Champion Rothsay Chief. Not a flaw in that pup. She--"
+
+"Not a flaw, hey!" sniffed the Master. "Come down to the kennel and
+take a look at her. She has as many flaws as a street-cur has fleas."
+
+He led the way to the kennel. At sight of the stranger Lass growled and
+showed her teeth. For a collie mother will let nobody but proven
+friends come near to her newborn brood.
+
+The foreman stared at the hostile young mother for a half-minute,
+whistling bewilderedly between his teeth. Then he laughed aloud.
+
+"That's no more Rothsay Princess than I am!" he declared. "I know who
+she IS, though. I'd remember that funny mask among a million. That's
+Rothsay Lass! Though how she got HERE--!
+
+"We couldn't have shipped her by mistake, either," he went on,
+confused. "For we'd sold her, that same day, to a kid in our town. I
+ought to know. Because the kid kept on pestering us every day for a
+month afterward, to find if she had come back to us. He said she ran
+away in the night. He still comes around, once a week or so, to ask. A
+spindly, weak, sick-looking little chap, he is. I don't get the point
+of this thing, from any angle. But we run our kennels on the square.
+And I can promise the boss'll either send back your check or send
+Rothsay Princess to you and take Lass back."
+
+Two days later, while all The Place was still mulling over the mystery,
+a letter came for the Master from Lass's home town. It was signed
+"Edw'd Hazen," and it was written on the cheap stationery of his
+employer's bottling works. It read:
+
+Dear Sir:
+
+"Six months ago, my son bought a dog from the Rothsay Kennels. It was a
+she-dog, and his ma and I didn't want one around. So I put it aboard a
+freight-car on the sly. My boy went sick over losing his dog. He has
+never rightly got over it, but he peaks and mopes and gets thinner all
+the time. If I had known how hard he was going to take it, I would of
+cut off my hand before I would of done such a thing. And my wife feels
+just like I do about it. We would both of us have given a hundred
+dollars to get the dog back for him, when we saw how bad he felt. But
+it was too late. Somehow or other it is most generally too late when a
+rotten thing has been done.
+
+"To-day he went again to the Rothsay Kennels to ask if she had come
+back. He has always been hoping she would. And they told him you have
+her. Now, sir, I am a poor man, but if one hundred dollars will make
+you sell me that dog, I'll send it to you in a money order by return
+mail. It will be worth ten times that much, to my wife and me, to have
+Dick happy again. I inclose a stamp. Will you let me know?"
+
+Six weeks afterward The Place's car brought Dick Hazen across to
+receive his long-lost pet.
+
+The boy was thinner and shakier and whiter than when he had gone to
+sleep with his cherished puppy curled against his narrow chest. But
+there was a light in his eyes and an eagerness in his heart that had
+not been there in many a long week.
+
+Lass was on the veranda to welcome him. And as Dick scrambled out of
+the car and ran to pick her up, she came more than half-way to meet
+him. With a flurry of fast-pattering steps and a bark of eager welcome,
+she flung herself upon her long-vanished master. For a highbred collie
+does not forget. And at first glimpse of the boy Lass remembered him.
+
+Dick caught her up in his arms--a harder feat than of yore, because of
+her greater weight and his own sapped strength,--and hugged her tight
+to his breast. Winking very fast indeed to disperse tears that had no
+place in the eyes of a self-contained man of twelve, he sputtered
+rapturously:
+
+"I KNEW I'd find you, Lassie--I knew it all the time;--even the times
+when I was deadsure I wouldn't! Gee, but you've grown, though! And
+you're beautifuler than ever. Isn't she, Miss?" he demanded, turning to
+the Mistress with instinctive knowledge that here at least he would
+find confirmation. "Indeed she is!" the Mistress assured him.
+
+"And see how glad she is to be with you again! She--"
+
+"And Dad says she can stay with me, for keeps!" exulted Dick. "He says
+he'll put a new lock on the cellar door, so she can't ever push out
+again, the way she did, last time. But I guess she's had her lesson in
+going out for walks at night and not being able to find her way back.
+She and I are going to have the dandiest times together, that ever
+happened. Aren't we, Lass? Is that her little boy?" he broke off, in
+eager curiosity, as the Master appeared from the kennels, carrying
+Bruce.
+
+The puppy was set down on the veranda floor for Dick's inspection.
+
+"He's cunning, isn't he? Kind of like a Teddy Bear,--the sort kids play
+with. But," with a tinge of worry, "I'm not sure Ma will let me keep
+two. Maybe--"
+
+"Perhaps," suggested the Mistress, "perhaps you'd like us to keep
+little Bruce, to remember Lass by? We'll try to make him very happy."
+
+"Yes'm!" agreed Dick, in much haste, his brow clearing from a mental
+vision of Mrs. Hazen's face when she should see him return with twice
+as many dogs as he had set out for. "Yes'm. If you wouldn't mind, very
+much. S'pose we leave it that way? I guess Bruce'll like being with
+you, Miss. I--I guess pretty near anybody would. You'll--you'll try not
+to be too homesick for Lass, won't you?"
+
+On the steps of the veranda the downy and fat puppy watched his
+mother's departure with no especial interest. By the Mistress's wish,
+Mr. Hazen had not been required to make any part of his proffered
+hundred-dollar payment for the return of his boy's pet. All the
+Mistress had stipulated was that Lass might be allowed to remain at The
+Place until baby Bruce should no longer need her.
+
+"Bruce," said the Mistress as the car rolled up the drive and out of
+sight, "you are the sole visible result of The Place's experiment in
+raising prize collies. You have a tremendous responsibility on those
+fat little shoulders of yours,--to live up to it all."
+
+By way of showing his scorn for such trifles as a "tremendous
+responsibility," Bruce proceeded to make a ferocious onslaught at the
+Mistress's temperamental gray Persian kitten, "Tipperary," which was
+picking a mincing way across the veranda.
+
+A howl of pain and two scratches on his tiny nose immediately followed
+the attack. Tipperary then went on with her mincing promenade. And
+Bruce, with loud lamentations, galloped to the shelter of the
+Mistress's skirt.
+
+"Poor little chap!" soothed the Mistress, picking him up and comforting
+him. "Responsibility isn't such a joke, after all, is it, Baby?"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. The Pest
+
+Thackeray, as a lad, was dropped from college for laziness and for
+gambling. Bismarck failed to get a University degree, because he lacked
+power to study and because he preferred midnight beer to midnight oil.
+George Washington, in student days, could never grasp the simplest
+rules of spelling. The young Lincoln loved to sprawl in the shade with
+fish-pole or tattered book, when he should have been working.
+
+Now, these men were giants--physically as well as mentally. Being
+giants, they were by nature slow of development.
+
+The kitten, at six months of age, is graceful and compact and of
+perfect poise. The lion-cub, at the same age, is a gawky and foolish
+and ill-knit mass of legs and fur; deficient in sense and in symmetry.
+Yet at six years, the lion and the cat are not to be compared for power
+or beauty or majesty or brain, or along any other lines.
+
+The foregoing is not an essay on the slow development of the Great. It
+is merely a condensation of the Mistress's earnest arguments against
+the selling or giving away of a certain hopelessly awkward and
+senseless and altogether undesirable collie pup named Bruce.
+
+From the very first, the Mistress had been Bruce's champion at The
+Place. There was no competition for that office. She and she alone
+could see any promise in the shambling youngster.
+
+Because he had been born on The Place, and because he was the only son
+of Rothsay Lass, whom the Mistress had also championed against strong
+opposition, it had been decided to keep and raise him. But daily this
+decision seemed less and less worth while. Only the Mistress's
+championing of the Undesirable prevented his early banishment.
+
+From a fuzzy and adventurous fluff-ball of gray-gold-and-white fur,
+Bruce swiftly developed into a lanky giant. He was almost as large
+again as is the average collie pup of his age; but, big as he was, his
+legs and feet and head were huge, out of all proportion to the rest of
+him. The head did not bother him. Being hampered by no weight of brain,
+it would be navigated with more or less ease, in spite of its bulk. But
+the legs and feet were not only in his own way, but in every one else's.
+
+He seemed totally lacking in sense, as well as in bodily coordination.
+He was forever getting into needless trouble. He was a stormcenter. No
+one but a born fool--canine or human--could possibly have caused
+one-tenth as much bother.
+
+The Mistress had named him "Bruce," after the stately Scottish
+chieftain who was her history-hero. And she still called him
+Bruce--fifty times a day--in the weary hope of teaching him his name.
+But every one else on The Place gave him a title instead of a name--a
+title that stuck: "The Pest." He spent twenty-four hours, daily, living
+up to it.
+
+Compared with Bruce's helplessly clownish trouble-seeking propensities,
+Charlie Chaplin's screen exploits are miracles of heroic dignity and of
+good luck.
+
+There was a little artificial water-lily pool on The Place, perhaps
+four feet deep. By actual count, Bruce fell into it no less than nine
+times in a single week. Once or twice he had nearly drowned there
+before some member of the family chanced to fish him out. And, learning
+nothing from experience, he would fall in again, promptly, the next day.
+
+The Master at last rigged up a sort of sloping wooden platform, running
+from the lip of the pool into the water, so that Bruce could crawl out
+easily, next time he should tumble in. Bruce watched the placing of
+this platform with much grave interest. The moment it was completed, he
+trotted down it on a tour of investigation. At its lower edge he
+slipped and rolled into the pool. There he floundered, with no thought
+at all of climbing out as he had got in, until the Master rescued him
+and spread a wire net over the whole pool to avert future accidents.
+
+Thenceforth, Bruce met with no worse mischance, there, than the
+perpetual catching of his toe-pads in the meshes of the wire. Thus
+ensnared he would stand, howling most lamentably, until his yells
+brought rescue.
+
+Though the pool could be covered with a net, the wide lake at the foot
+of the lawn could not be. Into the lake Bruce would wade till the water
+reached his shoulders. Then with a squeal of venturesome joy, he would
+launch himself outward for a swim; and, once facing away from shore, he
+never had sense enough to turn around.
+
+After a half-hour of steady swimming, his soft young strength would
+collapse. A howl of terror would apprise the world at large that he was
+about to drown. Whereat some passing boatman would pick him up and hold
+him for ransom, or else some one from The Place must jump into skiff or
+canoe and hie with all speed to the rescue. The same thing would be
+repeated day after day.
+
+The local S.P.C.A. threatened to bring action against the Master for
+letting his dog risk death, in this way, from drowning. Morbidly, the
+Master wished the risk might verge into a certainty.
+
+The puppy's ravenous appetite was the wonder of all. He stopped eating
+only when there was nothing edible in reach. And as his ideas of edible
+food embraced everything that was chewable,--from bath-towels to
+axle-grease--he was seldom fasting and was frequently ill.
+
+Nature does more for animals than for humans. By a single experience
+she warns them, as a rule, what they may safely eat and what they may
+not. Bruce was the exception. He would pounce upon and devour a
+luscious bit of laundry-soap with just as much relish as though a
+similar bit of soap had not made him horribly sick the day before.
+
+Once he munched, relishfully, a two-pound box of starch, box and all;
+on his recovery, he began upon a second box, and was unhappy when it
+was taken from him.
+
+He would greet members of the family with falsetto-thunderous barks of
+challenge as they came down the drive from the highway. But he would
+frisk out in joyous welcome to meet and fawn upon tramps or peddlers
+who sought to invade The Place. He could scarce learn his own name. He
+could hardly be taught to obey the simplest command. As for shaking
+hands or lying down at order (those two earliest bits of any dog's
+education), they meant no more to Bruce than did the theory of
+quadratic equations.
+
+At three months he launched forth merrily as a chicken-killer;
+gleefully running down and beheading The Place's biggest Orpington
+rooster. But his first kill was his last. The Master saw to that.
+
+There is no use in thrashing a dog for killing poultry. There is but
+one practically sure cure for the habit. And this one cure the Master
+applied.
+
+He tied the slain rooster firmly around Bruce's furry throat, and made
+the puppy wear it, as a heavy and increasingly malodorous pendant, for
+three warm days and nights.
+
+Before the end of this seventy-two-hour period, Bruce had grown to
+loathe the sight and scent of chicken. Stupid as he was, he learned
+this lesson with absolute thoroughness,--as will almost any
+chicken-killing pup,--and it seemed to be the only teaching that his
+unawakened young brain had the power to grasp.
+
+In looks, too, Bruce was a failure. His yellowish-and-white body was
+all but shapeless. His coat was thick and heavy enough, but it showed a
+tendency to curl--almost to kink--instead of waving crisply, as a
+collie's ought. The head was coarse and blurred in line. The body was
+gaunt, in spite of its incessant feedings. As for contour or style--
+
+It was when the Master, in disgust, pointed out these diverse failings
+of the pup, that the Mistress was wont to draw on historic precedent
+for other instances of slow development, and to take in vain the names
+of Thackeray, Lincoln, Washington and Bismarck and the rest.
+
+"Give him time!" she urged once. "He isn't quite six months old yet;
+and he has grown so terribly fast. Why, he's over two feet tall, at the
+shoulder, even now--much bigger than most full-grown collies. Champion
+Howgill Rival is spoken of as a 'big' dog; yet he is only twenty-four
+inches at the shoulder, Mr. Leighton says. Surely it's something to own
+a dog that is so big."
+
+"It IS 'something,'" gloomily conceded the Master. "In our case it is a
+catastrophe. I don't set up to be an expert judge of collies, so maybe
+I am all wrong about him. I'm going to get professional opinion,
+though. Next week they are going to have the spring dogshow at Hampton.
+It's a little hole-in-a-corner show, of course. But Symonds is to be
+the all-around judge, except for the toy breeds. And Symonds knows
+collies, from the ground up. I am going to take Bruce over there and
+enter him for the puppy class. If he is any good, Symonds will know it.
+If the dog is as worthless as I think he is, I'll get rid of him. If
+Symonds gives any hope for him, I'll keep him on a while longer."
+
+"But," ventured the Mistress, "if Symonds says 'Thumbs down,' then--"
+
+"Then I'll buy a pet armadillo or an ornithorhynchus instead,"
+threatened the Master. "Either of them will look more like a collie
+than Bruce does."
+
+"I--I wonder if Mr. Symonds smokes," mused the Mistress under her
+breath.
+
+"Smokes?" echoed the Master. "What's that got to do with it?"
+
+"I was only wondering," she made hesitant answer, "if a box of very
+wonderful cigars, sent to him with our cards, mightn't perhaps--"
+
+"It's a fine sportsmanly proposition!" laughed the Master. "When women
+get to ruling the world of sport, there'll be no need of comic
+cartoons. Genuine photographs will do as well. If it's just the same to
+you, dear girl, we'll let Symonds buy his own cigars, for the present.
+The dog-show game is almost the only one I know of where a judge is
+practically always on the square. People doubt his judgment, sometimes,
+but there is practically never any doubt of his honesty. Besides, we
+want to get the exact dope on Bruce. (Not that I haven't got it,
+already!) If Symonds 'gates' him, I'm going to offer him for sale at
+the show. If nobody buys him there, I'm going--"
+
+"He hasn't been 'gated' yet," answered the Mistress in calm confidence.
+
+At the little spring show, at Hampton, a meager eighty dogs were
+exhibited, of which only nine were collies. This collie division
+contained no specimens to startle the dog-world. Most of the exhibits
+were pets. And like nearly all pets, they were "seconds"--in other
+words, the less desirable dogs of thoroughbred litters.
+
+Hampton's town hall auditorium was filled to overcrowding, with a mass
+of visitors who paraded interestedly along the aisles between the
+raised rows of stall-like benches where the dogs were tied; or who
+grouped densely around all four sides of the roped judging-ring in the
+center of the hall.
+
+For a dogshow has a wel-nigh universal appeal to humanity at large;
+even as the love for dogs is one of the primal and firm-rooted human
+emotions. Not only the actual exhibitor and their countless friends
+flock to such shows; but the public at large is drawn thither as to no
+other function of the kind.
+
+Horse-racing, it is true, brings out a crowd many times larger than
+does a dogshow. But only because of the thrill of winning or losing
+money. For where one's spare cash is, there is his heart and his
+all-absorbing interest. Yet it is a matter of record that grass is
+growing high, on the race-tracks, in such states as have been able to
+enforce the anti-betting laws. The "sport of kings" flourishes only
+where wagers may accompany it. Remove the betting element, and you turn
+your racetrack into a huge and untrodden lot.
+
+There is practically no betting connected with any dogshow. People go
+there to see the dogs and to watch their judging, and for nothing else.
+As a rule, the show is not even a social event. Nevertheless, the
+average dogshow is thronged with spectators. (Try to cross Madison
+Square Garden, on Washington's Birthday afternoon, while the
+Westminster Kennel Club's Show is in progress. If you can work your way
+through the press of visitors in less than half an hour, then Nature
+intended you for a football champion.)
+
+The fortunate absence of a betting-interest alone keeps such affairs
+from becoming among the foremost sporting features of the world. Many
+of the dogs on view are fools, of course. Because many of them have
+been bred solely with a view to show-points. And their owners and
+handlers have done nothing to awaken in their exhibits the half-human
+brain and heart that is a dog's heritage. All has been sacrificed to
+"points"--to points which are arbitrary and which change as freakily as
+do fashions in dress.
+
+For example, a few years ago, a financial giant collected and exhibited
+one of the finest bunches of collies on earth. He had a competent
+manager and an army of kennel-men to handle them. He took inordinate
+pride in these priceless collies of his. Once I watched him, at the
+Garden Show, displaying them to some Wall Street friends. Three times
+he made errors in naming his dogs. Once, when he leaned too close to
+the star collie of his kennels, the dog mistook him for a stranger and
+resented the intrusion by snapping at him. He did not know his own
+pets, one from another. And they did not know their owner, by sight or
+by scent.
+
+At the small shows, there is an atmosphere wholly different. Few of the
+big breeders bother to compete at such contests. The dogs are for the
+most part pets, for which their owners feel a keen personal affection,
+and which have been brought up as members of their masters' households.
+Thus, if small shows seldom bring forth a world-beating dog, they at
+least are full of clever and humanized exhibits and of men and women to
+whom the success or failure of their canine friends is a matter of
+intensest personal moment. Wherefore the small show often gives the
+beholder something he can find but rarely in a larger exhibition.
+
+A few dogs genuinely enjoy shows--or are supposed to. To many others a
+dogshow is a horror.
+
+Which windy digression brings us back by prosy degrees to Bruce and to
+the Hampton dogshow.
+
+The collies were the first breed to be judged. And the puppy class, as
+usual, was the first to be called to the ring.
+
+There were but three collie pups, all males. One was a rangy tri-color
+of eleven months, with a fair head and a bad coat. The second was an
+exquisite six-months puppy, rich of coat, prematurely perfect of head,
+and cowhocked. These two and Bruce formed the puppy class which paraded
+before Symonds in the oblong ring.
+
+"Anyhow," whispered the Mistress as the Master led his stolidly
+gigantic entry toward the enclosure, "Bruce can't get worse than a
+third-prize yellow ribbon. We ought to be a little proud of that. There
+are only three entries in his class."
+
+But even that bit of barren pride was denied the awkward youngster's
+sponsor. As the three pups entered the enclosure, the judge's half-shut
+eyes rested on Bruce--at first idly, then in real amazement. Crossing
+to the Master, before giving the signal for the first maneuvers, he
+said in tired disgust--
+
+"Please take your measly St. Bernard monstrosity out of the ring. This
+is a class for collies, not for freaks. I refuse to judge that pup as a
+collie."
+
+"He's a thoroughbred," crossly protested the Master. "I have his
+certified pedigree. There's no better blood in--"
+
+"I don't care what his ancestors were," snapped the judge. "He's a
+throw-back to the dinosaur or the Great Auk. And I won't judge him as a
+collie. Take him out of the ring. You're delaying the others."
+
+A judge's decision is final. Red with angry shame and suppressing an
+unworthy desire to kick the luckless Bruce, the Master led the pup back
+to his allotted bench. Bruce trotted cheerily along with a maddening
+air of having done something to be proud of. Deaf to the Mistress's
+sympathy and to her timidly voiced protests, the Master scrawled on an
+envelope-back the words "For Sale. Name Your Own Price," and pinned it
+on the edge of the bench.
+
+"Here endeth the first lesson in collie-raising, so far as The Place is
+concerned," he decreed, stalking back to the ringside to watch the rest
+of the judging.
+
+The Mistress lingered behind, to bestow a furtive consolatory pat upon
+the disqualified Bruce. Then she joined her husband beside the ring.
+
+It was probably by accident that her skirt brushed sharply against the
+bench-edge as she went--knocking the "For Sale" sign down into the
+litter of straw below.
+
+But a well-meaning fellow-exhibitor, across the aisle, saw the bit of
+paper flutter floorward. This good soul rescued it from the straw and
+pinned it back in place.
+
+(The world is full of helpful folk. That is perhaps one reason why the
+Millennium's date is still so indefinite.)
+
+An hour later, a man touched the Master on the arm.
+
+"That dog of yours, on Bench 48," began the stranger, "the big pup with
+the 'For Sale' sign on his bench. What do you want for him?"
+
+The Mistress was several feet away, talking to the superintendent of
+the show. Guiltily, yet gratefully, the Master led the would-be
+purchaser back to the benches, without attracting his wife's notice.
+
+A few minutes afterward he returned to where she and the superintendent
+were chatting.
+
+"Well," said the Master, trying to steel himself against his wife's
+possible disappointment, "I found a buyer for Bruce--a Dr. Halding,
+from New York. He likes the pup. Says Bruce looks as if he was strong
+and had lots of endurance. I wonder if he wants him for a sledge-dog.
+He paid me fifteen dollars for him; and it was a mighty good bargain. I
+was lucky to get more than a nickel for such a cur."
+
+The Master shot forth this speech in almost a single rapid breath.
+Then, before his wife could reply,--and without daring to look into her
+troubled eyes,--he discovered an acquaintance on the far side of the
+ring and bustled off to speak to him. The Master, you see, was a
+husband, not a hero.
+
+The Mistress turned a worried gaze on the superintendent.
+
+"It was best, I suppose," she said bravely. "We agreed he must be sold,
+if the judge decided he was not any good. But I'm sorry. For I'm fond
+of him. I'm sorry he is going to live in New York, too. A big city is
+no place for a big dog. I hope this Dr. Halding will be nice to the
+poor puppy."
+
+"Dr.--WHO?" sharply queried the superintendent, who had not caught the
+name when the Master had spoken it in his rapid-fire speech. "Dr.
+Halding? Of New York? Huh!
+
+"You needn't worry about the effect of city life on your dog," he went
+on with venomous bitterness. "The pup won't have a very long spell of
+it. If I had my way, that man Halding would be barred from every
+dog-show and stuck in jail. It's an old trick of his, to buy up
+thoroughbreds, cheap, at shows. The bigger and the stronger they are,
+the more he pays for them. He seems to think pedigreed dogs are better
+for his filthy purposes than street curs. They have a higher nervous
+organism, I suppose. The swine!"
+
+"What do you mean?" asked the Mistress, puzzled by his vehemence. "I
+don't--"
+
+"You must have heard of Halding and his so-called 'research work,'" the
+superintendent went on. "He is one of the most notorious
+vivisectionists in--"
+
+The superintendent got no further. He was talking to empty air. The
+Mistress had fled. Her determined small figure made a tumbled wake
+through the crowd as she sped toward Bruce's bench. The puppy was no
+longer there. In another second the Mistress was at the door of the
+building.
+
+A line of parked cars was stretched across the opposite side of the
+village street. Into one of these cars a large and loose-jointed man
+was lifting a large and loose-jointed dog. The dog did not like his
+treatment, and was struggling pathetically in vain awkwardness to get
+free.
+
+"Bruce!" called the Mistress, fiercely, as she dashed across the street.
+
+The puppy heard the familiar voice and howled for release. Dr. Halding
+struck him roughly over the head and scrambled into the machine with
+him, reaching with his one disengaged hand for the self-starter button.
+Before he could touch it, the Mistress was on the running-board of the
+car.
+
+As she ran, she had opened her wristbag. Now, flinging on the
+runabout's seat a ten and a five-dollar bill, she demanded--
+
+"Give me my dog! There is the money you paid for him!"
+
+"He isn't for sale," grinned the Doctor. "Stand clear, please. I'm
+starting."
+
+"You're doing nothing of the sort," was the hot reply. "You'll give
+back my dog! Do you understand?"
+
+For answer Halding reached again toward his self-starter. A renewed
+struggle from the whimpering puppy frustrated his aim and forced him to
+devote both hands to the subduing of Bruce. The dog was making frantic
+writhings to get to the Mistress. She caught his furry ruff and raged
+on, sick with anger.
+
+"I know who you are and what you want this poor frightened puppy for.
+You shan't have him! There seems to be no law to prevent human devils
+from strapping helpless dogs to a table and torturing them to death in
+the unholy name of science. But if there isn't a corner waiting for
+them, below, it's only because Hades can't be made hot enough to punish
+such men as they ought to be punished! You're not going to torture
+Bruce. There's your money. Let go of him."
+
+"You talk like all silly, sloppy sentimentalists!" scoffed the Doctor,
+his slight German accent becoming more noticeable as he continued: "A
+woman can't have the intellect to understand our services to humanity.
+We--"
+
+"Neither have half the real doctors!" she flashed. "Fully half of them
+deny that vivisection ever helped humanity. And half the remainder say
+they are in doubt. They can't point to a single definite case where it
+has been of use. Alienists say it's a distinct form of mental
+perversion,--the craving to torture dumb animals to death and to make
+scientific notes of their sufferings."
+
+"Pah!" he sniffed. "I--"
+
+She hurried on
+
+"If humanity can't be helped without cutting live dogs and kittens to
+shreds, in slow agony--then so much the worse for humanity! If you
+vivisectors would be content to practice on one another--or on
+condemned murderers,--instead of on friendly and innocent dogs, there'd
+be no complaint from any one. But leave our pets alone. Let go of my
+puppy!"
+
+By way of response the Doctor grunted in lofty contempt. At the same
+time he tucked the wriggling dog under his right arm, holding him thus
+momentarily safe, and pressed the self-starter button.
+
+There was a subdued whir. A move of Halding's foot and a release of the
+brake, and the car started forward.
+
+"Stand clear!" he ordered. "I'm going."
+
+The jolt of the sudden start was too much for the Mistress's balance on
+the running-board. Back she toppled. Only by luck did she land on her
+feet instead of her head, upon the greasy pavement of the street.
+
+But she sprang forward again, with a little cry of indignant dismay,
+and reached desperately into the moving car for Bruce, calling him
+eagerly by name.
+
+Dr. Halding was steering with his left hand, while his viselike right
+arm still encircled the protesting collie. As the Mistress ran
+alongside and grasped frantically for her doomed pet, he let go of
+Bruce for an instant, to fend off her hand--or perhaps to thrust her
+away from the peril of the fast-moving mud-guards. At the Mistress's
+cry--and at the brief letup of pressure caused by the Doctor's menacing
+gesture toward the unhappy woman--Bruce's long-sleeping soul awoke. He
+answered the cry and the man's blow at his deity in the immemorial
+fashion of all dogs whose human gods are threatened.
+
+There was a snarling wild-beast growl, the first that ever had come
+from the clownlike puppy's throat,--and Bruce flung his unwieldy young
+body straight for the vivisector's throat.
+
+Halding, with a vicious fist-lunge, sent the pup to the floor of the
+car in a crumpled heap, but not before the curving white eyeteeth had
+slashed the side of the man's throat in an ugly flesh-wound that drove
+its way dangerously close to the jugular.
+
+Half stunned by the blow, and with the breath knocked out of him, Bruce
+none the less gathered himself together with lightning speed and
+launched his bulk once more for Halding's throat.
+
+This time he missed his mark--for several things happened all at once.
+
+At the dog's first onslaught, Halding's foot had swung forward, along
+with his fist, in an instinctive kick. The kick did not reach Bruce.
+But it landed, full and effectively, on the accelerator.
+
+The powerful car responded to the touch with a bound. And it did so at
+the very moment that the flash of white teeth at his throat made
+Halding snatch his own left hand instinctively from the steering-wheel,
+in order to guard the threatened spot.
+
+A second later the runabout crashed at full speed into the wall of a
+house on the narrow street's opposite side.
+
+The rest was chaos.
+
+When a crowd of idlers and a policeman at last righted the wrecked car,
+two bodies were found huddled inertly amid a junk-heap of splintered
+glass and shivered wood and twisted metal. The local ambulance carried
+away one of these limp bodies. The Place's car rushed the smash-up's
+other senseless victim to the office of the nearest veterinary. Dr.
+Halding, with a shattered shoulder-blade and a fractured nose and jaw
+and a mild case of brain-concussion,--was received as a guest of honor
+at the village hospital.
+
+Bruce, his left foreleg broken and a nasty assortment of glass-cuts
+marring the fluffiness of his fur, was skillfully patched up by the
+vet' and carried back that night to The Place.
+
+The puppy had suddenly taken on a new value in his owners' eyes--partly
+for his gallantly puny effort at defending the Mistress, partly because
+of his pitiful condition. And he was nursed, right zealously, back to
+life and health.
+
+In a few weeks, the plaster cast on the convalescent's broken foreleg
+had been replaced by a bandage. In another week or two the vet'
+pronounced Bruce as well as ever. The dog, through habit, still held
+the mended foreleg off the ground, even after the bandage was removed.
+Whereat, the Master tied a bandage tightly about the uninjured foreleg.
+
+Bruce at once decided that this, and not the other, was the lame leg;
+and he began forthwith to limp on it. As it was manifestly impossible
+to keep both forelegs off the ground at the same time when he was
+walking, he was forced to make use of the once-broken leg. Finding, to
+his amaze, that he could walk on it with perfect ease, he devoted his
+limping solely to the well leg. And as soon as the Master took the
+bandage from that, Bruce ceased to limp at all.
+
+Meanwhile, a lawyer, whose name sounded as though it had been culled
+from a Rhine Wine list, had begun suit, in Dr. Halding's name, against
+the Mistress, as a "contributory cause" of his client's accident. The
+suit never came to trial. It was dropped, indeed, with much haste. Not
+from any change of heart on the plaintiff's behalf; but because, at
+that juncture, Dr. Halding chanced to be arrested and interned as a
+dangerous Enemy Alien. Our country had recently declared war on
+Germany; and the belated spy-hunt was up.
+
+During the Federal officers' search of the doctor's house, for
+treasonable documents (of which they found an ample supply), they came
+upon his laboratory. No fewer than five dogs, in varying stages of
+hideous torture, were found strapped to tables or hanging to
+wall-hooks. The vivisector bewailed, loudly and gutturally, this cruel
+interruption to his researches in Science's behalf.
+
+One day, two months after the accident, Bruce stood on all four feet
+once more, with no vestige left of scars or of lameness. And then, for
+the first time, a steady change that had been so slow as to escape any
+one's notice dawned upon the Mistress and the Master. It struck them
+both at the same moment. And they stared dully at their pet.
+
+The shapeless, bumptious, foolish Pest of two months ago had vanished.
+In his place, by a very normal process of nature-magic, stood a
+magnificently stately thoroughbred collie.
+
+The big head had tapered symmetrically, and had lost its puppy
+formlessness. It was now a head worthy of Landseer's own pencil. The
+bonily awkward body had lengthened and had lost its myriad knobs and
+angles. It had grown massively graceful.
+
+The former thatch of half-curly and indeterminately yellowish fuzz had
+changed to a rough tawny coat, wavy and unbelievably heavy, stippled at
+the ends with glossy black. There was a strange depth and repose and
+Soul in the dark eyes--yes, and a keen intelligence, too.
+
+It was the old story of the Ugly Duckling, all over again.
+
+"Why!" gasped the Mistress. "He's--he's BEAUTIFUL! And I never knew it."
+
+At her loved voice the great dog moved across to where she sat. Lightly
+he laid one little white paw on her knee and looked gravely up into her
+eyes.
+
+"He's got sense, too," chimed in the Master. "Look at those eyes, if
+you doubt it. They're alive with intelligence. It's--it's a miracle! He
+can't be the same worthless whelp I wanted to get rid of! He CAN'T!"
+
+And he was not. The long illness, at the most formative time of the
+dog's growth, had done its work in developing what, all the time, had
+lain latent. The same illness--and the long-enforced personal touch
+with humans--had done an equally transforming work on the puppy's
+undeveloped mind. The Thackeray-Washington-Lincoln-Bismarck simile had
+held good.
+
+What looked like a miracle was no more than the same beautifully simple
+process which Nature enacts every day, when she changes an awkward and
+dirt-colored cygnet into a glorious swan or a leggily gawky colt into a
+superb Derby-winner. But Bruce's metamorphosis seemed none the less
+wonderful in the eyes of the two people who had learned to love him.
+
+Somewhere in the hideous wreck of Dr. Halding's motorcar the dog had
+found a soul--and the rest had followed as a natural course of growth.
+
+At the autumn dog-show, in Hampton, a "dark-sable-and-white" collie of
+unwonted size and beauty walked proudly into the ring close to the
+Mistress's side, when the puppy class was called--a class that includes
+all dogs under twelve months old. Six minutes later the Mistress was
+gleesomely accepting the first-prize blue ribbon, for "best puppy,"
+from Judge Symonds' own gnarled hand.
+
+Then came the other classes for collies--"Novice," "Open," "Limit,"
+"Local," "American Bred." And as Bruce paced majestically out of the
+ring at last, he was the possessor of five more blue ribbons--as well
+as the blue Winner's rosette, for "best collie in the show."
+
+"Great dog you've got there, madam!" commented Symonds in solemn
+approval as he handed the Winner's rosette to the Mistress. "Fine dog
+in every way. Fine promise. He will go far. One of the best types
+I've--"
+
+"Do you really think so?" sweetly replied the Mistress. "Why, one of
+the foremost collie judges in America has gone on record as calling him
+a 'measly St. Bernard monstrosity.'"
+
+"No?" snorted Symonds, incredulous. "You don't say so! A judge who
+would speak so, of that dog, doesn't understand his business. He--"
+
+"Oh, yes, he does!" contradicted the Mistress, glancing lovingly at her
+handful of blue ribbons. "I think he understands his business very well
+indeed--NOW!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. The War Dog
+
+The guest had decided to wait until next morning, before leaving The
+Place, instead of following his first plan of taking a night train to
+New York. He was a captain in our regular army and had newly come back
+from France to forget an assortment of shrapnel-bites and to teach
+practical tactics to rookies.
+
+He reached his decision to remain over night at The Place while he and
+the Mistress and the Master were sitting on the vine-hung west veranda
+after dinner, watching the flood of sunset change the lake to molten
+gold and the sky to pink fire. It would be pleasant to steal another
+few hours at this back-country House of Peace before returning to the
+humdrum duties of camp. And the guest yielded to the temptation.
+
+"I'm mighty glad you can stay over till morning," said the Master.
+"I'll send word to Roberts not to bring up the car."
+
+As he spoke, he scrawled a penciled line on an envelope-back; then he
+whistled.
+
+From a cool lounging-place beneath the wistaria-vines arose a huge
+collie--stately of form, dark brown and white of coat, deep-set of eye
+and with a head that somehow reminded one of a Landseer engraving. The
+collie trotted up the steps of the veranda and stood expectant before
+the Master. The latter had been folding the envelope lengthwise. Now he
+slipped it through the ring in the dog's collar.
+
+"Give it to Roberts," he said.
+
+The big collie turned and set off at a hand-gallop.
+
+"Good!" approved the guest. "Bruce didn't seem to be in any doubt as to
+what you wanted him to do. He knows where Roberts is likely to be?"
+
+"No," said the Master. "But he can track him and find him, if Roberts
+is anywhere within a mile or so from here. That was one of the first
+things we taught him--to carry messages. All we do is to slip the paper
+into his collar-ring and tell him the name of the person to take it to.
+Naturally, he knows us all by name. So it is easy enough for him to do
+it. We look on the trick as tremendously clever. But that's because we
+love Bruce. Almost any dog can be taught to do it, I suppose. We--"
+
+"You're mistaken!" corrected the guest. "Almost any dog CAN'T be taught
+to. Some dogs can, of course; but they are the exception. I ought to
+know, for I've been where dog-couriers are a decidedly important
+feature of trench-warfare. I stopped at one of the dog-training schools
+in England, too, on my way back from Picardy, and watched the teaching
+of the dogs that are sent to France and Flanders. Not one in ten can be
+trained to carry messages; and not one in thirty can be counted on to
+do it reliably. You ought to be proud of Bruce."
+
+"We are," replied the Mistress. "He is one of the family. We think
+everything of him. He was such a stupid and awkward puppy, too! Then,
+in just a few months, he shaped up, as he is now. And his brain woke."
+
+Bruce interrupted the talk by reappearing on the veranda. The folded
+envelope was still in the ring on his collar. The guest glanced
+furtively at the Master, expecting some sign of chagrin at the collie's
+failure.
+
+Instead, the Master took the envelope, unfolded it and glanced at a
+word or two that had been written beneath his own scrawl; then he made
+another penciled addition to the envelope's writing, stuck the twisted
+paper back into the ring and said--
+
+"Roberts."
+
+Off trotted Bruce on his second trip.
+
+"I had forgotten to say which train you'll have to take in the
+morning," explained the Master. "So Roberts wrote, asking what time he
+was to have the car at the door after breakfast. It was careless of me."
+
+The guest did not answer. But when Bruce presently returned,--this time
+with no paper in his collar-ring,--the officer passed his hand
+appraisingly through the dog's heavy coat and looked keenly down into
+his dark eyes.
+
+"Gun-shy?" asked the guest. "Or perhaps he's never heard a gun fired?"
+
+"He's heard hundreds of guns fired," said the Master. "I never allow a
+gun to be fired on The Place, of course, because we've made it a bird
+refuge. But Bruce went with us in the car to the testing of the Lewis
+machineguns, up at Haskell. They made a most ungodly racket. But
+somehow it didn't seem to bother the Big Dog at all."
+
+"H'm!" mused the guest, his professional interest vehemently roused.
+"He would be worth a fortune over there. There are a lot of collies in
+the service, in one capacity or another--almost as many as the
+Airedales and the police dogs. And they are doing grand work. But I
+never saw one that was better fitted for it than Bruce. It's a pity he
+lives on the wrong side of the Atlantic. He could do his bit, to more
+effect than the average human. There are hundreds of thousands of men
+for the ranks, but pitifully few perfect courier-dogs."
+
+The Mistress was listening with a tensity which momentarily grew more
+painful. The Master's forehead, too, was creased with a new thought
+that seemed to hurt him. To break the brief silence that followed the
+guest's words, he asked:
+
+"Are the dogs, over there, really doing such great work as the papers
+say they are? I read, the other day--"
+
+"'Great work!'" repeated the guest. "I should say so. Not only in
+finding the wounded and acting as guards on listening posts, and all
+that, but most of all as couriers. There are plenty of times when the
+wireless can't be used for sending messages from one point to another,
+and where there is no telephone connection, and where the firing is too
+hot for a human courier to get through. That is where is the war dogs
+have proved their weight in radium. Collies, mostly. There are a
+million true stories of their prowess told, at camp-fires. Here are
+just two such incidents--both of them on record, by the way, at the
+British War Office
+
+"A collie, down near Soissons, was sent across a bad strip of
+fire-scourged ground, with a message. A boche sharpshooter fired at him
+and shattered his jaw. The dog kept on, in horrible agony, and
+delivered the message. Another collie was sent over a still hotter and
+much longer stretch of territory with a message. (That was during the
+Somme drive of 1916.) He was shot at, a dozen times, as he ran. At last
+two bullets got him. He fell over, mortally wounded. He scrambled to
+his feet and kept on falling, stumbling, staggering--till he got to his
+destination. Then he dropped dead at the side of the Colonel the
+message had been sent to. And those are only two of thousands of true
+collie-anecdotes. Yet some fools are trying to get American dogs done
+away with, as 'non-utilitarian,' while the war lasts! As if the dogs in
+France, today, weren't earning their overseas brothers' right to
+live--and live well!"
+
+Neither of his hearers made reply when the guest finished his earnest,
+eager recital. Neither of them had paid much heed to his final words.
+For the Master and the Mistress were looking at each other in mute
+unhappiness. The same miserable thought was in the mind of each. And
+each knew the thought that was torturing the mind of the other.
+
+Presently, at a glint of inquiry in the Master's eye, the Mistress
+suddenly bent over and buried her face in the deep mass of Bruce's ruff
+as the dog stood lovingly beside her. Then, still stroking the collie's
+silken head, she returned her husband's wretchedly questioning glance
+with a resigned little nod. The Master cleared his throat noisily
+before he could speak with the calm indifference he sought. Then,
+turning to the apparently unnoticing guest, he said--
+
+"I think I told you I tried to get across to France at the very
+start--and I was barred because I am past forty and because I have a
+bum heart and several other defects that a soldier isn't supposed to
+have. My wife and I have tried to do what little we can for the Cause,
+on this side of the ocean. But it has seemed woefully little, when we
+remember what others are doing. And we have no son we can send."
+
+Again he cleared his throat and went on with sulky ungraciousness:
+
+"We both know what you've been driving at for the past five minutes.
+And--and we agree. Bruce can go."
+
+"Great!" applauded the guest. "That's fine! He'll be worth his--"
+
+"If you think we're a couple of fools for not doing this more
+willingly," went on the Master with savage earnestness, "just stop to
+think what it means to a man to give up the dog he loves. Not to give
+him up to some one who will assure him a good home, but to send him
+over into that hell, where a German bullet or a shell-fragment or
+hunger or disease is certain to get him, soon or late. To think of him
+lying smashed and helpless, somewhere in No Man's Land, waiting for
+death; or caught by the enemy and eaten! (The Red Cross bulletin says
+no less than eight thousand dogs were eaten, in Saxony alone, in 1913,
+the year BEFORE the war began.) Or else to be captured and then cut up
+by some German vivisector-surgeon in the sacred interests of Science!
+Oh, we can bring ourselves to send Bruce over there! But don't expect
+us to do it with a good grace. For we can't."
+
+"I--" began the embarrassed guest; but the Mistress chimed in, her
+sweet voice not quite steady.
+
+"You see, Captain, we've made such a pet--such a baby--of Bruce! All
+his life he has lived here--here where he had the woods to wander in
+and the lake to swim in, and this house for his home. He will be so
+unhappy and--Well, don't let's talk about that! When I think of the
+people who give their sons and everything they have, to the country, I
+feel ashamed of not being more willing to let a mere dog go. But then
+Bruce is not just a 'mere dog.' He is--he is BRUCE. All I ask is that
+if he is injured and not killed, you'll arrange to have him sent back
+here to us. We'll pay for it, of course. And will you write to whomever
+you happen to know, at that dog-training school in England, and ask
+that Bruce be treated nicely while he is training there? He's never
+been whipped. He's never needed it, you see."
+
+
+The Mistress might have spared herself much worry as to Bruce's
+treatment in the training school to which he was consigned. It was not
+a place of cruelty, but of development. And when, out of the thousands
+of dogs sent there, the corps of trainers found one with promise of
+strong ability, such a pupil was handled with all the care and
+gentleness and skill that a temperamental prima donna might expect.
+
+Such a dog was the big American collie, debarked from a goods car at
+the training camp railway station, six weeks after the Mistress and the
+Master had consented to his enlistment. And the handlers treated him
+accordingly.
+
+The Master himself had taken Bruce to the transport, in Brooklyn, and
+had led him aboard the overfull ship. The new sights and sounds around
+him interested the home-bred collie. But when the Master turned him
+over to the officer in whose charge he was to be for the voyage,
+Bruce's deep-set eyes clouded with a sudden heartsick foreboding.
+
+Wrenching himself free from the friendly hand on his collar, he sprang
+in pursuit of his departing deity,--the loved Master who was leaving
+him alone and desolate among all these strange scenes and noises. The
+Master, plodding, sullen and heavy-hearted, toward the gangway, was
+aware of a cold nose thrust into his dejected hand.
+
+Looking down he beheld Bruce staring up at him with a world of stark
+appeal in his troubled gaze. The Master swallowed hard; then laid his
+hand on the beautiful head pressed so confidingly against his knee.
+Turning, he led the dog back to the quarters assigned to him.
+
+"Stay here, old friend!" he commanded, huskily. "It's all right. You'll
+make good. I know that. And there's a chance in a billion that you'll
+come back to us. I'm--I'm not deserting you. And I guess there's
+precious little danger that any one on The Place will ever forget you.
+It's--it's all right. Millions of humans are doing it. I'd give
+everything I've got, if I could go, too. IT'S ALL RIGHT!"
+
+Then Bruce understood at last that he was to stay in this place of
+abominations, far from everything he loved; and that he must do so
+because the Master ordained it. He made no further effort to break away
+and to follow his god ashore. But he shivered convulsively from head to
+foot; and his desolate gaze continued to trace the Master's receding
+figure out of sight. Then, with a long sigh, he lay down, heavily, his
+head between his white forepaws, and resigned himself to whatever of
+future misery his deities might have ordained for him.
+
+Ensued a fortnight of mental and bodily anguish, as the inland-reared
+dog tasted the horrors of a voyage in a rolling ship, through heaving
+seas. Afterward, came the landing at a British port and the train ride
+to the camp which was to be his home for the next three months.
+
+Bruce's sense of smell told him the camp contained more dogs than ever
+he had beheld in all his brief life put together. But his hearing would
+have led him to believe there were not a dozen other dogs within a mile
+of him.
+
+From the encampment arose none of the rackety barking which betokens
+the presence of many canines, and which deafens visitors to a dog-show.
+
+One of the camp's first and most stringent rules forbade barking,
+except under special order. These dogs--or the pick of them--were
+destined for work at the front. The bark of a dog has a carrying
+quality greater than the combined shouting of ten men. It is the last
+sound to follow a balloonist, after he has risen above the reach of all
+other earth-noises.
+
+Hence, a chance bark, rising through the night to where some enemy
+airman soared with engines turned off, might well lead to the bombing
+of hitherto unlocated trenches or detachment-camps. For this and divers
+other reasons, the first lesson taught to arriving wardogs was to
+abstain from barking.
+
+The dogs were divided, roughly, by breeds, as regarded the line of
+training assigned to them. The collies were taught courier-work. The
+Airedales, too,--hideous, cruel, snake-headed,--were used as couriers,
+as well as to bear Red Cross supplies and to hunt for the wounded. The
+gaunt and wolflike police dogs were pressed into the two latter tasks,
+and were taught listening-post duty. And so on through all available
+breeds,--including the stolidly wise Old English sheepdogs who were to
+prove invaluable in finding and succoring and reporting the
+wounded,--down to the humble terriers and mongrels who were taught to
+rid trenches of vermin.
+
+Everywhere was quiet efficiency and tirelessly patient and skillful
+work on the part of the trainers. For Britain's best dog men had been
+recruited for service here. On the perfection of their charges'
+training might depend the fate of many thousand gallant soldiers.
+Wherefore, the training was perfect.
+
+Hundreds of dogs proved stupid or unreliable or gun-shy or too easily
+confused in moments of stress. These were weeded out, continually, and
+shipped back to the masters who had proffered them.
+
+Others developed with amazing speed and cleverness, grasping their
+profession as could few human soldiers. And Bruce, lonely and
+heartsore, yet throwing himself into his labors with all the zest of
+the best thoroughbred type,--was one of this group.
+
+His early teachings now stood him in good stead. What once had been a
+jolly game, for his own amusement and that of the Mistress and the
+Master, was now his life-work. Steadily his trainer wrought over him,
+bringing out latent abilities that would have dumfounded his earliest
+teachers, steadying and directing the gayly dashing intelligence;
+upbuilding and rounding out all his native gifts.
+
+A dog of Bruce's rare type made up to the trainers for the dullness of
+their average pupils. He learned with bewildering ease. He never forgot
+a lesson once taught.
+
+No, the Mistress need not have interceded to save him from beating. As
+soon would an impresario think of thrashing Caruso or Paderewski as
+would Bruce's glum Scottish trainer have laid whip to this best pupil
+of his. Life was bare and strict for Bruce. But life was never unkind
+to him, in these first months of exile from The Place. And, bit by bit,
+he began to take a joy in his work.
+
+Not for a day,--perhaps not for an hour, did the big collie forget the
+home of his babyhood or those he had delighted to worship, there. And
+the look of sadness in his dark eyes became a settled aspect. Yet,
+here, there was much to interest and to excite him. And he grew to look
+forward with pleasure to his daily lessons.
+
+At the end of three months, he was shipped to France. There his
+seemingly aimless studies at the training camp were put to active use.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+At the foot of the long Flanders hill-slope the "Here-We-Come"
+Regiment, of mixed American and French infantry, held a
+caterpillar-shaped line of trenches.
+
+To the right, a few hundred yards away, was posted a Lancashire
+regiment, supported by a battalion from Cornwall. On the left were two
+French regiments. In front, facing the hill-slope and not a half-mile
+distant, was the geometric arrangement of sandbags that marked the
+contour of the German first-line trenches.
+
+The hill behind them, the boches in front of them, French and British
+troops on either side of them--the Here-We-Comes were helping to defend
+what was known as a "quiet" sector. Behind the hill, and on loftier
+heights far to the rear, the Allied artillery was posted. Somewhere in
+the same general locality lay a division of British reserves.
+
+It is almost a waste of words to have described thus the surroundings
+of the Here-We-Comes. For, with no warning at all, those entire
+surroundings were about to be changed.
+
+Ludendorff and his little playmates were just then engaged in the
+congenial sport of delivering unexpected blows at various successive
+points of the Allied line, in an effort to find some spot that was soft
+enough to cave in under the impact and let through a horde of gray-clad
+Huns. And though none of the defenders knew it, this "quiet" sector had
+been chosen for such a minor blow.
+
+The men in higher command, back there behind the hill crest, had a
+belated inkling, though, of a proposed attack on the lightly defended
+front trenches. For the Allied airplanes which drifted in the upper
+heavens like a scattered handful of dragon-flies were not drifting
+there aimlessly. They were the eyes of the snakelike columns that
+crawled so blindly on the scarred brown surface of the earth. And those
+"eyes" had discerned the massing of a force behind the German line had
+discerned and had duly reported it.
+
+The attack might come in a day. It might not come in a week. But it was
+coming--unless the behind-the-lines preparations were a gigantic feint.
+
+A quiet dawn, in the quiet trenches of the quiet sector. Desultory
+artillery and somewhat less desultory sniping had prevailed throughout
+the night, and at daybreak; but nothing out of the ordinary.
+
+Two men on listening-post had been shot; and so had an overcurious
+sentry who peeped just an inch too far above a parapet. A shell had
+burst in a trench, knocking the telephone connection out of gear and
+half burying a squad of sleepers under a lot of earth. Otherwise,
+things were drowsily dull.
+
+In a dugout sprawled Top-Sergeant Mahan,--formerly of Uncle Sam's
+regular army, playing an uninspiring game of poker with Sergeant Dale
+of his company and Sergeant Vivier of the French infantry. The
+Frenchman was slow in learning poker's mysteries.
+
+And, anyway, all three men were temporarily penniless and were forced
+to play for I.O.U's--which is stupid sport, at best.
+
+So when, from the German line, came a quick sputt-sputt-sputt from a
+half-dozen sharpshooters' rifles, all three men looked up from their
+desultory game in real interest. Mahan got to his feet with a grunt.
+
+"Some other fool has been trying to see how far he can rubber above the
+sandbags without drawing boche fire," he hazarded, starting out to
+investigate. "It's a miracle to me how a boche bullet can go through
+heads that are so full of first-quality ivory as those rubberers'."
+
+But Mahan's strictures were quite unwarranted. The sharpshooters were
+not firing at the parapet. Their scattering shots were flying high, and
+hitting against the slope of the hill behind the trenches.
+
+Adown this shell-pocked hillside, as Mahan and the other disturbed
+idlers gazed, came cantering a huge dark-brown-and-white collie. The
+morning wind stirred the black stippling that edged his tawny fur,
+showing the gold-gray undercoat beneath it. His white chest was like a
+snowdrift, and offered a fine mark for the German rifles. A bullet or
+two sang whiningly past his gayly up-flung head.
+
+A hundred voices from the Here-We-Come trenches hailed the advancing
+dog.
+
+"Why, it's Bruce!" cried Mahan in glad welcome. "I might 'a' known he
+or another of the collies would be along. I might 'a' known it, when
+the telephones went out of commission. He--"
+
+"Regardez-donc!" interrupted the admiring Vivier. "He acts like bullets
+was made of flies! Mooch he care for boche lead-pills, ce brave vieux!"
+
+"Yes," growled Dale worriedly; "and one of these days a bullet will
+find its way into that splendid carcass of his. He's been shot at, a
+thousand times, to my own knowledge. And all I ask is a chance, with a
+rifle-butt, at the skull of the Hun who downs him!"
+
+"Downs Bruce?" queried Vivier in fine scorn. "The boche he is no borned
+who can do it. Bruce has what you call it, in Ainglish, the 'charm
+life.' He go safe, where other caniche be pepper-potted full of holes.
+I've watch heem. I know."
+
+Unscathed by the several shots that whined past him, Bruce came to a
+halt at the edge of a traverse. There he stood, wagging his plume of a
+tail in grave friendliness, while a score of khaki-clad arms reached up
+to lift him bodily into the trench.
+
+A sergeant unfastened the message from the dog's collar and posted off
+to the colonel with it.
+
+The message was similar to one which had been telephoned to each of the
+supporting bodies, to right and to left of the Here-We-Comes. It bade
+the colonel prepare to withdraw his command from the front trenches at
+nightfall, and to move back on the main force behind the hill-crest.
+The front trenches were not important; and they were far too lightly
+manned to resist a mass attack. Wherefore the drawing-in and
+consolidating of the whole outflung line.
+
+Bruce, his work done now, had leisure to respond to the countless
+offers of hospitality that encompassed him. One man brought him a slice
+of cold broiled bacon. Another spread pork-grease over a bit of bread
+and proffered it. A third unearthed from some sacredly guarded
+hiding-place an excessively stale half-inch square of sweet chocolate.
+
+Had the dog so chosen, he might then and there have eaten himself to
+death on the multitude of votive offerings. But in a few minutes he had
+had enough, and he merely sniffed in polite refusal at all further
+gifts.
+
+"See?" lectured Mahan. "That's the beast of it! When you say a fellow
+eats or drinks 'like a beast,' you ought to remember that a beast won't
+eat or drink a mouthful more than is good for him."
+
+"Gee!" commented the somewhat corpulent Dale. "I'm glad I'm not a
+beast--especially on pay-day."
+
+Presently Bruce tired of the ovation tendered him. These ovations were
+getting to be an old story. They had begun as far back as his
+training-camp days--when the story of his joining the army was told by
+the man to whom The Place's guest had written commending the dog to the
+trainers' kindness.
+
+At the training-camp this story had been reenforced by the chief
+collie-teacher--a dour little Hieland Scot named McQuibigaskie, who on
+the first day declared that the American dog had more sense and more
+promise and more soul "than a' t'other tykes south o' Kirkcudbright
+Brae."
+
+Being only mortal, Bruce found it pleasanter to be admired and petted
+than ignored or kicked. He was impersonally friendly with the soldiers,
+when he was off duty; and he relished the dainties they were forever
+thrusting at him.
+
+But at times his soft eyes would grow dark with homesickness for the
+quiet loveliness of The Place and for the Mistress and the Master who
+were his loyally worshiped gods. Life had been so happy and so sweetly
+uneventful for him, at The Place! And there had been none of the awful
+endless thunder and the bewilderingly horrible smells and gruesome
+sights which here met him at every turn.
+
+The dog's loving heart used to grow sick with it all; and he longed
+unspeakably for home. But he was a gallant soldier, and he did his work
+not only well, but with a snap and a dash and an almost uncanny
+intelligence which made him an idol to the men.
+
+Presently, now, having eaten all he wanted and having been patted and
+talked to until he craved solitude, Bruce strolled ever to an empty
+dugout, curled up on a torn blanket there, put his nose between his
+white paws and went to sleep.
+
+The German artillery-fire had swelled from an occasional explosion to a
+ceaseless roar, that made the ground vibrate and heave, and that beat
+on the eardrums with nauseating iterance. But it did not bother Bruce.
+For months he had been used to this sort of annoyance, and he had
+learned to sleep snugly through it all.
+
+Meanwhile, outside his dugout, life was speeding up at a dizzying rate.
+The German artillery had sprung to sudden and wholesale activity. Far
+to the right of the Here-We-Come regiment's trenches a haze had begun
+to crawl along the ground and to send snaky tendrils high in
+air-tendrils that blended into a single grayish-green wall as they
+moved forward. The hazewall's gray-green was shot by yellow and purple
+tinges as the sun's weak rays touched it. To the left of the
+Here-We-Comes, and then in front of them, appeared the same wall of
+billowing gas.
+
+The Here-We-Comes were ready for it with their hastily donned masks.
+But there was no need of the precaution. By one of the sudden
+wind--freaks so common in the story of the war, the gas-cloud was cleft
+in two by a swirling breeze, and it rolled dankly on, to right and
+left, leaving the central trenches clear.
+
+Now, an artillery barrage, accompanied or followed by a
+gas-demonstration, can mean but one thing: a general attack. Therefore
+telephonic word came to the detachments to left and right of the
+Here-We-Comes, to fall back, under cover of the gas-cloud, to safer
+positions. Two dogs were sent, with the same order, to the
+Here-We-Comes. (One of the dogs was gassed. A bit of shrapnel found the
+other.)
+
+Thus it was that the Here-We-Comes were left alone (though they did not
+know it), to hold the position,--with no support on either side, and
+with a mere handful of men wherewith to stem the impending rush.
+
+On the heels of the dispersing gas-cloud, and straight across the
+half-mile or less of broken ground, came a line of gray. In five
+successive waves, according to custom, the boches charged. Each wave
+hurled itself forward as fast as efficiency would let it, in face of
+the opposing fire, and as far as human endurance would be goaded. Then
+it went down, and its survivors attached themselves to the succeeding
+wave.
+
+Hence, by the time the fifth and mightiest wave got into motion, it was
+swelled by the survivors of all four of its predecessors and was an
+all-but-resistless mass of shouting and running men.
+
+The rifles and machine-guns of the Here-We-Comes played merrily into
+the advancing gray swarms, stopping wave after wave, and at last
+checking the fifth and "master" wave almost at the very brink of the
+Franco-American parapet.
+
+"That's how they do!" Mahan pantingly explained to a rather shaky
+newcomer, as the last wave fell back. "They count on numbers and
+bullrushes to get them there. If they'd had ten thousand men, in that
+rush, instead of five thousand, they'd have got us. And if they had
+twice as many men in their whole army as they have, they'd win this
+war. But praise be, they haven't twice as many! That is one of the
+fifty-seven reasons why the Allies are going to lick Germany."
+
+Mahan talked jubilantly. The same jubilation ran all along the line of
+victors. But the colonel and his staff were not rejoicing. They had
+just learned of the withdrawal of the forces to either side of them,
+and they knew they themselves could not hope to stand against a second
+and larger charge.
+
+Such a charge the enemy were certain to make. The Germans, too, must
+soon learn of the defection of the supports. It was now only a question
+of an hour or less before a charge with a double-enveloping movement
+would surround and bag the Here-We-Comes, catching the whole regiment
+in an inescapable trap.
+
+To fall back, now, up that long bare hillside, under full fire of the
+augmented German artillery, would mean a decimating of the entire
+command. The Here-We-Comes could not retreat. They could not hope to
+hold their ground. The sole chance for life lay in the arrival of
+strong reenforcements from the rear, to help them hold the trenches
+until night, or to man the supporting positions. Reserves were within
+easy striking distance. But, as happened so many times in the war,
+there was no routine way to summon them in time.
+
+It was the chance sight of a crumpled message lying on his dugout-table
+that reminded the colonel of Bruce's existence and of his presence in
+the front trench. It was a matter of thirty seconds for the colonel to
+scrawl an urgent appeal and a brief statement of conditions. Almost as
+soon as the note was ready, an orderly appeared at the dugout entrance,
+convoying the newly awakened Bruce.
+
+The all-important message was fastened in place. The colonel himself
+went to the edge of the traverse, and with his own arms lifted the
+eighty-pound collie to the top.
+
+There was tenderness as well as strength in the lifting arms. As he set
+Bruce down on the brink, the colonel said, as if speaking to a
+fellow-human:
+
+"I hate to do it, old chap. I HATE to! There isn't one chance in three
+of your getting all the way up the hill alive. But there wouldn't be
+one chance in a hundred, for a MAN. The boches will be on the lookout
+for just this move. And their best sharpshooters will be waiting for
+you--even if you dodge the shrapnel and the rest of the artillery. I'm
+sorry! And--good-by."
+
+Then, tersely, he rasped out the command--
+
+"Bruce! Headquarters! Headquarters! QUICK!"
+
+At a bound, the dog was gone.
+
+Breasting the rise of the hill, Bruce set off at a sweeping run, his
+tawny-and-white mane flying in the wind.
+
+A thousand eyes, from the Here-We-Come trenches, watched his flight.
+And as many eyes from the German lines saw the huge collie's dash up
+the coverless slope.
+
+Scarce had Bruce gotten fairly into his stride when the boche bullets
+began to sing--not a desultory little flurry of shots, as before; but
+by the score, and with a murderous earnestness. When he had appeared,
+on his way to the trenches, an hour earlier, the Germans had opened
+fire on him, merely for their own amusement--upon the same merry
+principle which always led them to shoot at an Ally war-dog. But now
+they understood his all-important mission; and they strove with their
+best skill to thwart it.
+
+The colonel of the Here-We-Comes drew his breath sharply between his
+teeth. He did not regret the sending of the collie. It had been a move
+of stark military necessity. And there was an off chance that it might
+mean the saving of his whole command.
+
+But the colonel was fond of Bruce, and it angered him to hear the
+frantic effort of the boche marksmen to down so magnificent a creature.
+The bullets were spraying all about the galloping dog, kicking up tiny
+swirls of dust at his heels and in front of him and to either side.
+
+Mahan, watching, with streaming eyes and blaspheming lips, recalled the
+French sergeant's theory that Bruce bore a charmed life. And he prayed
+that Vivier might be right. But in his prayer was very little faith.
+For under such a fusillade it seemed impossible that at least one
+highpower bullet should not reach the collie before the slope could be
+traversed. A fast-running dog is not an easy mark for a
+bullet--especially if the dog be a collie, with a trace of
+wolf--ancestry in his gait. A dog, at best, does not gallop straight
+ahead as does a horse. There is almost always a sidewise lilt to his
+run.
+
+Bruce was still further aided by the shell-plowed condition of the
+hillside. Again and again he had to break his stride, to leap some
+shell-hole. Often he had to encircle such holes. More than once he
+bounded headlong down into a gaping crater and scrambled up its far
+side. These erratic moves, and the nine-hundred-yard distance (a
+distance that was widening at every second) made the sharpshooters'
+task anything but an exact science.
+
+Mahan's gaze followed the dog's every step. Bruce had cleared more than
+three-fourths of the slope. The top-sergeant permitted himself the
+luxury of a broad grin.
+
+"I'll buy Vivier all the red-ink wine he can gargle, next pay-day!" he
+vowed. "He was dead right about the dog. No bullet was ever molded that
+can get--"
+
+Mahan broke off in his exultation, with an explosive oath, as a new
+note in the firing smote upon his trained hearing.
+
+"The swine!" he roared. "The filthy, unsportsmanly, dog-eating Prussian
+swine! They're turning MACHINE-GUNS on him!"
+
+In place of the intermittent rattle of rifleshots now came the purring
+cough of rapidfire guns. The bullets hit the upper hillside in swathes,
+beginning a few yards behind the flying collie and moving upward toward
+him like a sweeping of an unseen scythe.
+
+"That's the wind-up!" groaned Mahan. "Lord, send me an even break
+against one of those Hun machinegunners some day! If--"
+
+Again Mahan failed to finish his train of thought. He stared
+open-mouthed up the hill. Almost at the very summit, within a rod or
+two of the point where the crest would intervene between him and his
+foes, Bruce whirled in mid-air and fell prone.
+
+The fast-following swaths of machine-gun bullets had not reached him.
+But another German enemy had. From behind a heap of offal, on the
+crest, a yellow-gray dog had sprung, and had launched himself bodily
+upon Bruce's flank as the unnoticing collie had flashed past him.
+
+The assailant was an enormous and hyena-like German police-dog. He was
+one of the many of his breed that were employed (for work or food) in
+the German camps, and which used to sneak away from their hard-kicking
+soldier-owners to ply a more congenial trade as scavengers, and as
+seekers for the dead. For, in traits as well as in looks, the
+police-dog often emulates the ghoulish hyena.
+
+Seeing the approaching collie (always inveterate foe of his kind), the
+police-dog had gauged the distance and had launched his surprise attack
+with true Teuton sportsmanship and efficiency. Down went Bruce under
+the fierce weight that crashed against his shoulder. But before the
+other could gain his coveted throat-grip, Bruce was up again. Like a
+furry whirlwind he was at the police-dog, fighting more like a wolf
+than a civilized collie--tearing into his opponent with a maniac rage,
+snapping, slashing; his glittering white fangs driving at a dozen
+vulnerable points in a single second.
+
+It was as though Bruce knew he had no time to waste from his
+life-and-death mission. He could not elude this enemy, so he must
+finish him as quickly as possible.
+
+"Give me your rifle!" sputtered Mahan to the soldier nearest him. "I'll
+take one potshot at that Prussian cur, before the machine-guns get the
+two of 'em. Even if I hit Bruce by mistake, he'd rather die by a
+Christian Yankee-made bullet than--"
+
+Just then the scythelike machine-gun fire reached the hillcrest
+combatants. And in the same instant a shell smote the ground,
+apparently between them. Up went a geyser of smoke and dirt and rocks.
+When the cloud settled, there was a deep gully in the ground where a
+moment earlier Bruce and the police-dog had waged their death-battle.
+
+"That settles it!" muttered the colonel.
+
+And he went to make ready for such puny defense as his men might hope
+to put up against the German rush.
+
+While these futile preparations were still under way, terrific
+artillery fire burst from the Allied batteries behind the hill,
+shielding the Here-We-Come trenches with a curtain of fire whose lower
+folds draped themselves right unlovingly around the German lines. Under
+cover of this barrage, down the hill swarmed the Allied reserves!
+
+"How did you get word?" demanded the astonished colonel of the
+Here-We-Comes, later in the day.
+
+"From your note, of course," replied the general he had questioned.
+"The collie--old Bruce."
+
+"Bruce?" babbled the colonel foolishly.
+
+"Of course," answered the general. "Who else? But I'm afraid it's the
+last message he'll ever deliver. He came rolling and staggering up to
+headquarters--one mass of blood, and three inches thick with caked
+dirt. His right side was torn open from a shell-wound, and he had two
+machine-gun bullets in his shoulder. He's deaf as a post, too, from
+shell-shock. He tumbled over in a heap on the steps of headquarters.
+But he GOT there. That's Bruce, all over. That's the best type of
+collie, all over. Some of us were for putting him out of his misery
+with a shot through the head. We'd have done it, too, if it had been
+any other dog. But the surgeon-general waded in and took a hand in the
+game--carried Bruce to his own quarters. We left him working over the
+dog himself. And he swears Bruce will pull through!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. When Eyes Were No Use
+
+"Yes, it's an easy enough trade to pick up," lectured Top-Sergeant
+Mahan, formerly of the regular army. "You've just got to remember a few
+things. But you've got to keep on remembering those few, all the time.
+If you forget one of 'em, it's the last bit of forgetting you're ever
+likely to do."
+
+Top-Sergeant Mahan, of the mixed French-and-American regiment known as
+"Here-We-Come," was squatting at ease on the trench firing-step. From
+that professorial seat he was dispensing useful knowledge to a group of
+fellow-countrymen-newly arrived from the base, to pad the
+"Here-We-Come" ranks, which had been thinned at the Rache attack.
+
+"What sort of things have we got to remember, Sergeant?" jauntily asked
+a lanky Missourian. "We've got the drill pretty pat; and the trench
+instructions and--"
+
+"Gee!" ejaculated Mahan. "I had no idea of that! Then why don't you
+walk straight ahead into Berlin? If you know all you say you do, about
+war, there's nothing more for you to learn. I'll drop a line to General
+Foch and suggest to him that you rookies be detailed to teach the game
+to us oldsters."
+
+"I didn't mean to be fresh," apologized the jaunty one. "Won't you go
+ahead and tell us the things we need to remember?"
+
+"Well," exhorted Mahan, appeased by the newcomer's humility, "there
+aren't so many of them, after all. Learn to duck, when you hear a
+Minnie grunt or a whizzbang cut loose; or a five-nine begin to whimper.
+Learn not to bother to duck when the rifles get to jabbering--for
+you'll never hear the bullet that gets you. Study the nocturnal habits
+of machine-guns and the ways of snipers and the right time not to play
+the fool. And keep saying to yourself: 'The bullet ain't molded that
+can get ME!' Mean it when you say it. When you've learned those few
+things, the rest of the war-game is dead easy."
+
+"Except," timidly amended old Sergeant Vivier, the gray little
+Frenchman, "except when eyes are--are what you call it, no use."
+"That's right," assented Mahan. "In the times when eyes are no use, all
+rules fail. And then the only thing you can do is to trust to your
+Yankee luck. I remember--"
+
+"'When eyes are no use'?" repeated the recruit. "If you mean after
+dark, at night--haven't we got the searchlights and the starshells and
+all that?"
+
+"Son," replied Mahan, "we have. Though I don't see how you ever guessed
+such an important secret. But since you know everything, maybe you'll
+just kindly tell us what good all the lights in the world are going to
+do us when the filthy yellow-gray fog begins to ooze up out of the mud
+and the shell-holes, and the filthy gray mist oozes down from the
+clouds to meet it. Fog is the one thing that all the war-science won't
+overcome. A fogpenetrator hasn't been invented yet. If it had been,
+there'd be many a husky lad living today, who has gone West, this past
+few years, on account of the fogs. Fog is the boche's pet. It gives
+Fritzy a lovely chance to creep up or, us. It--"
+
+"It is the helper of US, too," suggested old Vivier. "More than one
+time, it has kept me safe when I was on patrol. And did it not help to
+save us at Rache, when--"
+
+"The fog may have helped us, one per cent, at Rache," admitted Mahan.
+"But Bruce did ninety-nine per cent of the saving."
+
+"A Scotch general?" asked the recruit, as Vivier nodded cordial
+affirmation of Mahan's words, and as others of the old-timers muttered
+approval.
+
+"No," contradicted Mahan. "A Scotch collie. If you were dry behind the
+ears, in this life, you wouldn't have to ask who Bruce is."
+
+"I don't understand," faltered the rookie, suspicious of a possible
+joke.
+
+"You will soon," Mahan told him. "Bruce will be here to-day. I heard
+the K.O. saying the big dog is going to be sent down with some
+dispatches or something, from headquarters. It's his first trip since
+he was cut up so."
+
+"I am saving him--this!" proclaimed Vivier, disgorging from the flotsam
+of his pocket a lump of once-white sugar. "My wife, she smuggle three
+of these to me in her last paquet. One I eat in my cafe noir; one I
+present to mon cher vieux, ce bon Mahan; one I keep for the grand dog
+what save us all that day."
+
+"What's the idea?" queried the mystified rookie. "I don't--"
+
+"We were stuck in the front line of the Rache salient," explained
+Mahan, eager to recount his dog-friend's prowess. "On both sides our
+supports got word to fall back. We couldn't get the word, because our
+telephone connection was knocked galley-west. There we were, waiting
+for a Hun attack to wipe us out. We couldn't fall back, for they were
+peppering the hillslope behind us. We were at the bottom. They'd have
+cut us to ribbons if we'd shown our carcasses in the open. Bruce was
+here, with a message he'd brought. The K.O. sent him back to
+headquarters for the reserves. The boche heavies and snipers and
+machine-guns all cut loose to stop him as he scooted up the hill. And a
+measly giant of a German police dog tried to kill him, too. Bruce got
+through the lot of them; and he reached headquarters with the SOS call
+that saved us. The poor chap was cut and gouged and torn by bullets and
+shell-scraps, and he was nearly dead from shell-shock, too. But the
+surgeon general worked over him, himself, and pulled him back to life.
+He--"
+
+"He is a loved pet of a man and a woman in your America, I have heard
+one say," chimed in Vivier. "And his home, there, was in the quiet
+country. He was lent to the cause, as a patriotic offering, ce brave!
+And of a certainty, he has earned his welcome."
+
+When Bruce, an hour later, trotted into the trenches, on the way to the
+"Here-We-Come" colonel's quarters, he was received like a visiting
+potentate. Dozens of men hailed him eagerly by name as he made his way
+to his destination with the message affixed to his collar.
+
+Many of these men were his well-remembered friends and comrades. Mahan
+and Vivier, and one or two more, he had grown to like--as well as he
+could like any one in that land of horrors, three thousand miles away
+from The Place, where he was born, and from the Mistress and the
+Master, who were his loyally worshiped gods.
+
+Moreover, being only mortal and afflicted with a hearty appetite, Bruce
+loved the food and other delicacies the men were forever offering him
+as a variation on the stodgy fare dished out to him and his fellow
+war-dogs.
+
+As much to amuse and interest the soldiers whose hero he was, as for
+any special importance in the dispatch he carried, Bruce had been sent
+now to the trenches of the Here-We-Comes. It was his first visit to the
+regiment he had saved, since the days of the Rache assault two months
+earlier. Thanks to supremely clever surgery and to tender care, the dog
+was little the worse for his wounds. His hearing gradually had come
+back. In one shoulder he had a very slight stiffness which was not a
+limp, and a new-healed furrow scarred the left side of his tawny coat.
+Otherwise he was as good as new.
+
+As Bruce trotted toward the group that so recently had been talking of
+him, the Missouri recruit watched with interest for the dog's joy at
+this reunion with his old friends. Bruce's snowy chest and
+black-stippled coat were fluffed out by many recent baths. His splendid
+head high and his dark eyes bright, the collie advanced toward the
+group.
+
+Mahan greeted him joyously. Vivier stretched out a hand which displayed
+temptingly the long-hoarded lump of sugar. A third man produced, from
+nowhere in particular, a large and meat-fringed soup-bone.
+
+"I wonder which of you he'll come to, first," said the interested
+Missourian.
+
+The question was answered at once, and right humiliatingly. For Bruce
+did not falter in his swinging stride as he came abreast of the group.
+Not by so much as a second glance did he notice Mahan's hail and the
+tempting food.
+
+As he passed within six inches of the lump of sugar which Vivier was
+holding out to him, the dog's silken ears quivered slightly, sure sign
+of hard-repressed emotion in a thoroughbred collie,--but he gave no
+other manifestation that he knew any one was there.
+
+"Well, I'll be blessed!" snickered the Missourian in high derision, as
+Bruce passed out of sight around an angle of the trench. "So that's the
+pup who is such a pal of you fellows, is he? Gee, but it was a treat to
+see how tickled he was to meet you again!"
+
+To the rookie's amazement none of his hearers seemed in the least
+chagrined over the dogs chilling disregard of them. Instead, Mahan
+actually grunted approbation.
+
+"He'll be back," prophesied the Sergeant. "Don't you worry. He'll be
+back. We ought to have had more sense than try to stop him when he's on
+duty. He has better discipline than the rest of us. That's one of very
+first things they teach a courier-dog--to pay no attention to anybody,
+when he's on dispatch duty. When Bruce has delivered his message to the
+K.O., he'll have the right to hunt up his chums. And no one knows it
+better'n Bruce himself."
+
+"It was a sin--a thoughtlessness--of me to hold the sugar at him," said
+old Vivier. "Ah, but he is a so good soldier, ce brave Bruce! He look
+not to the left nor yet to the right, nor yet to the so-desired
+sugar-lump. He keep his head at attention! All but the furry tips of
+his ears. Them he has not yet taught to be good soldiers. They tremble,
+when he smell the sugar and the good soup-bone. They quiver like the
+little leaf. But he keep on. He--"
+
+There was a scurry of fast-cantering feet. Around the angle of the
+trench dashed Bruce. Head erect, soft dark eyes shining with a light of
+gay mischief, he galloped up to the grinning Sergeant Vivier and stood.
+The dog's great plume of a tail was wagging violently. His tulip ears
+were cocked. His whole interest in life was fixed on the precious lump
+of sugar which Vivier held out to him.
+
+From puppyhood, Bruce had adored lump sugar. Even at The Place, sugar
+had been a rarity for him, for the Mistress and the Master had known
+the damage it can wreak upon a dog's teeth and digestion. Yet, once in
+a while, as a special luxury, the Mistress had been wont to give him a
+solitary lump of sugar.
+
+Since his arrival in France, the dog had never seen nor scented such a
+thing until now. Yet he did not jump for the gift. He did not try to
+snatch it from Vivier. Instead, he waited until the old Frenchman held
+it closer toward him, with the invitation:
+
+"Take it, mon vieux! It is for you."
+
+Then and then only did Bruce reach daintily forward and grip the grimy
+bit of sugar between his mighty jaws. Vivier stroked the collie's head
+while Bruce wagged his tail and munched the sugar and blinked
+gratefully up at the donor. Mahan looked on, enviously. "A dog's got
+forty-two teeth, instead of the thirty-two that us humans have to chew
+on," observed the Sergeant. "A vet' told me that once. And sugar is bad
+for all forty-two of 'em. Maybe you didn't know that, Monsoo Vivier?
+Likely, at this rate, we'll have to chip in before long and buy poor
+Brucie a double set of false teeth. Just because you've put his real
+ones out of business with lumps of sugar!"
+
+Vivier looked genuinely concerned at this grim forecast. Bruce wandered
+across to the place where the donor of the soup-bone brandished his
+offering. Other men, too, were crowding around with gifts.
+
+Between petting and feeding, the collie spent a busy hour among his
+comrades-at-arms. He was to stay with the "Here-We-Comes" until the
+following day, and then carry back to headquarters a reconnaissance
+report.
+
+At four o'clock that afternoon the sky was softly blue and the air was
+unwontedly clear. By five o'clock a gentle India-summer haze blurred
+the world's sharper outlines. By six a blanket-fog rolled in, and the
+air was wetly unbreatheable. The fog lay so thick over the soggy earth
+that objects ten feet away were invisible.
+
+"This," commented Sergeant Mahan, "is one of the times I was talking
+about this morning--when eyes are no use. This is sure the country for
+fogs, in war-time. The cockneys tell me the London fogs aren't a patch
+on 'em."
+
+The "Here-We-Comes" were encamped, for the while, at the edge of a
+sector from whence all military importance had recently been removed by
+a convulsive twist of a hundred-mile battle-front. In this dull
+hole-in-a-corner the new-arrived rivets were in process of welding into
+the more veteran structure of the mixed regiment.
+
+Not a quarter-mile away--across No Man's Land and athwart two barriers
+of barbed wire--lay a series of German trenches. Now, in all
+probability, and from all outward signs, the occupants of this boche
+position consisted only of a regiment or two which had been so badly
+cut up, in a foiled drive, as to need a month of non-exciting routine
+before going back into more perilous service.
+
+Yet the commander of the division to which the "Here-We-Comes" were
+attached did not trust to probabilities nor to outward signs. He had
+been at the front long enough to realize that the only thing likely to
+happen was the thing which seemed unlikeliest. And he felt a morbid
+curiosity to learn more about the personnel of those dormant German
+trenches.
+
+Wherefore he had sent an order that a handful of the "Here-We-Comes" go
+forth into No Man's Land, on the first favorable night, and try to pick
+up a boche prisoner or two for questioning-purposes. A scouring of the
+doubly wired area between the hostile lines might readily harvest some
+solitary sentinel or some other man on special duty, or even the
+occupants of a listening-post. And the division commander earnestly
+desired to question such prisoner or prisoners. The fog furnished an
+ideal night for such an expedition.
+
+Thus it was that a very young lieutenant and Sergeant Mahan and ten
+privates--the lanky Missourian among them--were detailed for the
+prisoner-seeking job. At eleven o'clock, they crept over the top,
+single file.
+
+It was a night wherein a hundred searchlights and a million star-flares
+would not have made more impression on the density of the fog than
+would the striking of a safety match. Yet the twelve reconnoiterers
+were instructed to proceed in the cautious manner customary to such
+nocturnal expeditions into No Man's Land. They moved forward at the
+lieutenant's order, tiptoeing abreast, some twenty feet apart from one
+another, and advancing in three-foot strides. At every thirty steps the
+entire line was required to halt and to reestablish contact--in other
+words, to "dress" on the lieutenant, who was at the extreme right.
+
+This maneuver was more time-wasting and less simple than its recital
+would imply. For in the dark, unaccustomed legs are liable to
+miscalculation in the matter of length of stride, even when shell-holes
+and other inequalities of ground do not complicate the calculations
+still further. And it is hard to maintain a perfectly straight line
+when moving forward through choking fog and over scores of obstacles.
+
+The halts for realignment consumed much time and caused no little
+confusion. Nervousness began to encompass the Missouri recruit. He was
+as brave as the next man. But there is something creepy about walking
+with measured tread through an invisible space, with no sound but the
+stealthy pad-pad-pad of equally hesitant footsteps twenty feet away on
+either side. The Missourian was grateful for the intervals that brought
+the men into mutual contact, as the eerie march continued.
+
+The first line of barbed wire was cut and passed. Then followed an
+endless groping progress across No Man's Land, and several delays, as
+one man or another had trouble in finding contact with his neighbor.
+
+At last the party came to the German wires. The lieutenant had drawn on
+a rubber glove. In his gloved hand he grasped a strip of steel which he
+held in front of him, like a wand, fanning the air with it.
+
+As he came to the entanglement, he probed the barbed wire carefully
+with his wand, watching for an ensuing spark. For the Germans more than
+once had been known to electrify their wires, with fatal results to
+luckless prowlers.
+
+These wires, to-night, were not charged. And, with pliers, the
+lieutenant and Mahan started to cut a passageway through them.
+
+As the very first strand parted under his pressure, Mahan laid one hand
+warningly on the lieutenant's sleeve, and then passed the same
+prearranged warning down the line to the left.
+
+Silence--moveless, tense, sharply listening silence--followed his
+motion. Then the rest of the party heard the sound which Mahan's keener
+ears had caught a moment earlier--the thud of many marching feet. Here
+was no furtive creeping, as when the twelve Yankees had moved along.
+Rather was it the rhythmic beat of at least a hundred pairs of
+shapeless army boots--perhaps of more. The unseen marchers were moving
+wordlessly, but with no effort at muffling the even tread of their
+multiple feet.
+
+"They're coming this way!" breathed Sergeant Mahan almost without
+sound, his lips close to the excited young lieutenant's ear. "And
+they're not fifty paces off. That means they're boches. So near the
+German wire, our men would either be crawling or else charging, not
+marching! It's a company--maybe a battalion--coming back from a
+reconnaissance, and making for a gap in their own wire some where near
+here. If we lay low there's an off chance they may pass us by."
+
+Without awaiting the lieutenant's order, Mahan passed along the signal
+for every man to drop to earth and lie there. He all but forced the
+eagerly gesticulating lieutenant to the ground.
+
+On came the swinging tread of the Germans. Mahan, listening
+breathlessly, tried to gauge the distance and the direction. He
+figured, presently, that the break the Germans had made in their wire
+could be only a few yards below the spot where he and the lieutenant
+had been at work with the pliers. Thus the intruders, from their
+present course, must inevitably pass very close to the prostrate
+Americans--so close, perhaps, as to brush against the nearest of them,
+or even to step on one or more of the crouching figures.
+
+Mahan whispered to the man on his immediate left, the rookie from
+Missouri:
+
+"Edge closer to the wire--close as you can wiggle, and lie flat. Pass
+on the word."
+
+The Missourian obeyed. Before writhing his long body forward against
+the bristly mass of wire he passed the instructions on to the man at
+his own left.
+
+But his nerves were at breaking-point.
+
+It had been bad enough to crawl through the blind fog, with the ghostly
+steps of his comrades pattering softly at either side of him. But it
+was a thousand times harder to lie helpless here, in the choking fog
+and on the soaked ground, while countless enemies were bearing down,
+unseen, upon him, on one side, and an impenetrable wire cut off his
+retreat on the other.
+
+The Missourian had let his imagination begin to work; always a mistake
+in a private soldier. He was visualizing the moment when this tramping
+German force should become aware of the presence of their puny foes and
+should slaughter them against the merciless wires. It would not be a
+fair stand-up fight, this murder-rush of hundreds of men against twelve
+who were penned in and could not maneuver nor escape. And the thought
+of it was doing queer things to the rookie's overwrought nerves.
+
+Having passed the word to creep closer to the wires, he began to
+execute the order in person, with no delay at all. But he was a
+fraction of a second too late. The Germans were moving in
+hike-formation with "points" thrown out in advance to either side--a
+"point" being a private soldier who, for scouting and other purposes,
+marches at some distance from the main body.
+
+The point, ahead of the platoon, had swerved too far to the left, in
+the blackness--an error that would infallibly have brought him up
+against the wires, with considerable force, in another two steps. But
+the Missourian was between him and the wires. And the point's
+heavy-shod foot came down, heel first, on the back of the rookie's
+out-groping hand. Such a crushing impact, on the hand-back, is one of
+the most agonizing minor injuries a man can sustain. And this fact the
+Missourian discovered with great suddenness.
+
+His too-taut nerves forced from his throat a yell that split the
+deathly stillness with an ear-piercing vehemence. He sprang to his
+feet, forgetful of orders intent only on thrusting his bayonet through
+the Hun who had caused such acute torture to his hand. Half way up, the
+rookie's feet went out from under him in the slimy mud. He caromed
+against the point, then fell headlong.
+
+The German, doubtless thinking he had stumbled upon a single stray
+American scout, whirled his own rifle aloft, to dash out the brains of
+his luckless foe. But before the upflung butt could descend,--before
+the rookie could rise or dodge,--the point added his quota to the rude
+breaking of the night's silence. He screamed in panic terror, dropped
+his brandished gun and reeled backward, clawing at his own throat.
+
+For out of the eerie darkness, something had launched itself at
+him--something silent and terrible, that had flown to the Missourian's
+aid. Down with a crash went the German, on his back. He rolled against
+the Missourian, who promptly sought to grapple with him.
+
+But even as he clawed for the German, the rookie's nerves wrung from
+him a second yell--this time less of rage than of horror.
+
+"Sufferin' cats!" he bellowed. "Why didn't anybody ever tell me Germans
+was covered with fur instead of clothes?"
+
+The boche platoon was no longer striding along in hike-formation. It
+was broken up into masses of wildly running men, all of them bearing
+down upon the place whence issued this ungodly racket and turmoil.
+Stumbling, reeling, blindly falling and rising again, they came on.
+
+Some one among them loosed a rifle-shot in the general direction of the
+yelling. A second and a third German rifleman followed the example of
+the first. From the distant American trenches, one or two snipers began
+to pepper away toward the enemy lines, though the fog was too thick for
+them, to see the German rifle-flashes.
+
+The boches farthest to the left, in the blind rush, fouled with the
+wires. German snipers, from behind the Hun parapets, opened fire. A
+minute earlier the night had been still as the grave. Now it fairly
+vibrated with clangor. All because one rookie's nerves had been less
+staunch than his courage, and because that same rookie had not only had
+his hand stepped on in the dark, but had encountered something swirling
+and hairy when he grabbed for the soldier who had stepped on him!
+
+
+The American lieutenant, at the onset of the clamor, sprang to his
+feet, whipping out his pistol; his dry lips parted in a command to
+charge--a command which, naturally, would have reduced his eleven men
+and himself to twelve corpses or to an equal number of mishandled
+prisoners within the next few seconds. But a big hand was clapped
+unceremoniously across the young officer's mouth, silencing the
+half-spoken suicidal order.
+
+Sergeant Mahan's career in the regular army had given him an almost
+uncanny power of sizing up his fellowmen. And he had long ago decided
+that this was the sort of thing his untried lieutenant would be likely
+to do, in just such an emergency. Wherefore his flagrant breach of
+discipline in shoving his palm across the mouth of his superior officer.
+
+And as he was committing this breach of discipline, he heard the
+Missourian's strangled gasp of:
+
+"Why didn't anybody ever tell me Germans was covered with fur?"
+
+In a flash Mahan understood. Wheeling, he stooped low and flung out
+both arms in a wide-sweeping circle. Luckily his right hand's
+fingertips, as they completed the circle, touched something fast-moving
+and furry.
+
+"Bruce!" he whispered fiercely, tightening his precarious grip on the
+wisp of fur his fingers had touched. "Bruce! Stand still, boy! It's YOU
+who's got to get us clear of this! Nobody else, short of the good Lord,
+can do it!"
+
+Bruce had had a pleasantly lazy day with his friends in the first-line
+trenches. There had been much good food and more petting. And at last,
+comfortably tired of it all, he had gone to sleep. He had awakened in a
+most friendly mood, and a little hungry. Wherefore he had sallied forth
+in search of human companionship. He found plenty of soldiers who were
+more than willing to talk to him and make much of him. But, a little
+farther ahead, he saw his good friend, Sergeant Mahan, and others of
+his acquaintances, starting over the parapet on what promised to be a
+jolly evening stroll.
+
+All dogs find it hard to resist the mysterious lure of a walk in human
+companionship. True, the night was not an ideal one for a ramble, and
+the fog had a way of congealing wetly on Bruce's shaggy coat. Still, a
+damp coat was not enough of a discomfort to offset the joy of a stroll
+with his friends. So Bruce had followed the twelve men quietly into No
+Man's Land, falling decorously into step behind Mahan.
+
+It had not been much of a walk, for speed or for fun. For the humans
+went ridiculously slowly, and had an eccentric way of bunching
+together, every now and again, and then of stringing out into a
+shambling line. Still, it was a walk, and therefore better than loafing
+behind in the trenches. And Bruce had kept his noiseless place at the
+Sergeant's heels.
+
+Then--long before Mahan heard the approaching tramp of feet--Bruce
+caught not only the sound but the scent of the German platoon. The
+scent at once told him that the strangers were not of his own army. A
+German soldier and an American soldier--because of their difference in
+diet as well as for certain other and more cogent reasons--have by no
+means the same odor, to a collie's trained scent, nor to that of other
+breeds of war-dogs. Official records of dog-sentinels prove that.
+
+Aliens were nearing Bruce's friends. And the dog's ruff began to stand
+up. But Mahan and the rest seemed in no way concerned in spirit
+thereby--though, to the dog's understanding, they must surely be aware
+of the approach. So Bruce gave no further sign of displeasure. He was
+out for a walk, as a guest. He was not on sentry-duty.
+
+But when the nearest German was almost upon them, and all twelve
+Americans dropped to the ground, the collie became interested once
+more. A German stepped on the hand of one of his newest friends. And
+the friend yelled in pain. Whereat the German made as if to strike the
+stepped-on man.
+
+This was quite enough for loyal Bruce. Without so much as a growl of
+warning, he jumped at the offender.
+
+Dog and man tumbled earthward together. Then after an instant of flurry
+and noise, Bruce felt Mahan's fingers on his shoulder and heard the
+stark appeal of Mahan's whispered voice. Instantly the dog was a
+professional soldier once more--alertly obedient and resourceful.
+
+"Catch hold my left arm, Lieutenant!" Mahan was exhorting. "Close up,
+there, boys--every man's hand grabbing tight to the shoulder of the man
+on his left! Pass the word. And you, Missouri, hang onto the
+Lieutenant! Quick, there! And tread soft and tread fast, and don't let
+go, whatever happens! Not a sound out of any one! I'm leading the way.
+And Bruce is going to lead me."
+
+There was a scurrying scramble as the men groped for one another. Mahan
+tightened his hold on Bruce's mane.
+
+"Bruce!" he said, very low, but with a strength of appeal that was not
+lost on the listening dog. "Bruce! Camp! Back to CAMP! And keep QUIET!
+Back to camp, boy! CAMP!"
+
+He had no need to repeat his command so often and so strenuously. Bruce
+was a trained courier. The one word "Camp!" was quite enough to tell
+him what he was to do.
+
+Turning, he faced the American lines and tried to break into a gallop.
+His scent and his knowledge of direction were all the guides he needed.
+A dog always relies on his nose first and his eyes last. The fog was no
+obstacle at all to the collie. He understood the Sergeant's order, and
+he set out at once to obey it.
+
+But at the very first step, he was checked. Mahan did not release that
+feverishly tight hold on his mane, but merely shifted to his collar.
+
+Bruce glanced back, impatient at the delay. But Mahan did not let go.
+Instead he said once more:
+
+"CAMP, boy!"
+
+And Bruce understood he was expected to make his way to camp, with
+Mahan hanging on to his collar.
+
+Bruce did not enjoy this mode of locomotion. It was inconvenient, and
+there seemed no sense in it; but there were many things about this
+strenuous war-trade that Bruce neither enjoyed nor comprehended, yet
+which he performed at command.
+
+So again he turned campward, Mahan at his collar and an annoyingly
+hindering tail of men stumbling silently on behind them. All around
+were the Germans--butting drunkenly through the blanket-dense fog,
+swinging their rifles like flails, shouting confused orders,
+occasionally firing. Now and then two or more of them would collide and
+would wrestle in blind fury, thinking they had encountered an American.
+
+Impeded by their own sightlessly swarming numbers, as much as by the
+impenetrable darkness, they sought the foe. And but for Bruce they must
+quickly have found what they sought. Even in compact form, the
+Americans could not have had the sheer luck to dodge every scattered
+contingent of Huns which starred the German end of No Man's Land--most
+of them between the fugitives and the American lines.
+
+But Bruce was on dispatch duty. It was his work to obey commands and to
+get back to camp at once. It was bad enough to be handicapped by
+Mahan's grasp on his collar. He was not minded to suffer further delay
+by running into any of the clumps of gesticulating and cabbage-reeking
+Germans between him and his goal. So he steered clear of such groups,
+making several wide detours in order to do so. Once or twice he stopped
+short to let some of the Germans grope past him, not six feet away.
+Again he veered sharply to the left--increasing his pace and forcing
+Mahan and the rest to increase theirs--to avoid a squad of thirty men
+who were quartering the field in close formation, and who all but
+jostled the dog as they strode sightlessly by. An occasional rifle-shot
+spat forth its challenge. From both trench-lines men were firing at a
+venture. A few of the bullets sang nastily close to the twelve huddled
+men and their canine leader. Once a German, not three yards away,
+screamed aloud and fell sprawling and kicking, as one such chance
+bullet found him. Above and behind, sounded the plop of star-shells
+sent up by the enemy in futile hope of penetrating the viscid fog. And
+everywhere was heard the shuffle and stumbling of innumerable boots.
+
+At last the noise of feet began to die away, and the uneven groping
+tread of the twelve Americans to sound more distinctly for the
+lessening of the surrounding turmoil. And in another few seconds Bruce
+came to a halt--not to an abrupt stop, as when he had allowed an enemy
+squad to pass in front of him, but a leisurely checking of speed, to
+denote that he could go no farther with the load he was helping to haul.
+
+Mahan put out his free hand. It encountered the American wires. Bruce
+had stopped at the spot where the party had cut a narrow path through
+the entanglement on the outward journey. Alone, the dog could easily
+have passed through the gap, but he could not be certain of pulling
+Mahan with him. Wherefore the halt.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The last of the twelve men scrambled down to safety, in the American
+first-line trench, Bruce among them. The lieutenant went straight to
+his commanding officer, to make his report. Sergeant Mahan went
+straight to his company cook, whom he woke from a snoreful sleep.
+Presently Mahan ran back to where the soldiers were gathered admiringly
+around Bruce.
+
+The Sergeant carried a chunk of fried beef, for which he had just given
+the cook his entire remaining stock of cigarettes.
+
+"Here you are, Bruce!" he exclaimed. "The best in the shop is none too
+good for the dog that got us safe out of that filthy mess. Eat hearty!"
+
+Bruce did not so much as sniff at the (more or less) tempting bit of
+meat. Coldly he looked up at Mahan. Then, with sensitive ears laid flat
+against his silken head, in token of strong contempt, he turned his
+back on the Sergeant and walked away.
+
+Which was Bruce's method of showing what he thought of a human fool who
+would give him a command and who would then hold so tightly to him that
+the dog could hardly carry out the order.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. The Double Cross
+
+In the background lay a landscape that had once been beautiful. In the
+middle distance rotted a village that had once been alive. In the
+foreground stood an edifice that had once been a church. The
+once-beautiful landscape had the look of a gigantic pockmarked face, so
+scored was it by shell-scar and crater. Its vegetation was swept away.
+Its trees were shattered stumps. Its farmsteads were charred piles of
+rubble.
+
+The village was unlike the general landscape, in that it had never been
+beautiful. In spite of globe-trotters' sentimental gush, not all
+villages of northern France were beautiful. Many were built for thrift
+and for comfort and for expediency; not for architectural or natural
+loveliness.
+
+But this village of Meran-en-Laye was not merely deprived of what
+beauty it once might or might not have possessed. Except by courtesy it
+was no longer a village at all. It was a double row of squalid ruins,
+zig-zagging along the two sides of what was left of its main street.
+Here and there a cottage or tiny shop or shed was still habitable. The
+rest was debris.
+
+The church in the foreground was recognizable as such by the shape and
+size of its ragged walls, and by a half-smashed image of the Virgin and
+Child which slanted out at a perilous angle above its facade.
+
+Yet, miserable as the ruined hamlet seemed to the casual eye, it was at
+present a vacation-resort--and a decidedly welcome one--to no less than
+three thousand tired men. The wrecked church was an impromptu hospital
+beneath whose shattered roof dozens of these men lay helpless on
+makeshift cots.
+
+For the mixed American and French regiment known as the "Here-We-Comes"
+was billeted at Meran-en-Laye during a respite from the rigors and
+perils of the front-line trenches.
+
+The rest and the freedom from risks, supposed to be a part of the
+"billeting" system, were not wholly the portion of the "Here-We Comes."
+Meran--en--Laye was just then a somewhat important little speck on the
+warmap.
+
+The Germans had been up to their favorite field sport of trying to
+split in half two of the Allied armies, and to roll up each,
+independently. The effort had been a failure; yet it had come so near
+to success that many railway communications were cut off or deflected.
+And Meran-en-Laye had for the moment gained new importance, by virtue
+of a spur railway-line which ran through its outskirts and which made
+junction with a new set of tracks the American engineers were
+completing. Along this transverse of roads much ammunition and food and
+many fighting men were daily rushed.
+
+The safety of the village had thus become of much significance. While
+it was too far behind the lines to be in grave danger of enemy raids,
+yet such danger existed to some extent. Wherefore the presence of the
+"Here-We-Comes"--for the paradoxical double purpose of "resting up" and
+of guarding the railway Function.
+
+Still, it was better than trench-work; and the "Here-We-Comes" enjoyed
+it--for a day or so. Then trouble had set in.
+
+A group of soldiers were lounging on the stone seat in front of the
+village estaminet. Being off duty, they were reveling in that popular
+martial pastime known to the Tommy as "grousing" and to the Yankee
+doughboy as "airing a grouch."
+
+Top-Sergeant Mahan, formerly of the regular army, was haranguing the
+others. Some listened approvingly, others dissentingly and others not
+at all.
+
+"I tell you," Mahan declared for the fourth time, "somebody's
+double-crossing us again. There's a leak. And if they don't find out
+where it is, a whole lot of good men and a million dollars' worth of
+supplies are liable to spill out through that same leak. It--"
+
+"But," argued his crony, old Sergeant Vivier, in his hard-learned
+English, "but it may all be of a chance, mon vieux. It may, not be the
+doubled cross,--whatever a doubled cross means,--but the mere chance.
+Such things often--"
+
+"Chance, my grandmother's wall-eyed cat!" snorted Mahan. "Maybe it
+might have been chance--when this place hadn't been bombed for a
+month--for a whole flight of boche artillery and airship grenades to
+cut loose against it the day General Pershing happened to stop here for
+an hour on his way to Chateau-Thierry. Maybe that was chance--though I
+know blamed well it wasn't. Maybe it was chance that the place wasn't
+bombed again till two days ago, when that troop-train had to spend such
+a lot of time getting shunted at the junction. Maybe it was chance that
+the church, over across the street, hadn't been touched since the last
+drive, till our regiment's wounded were put in it--and that it's been
+hit three times since then. Maybe any one of those things--and of a
+dozen others was chance. But it's a cinch that ALL of them weren't
+chance. Chance doesn't work that way. I--"
+
+"Perhaps," doubtfully assented old Vivier, "perhaps. But I little like
+to believe it. For it means a spy. And a spy in one's midst is like to
+a snake in one's blankets. It is a not pleasing comrade. And it stands
+in sore need of killing."
+
+"There's spies everywhere," averred Mahan. "That's been proved often
+enough. So why not here? But I wish to the Lord I could lay hands on
+him! If this was one of the little sheltered villages, in a valley, his
+work would be harder. And the boche airships and the long-rangers
+wouldn't find us such a simple target. But up here on this ridge, all a
+spy has to do is to flash a signal, any night, that a boche airman can
+pick up or that can even be seen with good glasses from some high point
+where it can be relayed to the German lines. The guy who laid out this
+burg was sure thoughtless. He might have known there'd be a war some
+day. He might even have strained his mind and guessed that we'd be
+stuck here. Gee!"
+
+He broke off with a grunt of disgust; nor did he so much as listen to
+another of the group who sought to lure him into an opinion as to
+whether the spy might be an inhabitant of the village or a
+camp-follower.
+
+Sucking at his pipe; the Sergeant glowered moodily down the ruined
+street. The village drowsed under the hot midday. Here and there a
+soldier lounged along aimlessly or tried out his exercise-book French
+on some puzzled, native. Now and then an officer passed in or out of
+the half-unroofed mairie which served as regimental headquarters.
+
+Beyond, in the handkerchief-sized village square, a platoon was
+drilling. A thin French housewife was hanging sheets on a line behind a
+shell-twisted hovel. A Red Cross nurse came out of the hospital-church
+across the street from the estaminet and seated herself on the stone
+steps with a basketful of sewing.
+
+Mahan's half-shut eyes rested critically on the drilling
+platoon--amusedly on the woman who was so carefully hanging the ragged
+sheets,--and then approvingly upon the Red Cross nurse on the church
+steps across the way.
+
+Mahan, like most other soldiers, honored and revered the Red Cross for
+its work of mercy in the army. And the sight of one of the several
+local nurses of the Order won from him a glance of real approbation.
+
+But presently into his weather-beaten face came an expression of glad
+welcome. Out of the mairie gate and into the sleepy warmth of the
+street lounged a huge dark-brown-and-white collie. The don stretched
+himself lazily, fore and aft, in true collie style, then stood gazing
+about him as if in search of something of interest to occupy his bored
+attention.
+
+"Hello!" observed Mahan, breaking in on a homily of Vivier's. "There's
+Bruce!"
+
+Vivier's leathery face brightened at sound of the collie's name. He
+looked eagerly in the direction of Mahan's pointing finger.
+
+"Ce brave!" exclaimed the Frenchman. "I did not know even that he was
+in the village. It must be he is but new-arriven. Otherwise he would,
+of an assuredly, have hunted up his old friends. Ohe, Bruce!" he called
+invitingly.
+
+"The big dog must have gotten here just a few minutes ago," said
+Sergeant Mahan. "He was coming out of headquarters when I saw him. That
+must mean he's just struck the town, and with a message for the K.O. He
+always goes like greased lightning when he's on dispatch duty, till he
+has delivered his message. Then, if he's to be allowed to hang around a
+while before he's sent back, he loafs, lazy-like; the way you see him
+now. If all the courier-dogs were like him, every human courier would
+be out of a job."
+
+At Vivier's hail the great collie had pricked his ears and glanced
+inquiringly up and down the street. Catching sight of the group seated
+in front of the estaminet, he began to wag his plumy tail and set off
+toward them at a trot.
+
+Ten minutes earlier, Bruce had cantered into Meran-en-Laye from the
+opposite end of the street, bearing in his collar a dispatch from the
+corps commander to the colonel of the "Here-We-Comes." The colonel, at
+the mairie, had read the dispatch and had patted its bearer; then had
+bidden the dog lie down and rest, if he chose, after his long run.
+
+Instead, Bruce had preferred to stroll out in search of friends.
+
+Top-Sergeant Mahan, by the way, would have felt highly flattered had he
+chanced to get a glimpse of the dispatch Bruce had brought to the
+colonel. For it bore out Mahan's own theory regarding the presence of
+spies at or near the village, and it bade the "Here-We-Come" colonel
+use every means for tracing them.
+
+It added the information that three troop-trains with nine engines were
+to pass through the village that night on their way to the trenches,
+and that the trains were due at the junction at nine o'clock or shortly
+thereafter. The mairie was on the other side of the street from the
+estaminet. Incidentally, it was on the shady side of the street--for
+which reason Bruce,--being wise, and the day being hot,--remained on
+that side, until he should come opposite the bench where his friends
+awaited him.
+
+His course, thus, brought him directly past the church.
+
+As he trotted by the steps, the Red Cross nurse, who sat sewing there,
+chirped timidly at him. Bruce paused in his leisurely progress to see
+who had accosted him whether an old acquaintance, to be greeted as
+such, or merely a pleasantly inclined stranger.
+
+His soft brown eyes rested first in idle inquiry upon the angular and
+white-robed figure on the steps. Then, on the instant, the friendly
+inquiring look left his eyes and their softness went with it--leaving
+the dog's gaze cold and frankly hostile.
+
+One corner of Bruce's lips slowly lifted, revealing a tiny view of the
+terrible white fangs behind them. His gayly erect head was lowered, and
+in the depths of his furry throat a growl was born. When a dog barks
+and holds his head up, there is little enough to fear from him. But
+when he lowers his head and growl--then look out.
+
+Mahan knew dogs. In stark amazement he now noted Bruce's strange
+attitude toward the nurse. Never before had he seen the dog show active
+hostility toward a stranger--least of all toward a stranger who had in
+no way molested him. It was incredible that the wontedly dignified and
+sweet-tempered collie had thus returned a greeting. Especially from a
+woman!
+
+Mahan had often seen Red Cross nurses stop to caress Bruce. He had been
+amused at the dog's almost protective cordiality toward all women,
+whether the French peasants or the wearers of the brassard of mercy.
+
+Toward men--except those he had learned to look on as friends--the
+collie always comported himself with a courteous aloofness But he had
+seemed to regard every woman as something to be humored and guarded and
+to be treated with the same cordial friendliness that he bestowed on
+their children--which is the way of the best type of collie. Yet Bruce
+had actually snarled at this woman who had chirped to him from the
+steps of the church! And he showed every sign of following up the
+challenge by still more drastic measures.
+
+"Bruce!" called Mahan sharply. "BRUCE! Shame! Come over here! Come,
+NOW!"
+
+At the Sergeant's vehement summons Bruce turned reluctantly away from
+the foot of the church steps and came across the street toward the
+estaminet. He came slowly. Midway he halted and looked back over his
+shoulder at the nurse, his fangs glinting once more in a snarl. At a
+second and more emphatic call from Mahan the dog continued his progress.
+
+The nurse had started back in alarm at the collie's angry
+demonstration. Now, gathering up her work, she retreated into the
+church.
+
+"I'm sorry, Miss!" Mahan shouted after her. "I never saw him that way,
+before, when a lady spoke to him. If it was any dog but old Bruce, I'd
+give him a whaling for acting like that to you. I'm dead-sure he didn't
+mean any harm."
+
+"Oh, I was going in, anyway," replied the nurse, from the doorway. "It
+is of no consequence."
+
+She spoke nervously, her rich contralto voice shaken by the dog's
+fierce show of enmity. Then she vanished into the church; and Mahan and
+Vivier took turns in lecturing Bruce on his shameful dearth of courtesy.
+
+The big dog paid no heed at all to his friends' discourse. He was
+staring sullenly at the doorway through which the nurse had gone.
+
+"That's one swell way for a decently bred dog to treat a woman!" Mahan
+was telling him. "Least of all, a Red Cross nurse! I'm clean ashamed of
+you!"
+
+Bruce did not listen. In his heart he was still angry--and very much
+perplexed as well. For he knew what these stupid humans did not seem to
+know.
+
+HE KNEW THE RED CROSS NURSE WAS NO WOMAN AT ALL, BUT A MAN.
+
+Bruce knew, too, that the nurse did not belong to his loved friends of
+the Red Cross. For his uncanny power of scent told him the garments
+worn by the impostor belonged to some one else. To mere humans, a small
+and slender man, who can act, and who dons woman's garb, is a woman. To
+any dog, such a man is no more like a woman than a horse with a
+lambskin saddle-pad is a lamb. He is merely a man who is differently
+dressed from other men--even as this man who had chirped to Bruce, from
+the church steps, was no less a man for the costume in which he had
+swathed his body. Any dog, at a glance and at a sniff, would have known
+that.
+
+Women, for one thing, do not usually smoke dozens of rank cigars daily
+for years, until their flesh is permeated with the smell of tobacco. A
+human could not have detected such a smell--such a MAN-smell,--on the
+person who had chirped to Bruce. Any dog, twenty feet away, would have
+noticed it, and would have tabulated the white-clad masquerader as a
+man. Nor do a woman's hair and skin carry the faint but unmistakable
+odor of barracks and of tent-life and of martial equipment, as did this
+man's. The masquerader was evidently not only a man but a soldier.
+
+Dogs,--high-strung dogs,--do not like to have tricks played on them;
+least of all by strangers. Bruce seemed to take the nurse-disguise as a
+personal affront to himself. Then, too, the man was not of his own
+army. On the contrary, the scent proclaimed him one of the horde whom
+Bruce's friends so manifestly hated--one of the breed that had more
+than once fired on the dog.
+
+Diet and equipment and other causes give a German soldier a markedly
+different scent, to dogs' miraculously keen nostrils,--and to those of
+certain humans,--from the French or British or American troops. War
+records prove this. Once having learned the scent, and having learned
+to detest it, Bruce was not to be deceived.
+
+For all these reasons he had snarled loathingly at the man in white.
+For these same reasons he could not readily forget the incident, but
+continued every now and then to glance curiously across toward the
+church.
+
+Presently,--not relishing the rebukes of the friends who had heretofore
+pestered him by overmuch petting,--the collie arose quietly from his
+couch of trampled earth at the foot of the stone bench and strolled
+back across the street. Most of the men were too busy, talking, to note
+Bruce's departure. But Sergeant Mahan caught sight of him just as the
+dog was mounting the last of the steps leading into the church.
+
+As a rule, when Bruce went investigating, he walked carelessly and with
+his tail slightly a-wag. Now his tail was stiff as an icicle, and he
+moved warily, on the tips of his toes. His tawny-maned neck was low.
+Mahan, understanding dogs, did not like the collie's demeanor.
+Remembering that the nurse had entered the church a few minutes
+earlier, the Sergeant got to his feet and hastily followed Bruce.
+
+The dog, meanwhile, had passed through the crazily splintered doorway
+and had paused on the threshold of the improvised hospital, as the reek
+of iodoform and of carbolic smote upon his sensitive nostrils. In front
+of him was the stone-paved vestibule. Beyond was the interior of the
+shattered church, lined now with double rows of cots.
+
+Seated on a camp-chair in the shadowy vestibule was the pseudo Red
+Cross nurse. At sight of the collie the nurse got up in some haste.
+Bruce, still walking stiff-legged, drew closer.
+
+Out from under the white skirt flashed a capable and solidly-shod foot.
+In a swinging kick, the foot let drive at the oncoming dog. Before
+Bruce could dodge or could so much as guess what was coming,--the kick
+smote him with agonizing force, square on the shoulder.
+
+To a spirited collie, a kick carries more than the mere pain of its
+inflicting. It is a grossly unforgivable affront as well--as many a
+tramp and thief have learned, at high cost.
+
+By the time the kick had fairly landed, Bruce had recovered from his
+instant of incredulous surprise; and with lightning swiftness he hurled
+himself at his assailant.
+
+No bark or growl heralded the murderous throatlunge. It was all the
+more terrible for the noiselessness wherewith it was delivered. The
+masquerading man saw it coming, just too late to guard against it. He
+lurched backward, belatedly throwing both hands up to defend his
+throat. It was the involuntary backward step which saved his jugular.
+For his heel caught in the hem of his white skirt. And wholly off
+balance, he pitched headlong to the floor.
+
+This jerky shift of position, on the part of the foe, spoiled Bruce's
+aim. His fearful jaws snapped together harmlessly in empty air at a
+spot where, a fraction of a second earlier, the other's throat had
+been. Down crashed the disguised man. And atop of him the furious dog
+hurled himself, seeking a second time the throatgrip he had so narrowly
+missed.
+
+At this point on the program Sergeant Mahan arrived just in time to
+bury both hands in the mass of Bruce's furry ruff and to drag the
+snarlingly rabid dog back from his prey.
+
+The place was in an uproar. Nurses and doctors came rushing out into
+the vestibule; sick and wounded men sat up on their cots and eagerly
+craned their necks to catch sight of the scrimmage. Soldiers ran in
+from the street.
+
+Strong as he was, Mahan had both hands full in holding the frantic
+Bruce back from his enemy. Under the insult of the kick from this
+masquerader, whom he had already recognized as a foe, the collie had
+temporarily lost every vestige of his stately dignity. He was for the
+moment merely a wild beast, seeking revenge for a brutal injury. He
+writhed and fought in Mahan's grasp. Never once did he seek to attack
+the struggling man who held him. But he strained every giant sinew to
+get at the foe who had kicked him.
+
+The dog's opponent scrambled to his feet, helped by a dozen willing
+hands and accosted by as many solicitous voices. The victim's face was
+bone-gray with terror. His lips twitched convulsively. Yet, as befitted
+a person in his position, he had a splendid set of nerves. And almost
+at once he recovered partial control over himself.
+
+"I--I don't know how it happened," he faltered, his rich contralto
+voice shaky with the ground-swells of his recent shock. "It began when
+I was sitting on the steps, sewing. This dog came past. He growled at
+me so threateningly that I came indoors. A minute later, while I was
+sitting here sewing, he sprang at me and threw me down. I believe he
+would--would have killed me," the narrator finished, with a very
+genuine shudder, "if I had not been rescued when I was. Such
+bloodthirsty brutes ought to be shot!"
+
+"He not only OUGHT to be," hotly agreed the chief surgeon, "but he is
+GOING to be. Take him out into the street, one of you men, and put a
+ball in his head."
+
+The surgeon turned to the panting nurse.
+
+"You're certain he didn't hurt you?" he asked. "I don't want a
+newcomer, like yourself, to think this is the usual treatment our
+nurses get. Lie down and rest. You look scared to death. And don't be
+nervous about the cur attacking you again. He'll be dead inside of
+three minutes."
+
+The nurse, with a mumbled word of thanks, scuttled off into the rear of
+the church, where the tumbledown vestry had been fitted up as a
+dormitory.
+
+Bruce had calmed down somewhat under Mahan's sharp reproof. But he now
+struggled afresh to get at his vanished quarry. And again the Sergeant
+had a tussle to hold him.
+
+"I don't know what's got into the big fellow!" exclaimed Mahan to
+Vivier as the old Frenchman joined the tumultuous group. "He's gone
+clean daft. He'd of killed that poor woman, if I hadn't--"
+
+"Get him out of here!" ordered the surgeon. "And clear out, yourselves,
+all of you! This rumpus has probably set a lot of my patients'
+temperatures to rocketing. Take the cur out and shoot him!"
+
+"Excuse me, sir," spoke up Mahan, as Vivier stared aghast at the man
+who commanded Bruce's destruction, "but he's no cur. He's a
+courier-collie, officially in the service of the United States
+Government. And he's the best courier-dog in France to-day. This is--"
+
+"I don't care what he is!" raged the surgeon. "He--"
+
+"This is Bruce," continued Mahan, "the dog that saved the
+'Here-We-Comes' at Rache, and that steered a detail of us to safety one
+night in the fog, in the Chateau-Thierry sector. If you order any man
+of the 'Here-We-Comes' to shoot Bruce, you're liable to have a mutiny
+on your hands--officer or no officer. But if you wish, sir, I can
+transmit your order to the K.O. If he endorses it--"
+
+But the surgeon sought, at that moment, to save the remnants of his
+dignity and of a bad situation by stalking loftily back into the
+hospital, and leaving Mahan in the middle of his speech.
+
+"Or, sir," the Sergeant grinningly called after him, "you might write
+to the General Commanding, and tell him you want Bruce shot. The Big
+Dog always sleeps in the general's own room, when he's off-duty, at
+Division Headquarters. Maybe the general will O.K. his death-sentence,
+if you ask him to. He--"
+
+Somewhat quickening his stately stride, the surgeon passed out of
+earshot. At the officers' mess of the "Here-We-Comes," he had often
+heard Bruce's praises sung. He had never chanced to see the dog until
+now. But, beneath his armor of dignity, he quaked to think what the
+results to himself must have been, had he obeyed his first impulse of
+drawing his pistol and shooting the adored and pricelessly useful
+collie.
+
+Mahan,--stolidly rejoicing in his victory over the top-lofty potentate
+whom he disliked,--led the way out of the crowded vestibule into the
+street. Bruce followed demurely at his heels and Vivier bombarded
+everybody in sight for information as to what the whole fracas was
+about.
+
+Bruce was himself again. Now that the detested man in woman's clothes
+had gone away, there was no sense in continuing to struggle or to waste
+energy in a show of fury. Nevertheless, in his big heart burned
+deathless hatred toward the German who had kicked him. And, like an
+elephant, a collie never forgets.
+
+"But," Vivier was demanding of everybody, "but why should the gentle
+Bruce have attacked a good nurse? It is not what you call 'make-sense.'
+C'est un gentilhomme, ce vieux! He would not attack a woman less still
+a sister of the Red Cross. He--"
+
+"Of course he wouldn't," glumly assented the downhearted Mahan. "But he
+DID. That's the answer. I saw him do it. He knocked her down and--"
+
+"Which nurse was she?" asked a soldier who had come up after the
+trouble was over.
+
+"A new one here. I don't know her name. She came last week. I saw her
+when she got here. I was on duty at the K.O.'s office when she
+reported. She had a letter from some one on the surgeon-general's
+staff. But why Bruce should have gone for her to-day--or for any
+woman--is more than I can see. She was scared half to death. It's lucky
+she heard the surgeon order him shot. She'll suppose he's dead, by now.
+And that'll cure her scare. We must try to keep Bruce away from this
+end of the street till he goes back to headquarters to-morrow."
+
+As a result Bruce was coaxed to Mahan's company-shed and by dint of
+food-gifts and petting was induced to spend most of the day there.
+
+At sunset Bruce tired of his dull surroundings. Mahan had gone on duty;
+so had Vivier; so had others of his friends. The dog was bored and
+lonely. Also he had eaten much. And a walk is good, not only for
+loneliness, but for settling an overfull stomach. Bruce decided to go
+for a walk.
+
+Through the irregular street of the village he picked his way, and on
+toward the open country beyond. A sentry or two snapped fingers of
+greeting to him as he strolled past them. The folk of the village eyed
+his bulk and graceful dignity with something like awe.
+
+Beyond the hamlet the ridge of hilltop ran on for perhaps a
+quarter-mile before dipping into the plain below. At one end of this
+little plateau a company of infantry was drilling. Bruce recognized
+Mahan among the marching lines, but he saw his friend was on duty and
+refrained from going up to him.
+
+Above, the sunset sky was cloudless. Like tiny specks, miles to
+eastward, a few enemy airships circled above the heap of clustered
+hills which marked the nearest German position. The torn-up plain,
+between, seemed barren of life. So, at first, did the farther end of
+the jutting ridge on which the village was perched. But presently
+Bruce's idly wandering eye was caught by a flutter of white among some
+boulders that clumped together on the ridge's brow farthest from the
+village.
+
+Some one--a woman, from the dress--was apparently picking her way
+through the boulders. As Bruce moved forward, a big rock shut her off
+from his view and from the view of the hamlet and of the maneuvering
+infantry company a furlong away.
+
+Just then a puff of breeze blew from eastward toward the collie; and it
+bore to him a faint scent that set his ruff a-bristle and his soft
+brown eyes ablaze. To a dog, a scent once smelled is as recognizable
+again as is the sight of a once-seen face to a human. Bruce set off at
+a hand-gallop toward the clump of boulders.
+
+The Red Cross nurse, whom Bruce had so nearly killed, was off duty
+until the night-shift should go on at the hospital. The nurse had taken
+advantage of this brief surcease from toil, by going for a little walk
+in the cool sunset air, and had carried along a bag of sewing.
+
+Up to three months ago this nurse had been known as Heinrich Stolz, and
+had been a valued member of the Wilhelmstrasse's workingforce of secret
+agents. Then, acting under orders, Herr Heinrich Stolz had vanished
+from his accustomed haunts. Soon thereafter a Red Cross nurse--Felicia
+Stuart by name had reported for duty at Paris, having been transferred
+thither from Italy, and bearing indubitable credentials to that effect.
+
+From carefully picked-up information Stolz had just learned of the
+expected arrival of the three troop-trains at the junction at nine that
+evening. The tidings had interested him keenly, and he knew of other
+people to whom they would be far more interesting.
+
+Seating himself under the lee of the easternmost rock, Stolz primly
+opened his sewing-bag and drew forth various torn garments. The
+garments were for the most part white, but one or two were of gaudy
+colors.
+
+By way of precaution, in case of discovery, the spy threaded a needle.
+Thus, if any one should chance to see him shake out a garment,
+preparatory to laying it on his knee and mending it, there could be no
+reasonable cause for suspicion. Herr Stolz was nothing if not efficient.
+
+He held up the needle and poked the thread at its eye in truly feminine
+fashion.
+
+He had just finished this feat of dexterity when he chanced to look up
+from his work at sound of fast-pattering feet. Not thirty feet away,
+charging head on at him, rushed the great brown-and-white collie he
+supposed had been shot.
+
+With a jump of abject terror, Herr Stolz sprang up. Mingled with his
+normal fear of the dog was a tinge of superstitious dread. He had been
+so certain the beast was shot! The doctor had given the order for his
+killing. The doctor was a commissioned officer. Stolz's German mind
+could not grasp the possibility of a soldier disobeying an officer's
+imperative command.
+
+The collie was upon him by the time the spy gained his feet. Stolz
+reached frantically under his dress-folds for the deadly little pistol
+that he always kept there. But he was still a novice in the mysteries
+of feminine apparel. And, before his fingers could close on the weapon,
+Bruce's bared fangs were gleaming at his throat.
+
+Stolz ceased to search for the weapon. And, as before, he threw up both
+frantic hands to ward off the furious jaws.
+
+He was barely in time. Bruce's white teeth drove deep into the spy's
+forearm, and Bruce's eighty pounds of furry muscular bulk smote Stolz
+full in the chest. Down went the spy, under the terrific impact,
+sprawling wildly on his back, and fighting with both bleeding hands to
+push back the dog.
+
+Bruce, collie-fashion, did not stick to one grip, but bit and slashed a
+dozen times in three seconds, tearing and rending his way toward the
+throat-hold he craved; driving through flesh of hands and of forearms
+toward his goal.
+
+Like many another German, Stolz was far more adept at causing pain than
+at enduring it. Also, from birth, he had had an unconquerable fear of
+dogs. His nerves, too, were not yet recovered from Bruce's attack
+earlier in the day. All this, and the spectral suddenness of the
+onslaught, robbed him of every atom of his usual stony self-control.
+
+Sergeant Mahan was a good soldier. Yet a minute earlier he had almost
+ruined his reputation as such. He had been hard put to it to refrain
+from leaving the ranks of his drilling company, a furlong from the
+rocks, and running at record speed toward the boulders. For he had seen
+the supposed nurse pass that way. And almost directly afterward he had
+seen Bruce follow her thither. And he could guess what would happen.
+
+Luckily for the sake of discipline, the order of "Break ranks!" was
+given before Mahan could disgrace himself by such unmartial behavior.
+And, on the instant, the Sergeant broke into a run in the direction of
+the rocks.
+
+Wondering at his eccentric action, several of the soldiers followed.
+The company captain, at sight of a knot of his men dashing at breakneck
+speed toward the boulders, started at a more leisurely pace in the same
+direction.
+
+Mahan had reached the edge of the rocks when his ears were greeted by a
+yell of mortal fear. The captain and the rest, catching the sound, went
+faster. Screech after screech rang from the rocky enclosure.
+
+Mahan rounded the big boulder at the crest of the ridge and flung
+himself upon the two combatants, as they thrashed about in a tumultuous
+dual mass on the ground. And just then Bruce at last found his grip on
+Stolz's throat.
+
+A stoical German signal-corps officer, on a hilltop some miles to
+eastward, laid aside his field-glass and calmly remarked to a man at
+his side
+
+"We have lost a good spy!"
+
+Such was the sole epitaph and eulogy of Herr Heinrich Stolz, from his
+army.
+
+Meantime, Sergeant Mahan was prying loose the collie's ferocious jaws
+from their prey and was tugging with all his might to drag the dog off
+the shrieking spy. The throat-hold, he noted, was a bare inch from the
+jugular.
+
+The rest of the soldiers, rushing up pell-mell, helped him pull the
+infuriated Bruce from his victim. The spectacle of their admired
+dog-hero, so murderously mauling a woman of the Red Cross, dazed them
+with horror.
+
+"Take him AWAY!" bellowed Stolz, delirious with pain and fear. "He's
+KILLED me--der gottverdammte Teufelhund!"
+
+And now the crazed victim's unconscious use of German was not needed to
+tell every one within hearing just who and what he was. For the
+quavering tones were no longer a rich contralto. They were a throaty
+baritone. And the accent was Teutonic.
+
+"Bruce!" observed Top-Sergeant Mahan next morning, "I've always said a
+man who kicks a dog is more of a cur than the dog is. But you'll never
+know how near I came to kicking you yesterday, when I caught you
+mangling that filthy spy. And Brucie, if I had kicked you, well--I'd be
+praying at this minute that the good Lord would grow a third leg on me,
+so that I could kick myself all the way from here to Berlin!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. The Werewolf
+
+When Bruce left the quiet peace of The Place for the hell of the
+Western Front, it had been stipulated by the Mistress and the Master
+that if ever he were disabled, he should be shipped back to The Place,
+at their expense.
+
+It was a stipulation made rather to soothe the Mistress's sorrow at
+parting from her loved pet than in any hope that it could be fulfilled;
+for the average life of a courierdog on the battle-front was tragically
+short. And his fate was more than ordinarily certain. If the boche
+bullets and shrapnel happened to miss him, there were countless
+diseases--bred of trench and of hardship and of abominable food--to
+kill him.
+
+The Red Cross appeal raised countless millions of dollars and brought
+rescue to innumerable human warriors. But in caring for humans, the
+generosity of most givers reached its limit; and the Blue Cross--"for
+the relief of dogs and horses injured in the service of the
+Allies"--was forced to take what it could get. Yet many a man, and many
+a body of men, owed life and safety to the heroism of some war-dog, a
+dog which surely merited special care when its own certain hour of
+agony struck.
+
+Bruce's warmest overseas friends were to be found in the ranks of the
+mixed Franco-American regiment, nicknamed the "Here-We-Comes." Right
+gallantly, in more than one tight place, had Bruce been of use to the
+"Here-We-Comes." On his official visits to the regiment, he was always
+received with a joyous welcome that would have turned any head less
+steady than a thoroughbred collie's.
+
+Bruce enjoyed this treatment. He enjoyed, too, the food-dainties
+wherewith the "Here-We-Comes" plied him. But to no man in the army
+would he give the adoring personal loyalty he had left at The Place
+with the Mistress and the Master. Those two were still his only gods.
+And he missed them and his sweet life at The Place most bitterly. Yet
+he was too good a soldier to mope.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+For months the "Here-We-Comes" had been quartered in a "quiet"--or only
+occasionally tumultuous--sector, near Chateau-Thierry. Then the
+comparative quiet all at once turned to pandemonium.
+
+A lanky and degenerate youth (who before the war had been unlovingly
+known throughout Europe as the "White Rabbit" and who now was mentioned
+in dispatches as the "Crown Prince") had succeeded in leading some
+half-million fellow-Germans into a "pocket" that had lately been merely
+a salient.
+
+From the three lower sides of the pocket, the Allies ecstatically flung
+themselves upon their trapped foes in a laudable effort to crush the
+half-million boches and their rabbit-faced princeling into surrender
+before the latter could get out of the snare, and to the shelter of the
+high ground and the reenforcements that lay behind it. The Germans
+objected most strenuously to this crushing process. And the three
+beleaguered edges of the pocket became a triple-section of hell.
+
+It was a period when no one's nerves were in any degree normal--least
+of all the nerves of the eternally hammered Germans. Even the fiercely
+advancing Franco-Americans, the "Here-We-Comes," had lost the grimly
+humorous composure that had been theirs, and waxed sullen and ferocious
+in their eagerness.
+
+Thus it was that Bruce missed his wontedly uproarious welcome as he
+cantered, at sunset one July day, into a smashed farmstead where his
+friends, the "Here-We-Comes," were bivouacked for the night. By
+instinct, the big dog seemed to know where to find the temporary
+regimental headquarters.
+
+He trotted past a sentry, into an unroofed cattle-shed where the
+colonel was busily scribbling a detailed report of the work done by the
+"Here-We-Comes" during that day's drive.
+
+Coming to a halt by the colonel's side, Bruce stood expectantly wagging
+his plumy tail and waiting for the folded message from division
+headquarters to be taken off his collar.
+
+Usually, on such visits, the colonel made much of the dog. To-day he
+merely glanced up abstractedly from his writing, at sight of Bruce's
+silken head at his side. He unfastened the message, read it, frowned
+and went on with his report.
+
+Bruce continued to wag his tail and to look up wistfully for the wonted
+petting and word of commendation. But the colonel had forgotten his
+existence. So presently the collie wearied of waiting for a caress from
+a man whose caresses, at best, he did not greatly value. He turned and
+strolled out of the shed. His message delivered, he knew he was at
+liberty to amuse himself as he might choose to, until such time as he
+must carry back to his general a reply to the dispatch he had brought.
+
+From outside came the voices of tired and lounging soldiers. A
+traveling kitchen had just been set up near by. From it arose a blend
+of smells that were mighty tempting to a healthily hungry dog. Thither,
+at a decorous but expectant pace, Bruce bent his steps.
+
+Top-Sergeant Mahan was gazing with solicitous interest upon the toil of
+the cooks at the wheeled kitchen. Beside him, sharing his concern in
+the supper preparations, was Mahan's closest crony, old Sergeant
+Vivier. The wizened little Frenchman, as a boy, had been in the
+surrender of Sedan. Nightly, ever since, he had besought the saints to
+give him, some day, a tiny share in the avenging of that black disgrace.
+
+Mahan and Vivier were the warmest of Bruce's many admirers in the
+"Here-We-Comes." Ordinarily a dual whoop of joy from them would have
+greeted his advent. This afternoon they merely chirped abstractedly at
+him, and Mahan patted him carelessly on the head before returning to
+the inspection of the cooking food.
+
+Since an hour before dawn, both men had been in hot action. The command
+for the "Here-We-Comes" to turn aside and bivouac for the night had
+been a sharp disappointment to them, as well as to every unwounded man
+in the regiment.
+
+When a gambler is in the middle of a winning streak, when an athlete
+feels he has the race in his own hands, when a business man has all but
+closed the deal that means fortune to him--at such crises it is
+maddening to be halted at the very verge of triumph. But to soldiers
+who, after months of reverses, at last have their hated foe on the run,
+such a check does odd things to temper and to nerves.
+
+In such plight were the men of the "Here-We-Comes," on this late
+afternoon. Mahan and Vivier were too seasoned and too sane to give way
+to the bursts of temper and the swirls of blasphemy that swayed so many
+of their comrades. Nevertheless they were glum and silent and had no
+heart for jolly welcomings,--even to so dear a friend as Bruce.
+
+Experience told them that a square meal would work miracles in the way
+of calming and bracing them. Hence, apart from stark hunger, their
+interest in the cooking of supper.
+
+Bruce was too much a philosopher--and not devoted enough to his soldier
+friends--to be hurt at the lack of warmth in the greeting. With the air
+of an epicure, he sniffed at the contents of one of the kitchen's
+bubbling kettles. Then he walked off and curled himself comfortably on
+a pile of bedding, there to rest until supper should be ready.
+
+Several times, as he lay there, soldiers passed and repassed. One or
+two of them snapped their fingers at the dog or even stooped, in
+passing, to stroke his head. But on the faces of all of them was unrest
+and a certain wolfish eagerness, which precluded playing with pets at
+such a time. The hot zest of the man-hunt was upon them. It was gnawing
+in the veins of the newest recruit, ever, as in the heart of the
+usually self-contained colonel of the regiment.
+
+The colonel, in fact, had been so carried away by the joy of seeing his
+men drive the hated graycoats before them that day that he had
+overstepped the spirit of his own orders from the division commander.
+
+In brief, he had made no effort to "dress" his command, in the advance,
+upon the regiments to either side of it. As a result, when the signal
+to bivouac for the night was given, the "Here-We-Comes" were something
+like a mile ahead of the regiment which should have been at their
+immediate right, and nearly two miles in front of the brigade at their
+left.
+
+In other words, the "Here-We-Comes" now occupied a salient of their
+own, ahead of the rest of the FrancoAmerican line. It was in rebuke for
+this bit of good progress and bad tactics that the division commander
+had written to the colonel, in the dispatch which Bruce had brought.
+
+German airmen, sailing far above, and dodging as best they could the
+charges of the Allied 'planes, had just noted that the "Here-We-Comes"
+"salient" was really no salient at all. So far had it advanced that,
+for the moment, it was out of touch with the rest of the division. It
+was, indeed, in an excellent position to be cut off and demolished by a
+dashing nightattack. And a report to this effect was delivered to a
+fumingly distracted German major general, who yearned for a chance to
+atone in some way for the day's shameful reverses.
+
+"If they hadn't halted us and made us call it a day, just as we were
+getting into our stride," loudly grumbled one Yankee private to another
+as the two clumped up to the kitchen, "we'd have been in
+Fere-en-Tardenois by now. What lazy guy is running this drive, anyhow?"
+
+"The same lazy guy that will stick you into the hoosgow for
+insubordination and leave you to do your bit there while the rest of us
+stroll on to Berlin!" snapped Top-Sergeant Mahan, wheeling upon the
+grumbler. "Till you learn how to obey orders without grouching, it
+isn't up to you to knock wiser men. Shut up!"
+
+Though Mahan's tone of reproof was professionally harsh, his spirit was
+not in his words. And the silenced private knew it. He knew, too, that
+the top-sergeant was as savage over the early halt as were the rest of
+the men.
+
+Bruce, as a rule, when he honored the "Here-We-Comes" with a visit,
+spent the bulk of his time with Mahan and old Vivier. But to-day
+neither of these friends was an inspiring companion. Nor were the rest
+of Bruce's acquaintances disposed to friendliness. Wherefore, as soon
+as supper was eaten, the dog returned to his heap of bedding, for the
+hour or so of laziness which Nature teaches all her children to demand,
+after a full meal,--and which the so-called "dumb" animals alone are
+intelligent enough to take.
+
+Dusk had merged into night when Bruce got to his feet again. Taps had
+just sounded. The tired men gladly rolled themselves into their
+blankets and fell into a dead sleep. A sentry-relief set forth to
+replace the first batch of sentinels with the second.
+
+Mahan was of the party. Though the top-sergeant had been a stupid
+comrade, thus far to-day, he was now evidently going for a walk. And
+even though it was a duty-walk, yet the idea of it appealed to the dog
+after his long inaction.
+
+So Bruce got up and followed. As he came alongside the stiffly marching
+top-sergeant, the collie so far subverted discipline as to thrust his
+nose, in friendly greeting, into Mahan's slightly cupped palm. And the
+top-sergeant so far abetted the breach of discipline as to give the
+collie's head a furtive pat. The night was dim, as the moon had not
+risen; so the mutual contact of good-fellowship was not visible to the
+marching men on either side of Mahan and the dog. And discipline,
+therefore, did not suffer much, after all.
+
+At one post after another, a sentinel was relieved and a fresh man took
+his place. Farthest in front of the "Here-We-Comes" lines--and nearest
+to the German--was posted a lanky Missourian whom Bruce liked, a man
+who had a way of discovering in his deep pockets stray bits of food
+which he had hoarded there for the collie and delighted to dole out to
+him. The Missourian had a drawlingly soft voice the dog liked, and he
+used to talk to Bruce as if the latter were another human.
+
+For all these reasons--and because Mahan was too busy and too grumpy to
+bother with him--Bruce elected to stay where he was, for a while, and
+share the Missourian's vigil. So, when the rest of the party moved
+along to the next sentry-go, the dog remained. The Missourian was only
+too glad to have him do so. It is tedious and stupid to pace a desolate
+beat, alone, at dead of night, after a day of hard fighting. And the
+man welcomed the companionship of the dog.
+
+For a time, as the Missourian paced his solitary stretch of broken and
+shrub-grown ground, Bruce gravely paced to and fro at his side. But
+presently this aimless promenade began to wax uninteresting. And, as
+the two came to the far end of the beat, Bruce yawned and lay down. It
+was pleasanter to lie there and to watch the sentinel do the walking.
+
+Stretched out, in a little grass-hollow, the dog followed blinkingly
+with his soft brown eyes the pendulumlike progress of his friend. And
+always the dog's plumed tail would beat rhythmic welcome against the
+ground as the sentry approached him.
+
+Thus nearly an hour wore on. A fat moon butted its lazy way through the
+smoke-mists of the eastern skyline.
+
+Then something happened--something that Bruce could readily have
+forestalled if the wind had been blowing from the other direction, and
+if a dog's eyes were not as nearsighted as his nose is farsmelling.
+
+The Missourian paused to run his hand caressingly over the collie's
+rough mane, and moved on, down the lonely beat. Bruce watched his
+receding figure, drowsily. At the end of ninety yards or more, the
+Missourian passed by a bunch of low bushes which grew at the near side
+of a stretch of hilly and shellpocked ground. He moved past the bushes,
+still watched by the somewhat bored dog.
+
+It was then that Bruce saw a patch of bushshadow detach itself from the
+rest, under the glow of the rising moon. The shadow was humpy and
+squat. Noiseless, it glided out from among the bushes, close at the
+sentry's heels, and crept after him.
+
+Bruce pricked his ears and started to get up. His curiosity was roused.
+The direction of the wind prevented him from smelling out the nature of
+the mystery. It also kept his keen hearing from supplying any clue. And
+the distance would not permit him to see with any distinctness.
+
+Still his curiosity was very mild. Surely, if danger threatened, the
+sentinel would realize it. For by this time the Shadow was a bare three
+feet behind him near enough, by Bruce's system of logic, for the
+Missourian to have smelled and heard the pursuer. So Bruce got up, in
+the most leisurely fashion, preparatory to strolling across to
+investigate. But at almost his first step he saw something that changed
+his gracefully slouching walk into a charging run.
+
+The Shadow suddenly had merged with the sentinel. For an instant, in
+stark silence, the two seemed to cling together. Then the Shadow fled,
+and the lanky Missourian slumped to the earth in a sprawling heap, his
+throat cut.
+
+The slayer had been a deft hand at the job. No sound had escaped the
+Missourian, from the moment the stranglingly tight left arm had been
+thrown around his throat from behind until, a second later, he fell
+bleeding and lifeless.
+
+In twenty leaping strides, Bruce came up to the slain sentinel and bent
+over him. Dog-instinct told the collie his friend had been done to
+death. And the dog's power of scent told him it was a German who had
+done the killing.
+
+For many months, Bruce had been familiar with the scent of German
+soldiers, so different from that of the army in which he toiled. And he
+had learned to hate it, even as a dog hates the vague "crushed
+cucumber" smell of a pitviper. But while every dog dreads the
+viper-smell as much as he loathes it, Bruce had no fear at all of the
+boche odor. Instead, it always awoke in him a blood-lust, as fierce as
+any that had burned in his wolf-ancestors.
+
+This same fury swept him now, as he stood, quivering, above the body of
+the kindly man who so lately had petted him; this and a craving to
+revenge the murder of his human friend.
+
+For the briefest time, Bruce stood there, his dark eyes abrim with
+unhappiness and bewilderment, as he gazed down on the huddled form in
+the wet grass. Then an electric change came over him. The softness fled
+from his eyes, leaving them bloodshot and blazing. His great tawny ruff
+bristled like an angry cat's. The lazy gracefulness departed from his
+mighty body. It became tense and terrible. In the growing moonlight his
+teeth gleamed whitely from under his upcurled lip.
+
+In a flash he turned and set off at a loping run, nose close to ground,
+his long stride deceptively swift. The zest of the man-hunt had
+obsessed him, as completely as, that day, it had spurred the advance of
+the "Here-We-Comes."
+
+The trail of the slayer was fresh, even over such broken ground. Fast
+as the German had fled, Bruce was flying faster. Despite the murderer's
+long start, the dog speedily cut down the distance between his quarry
+and himself. Not trusting to sight, but solely to his unerring sense of
+smell. Bruce sped on.
+
+Then, in a moment or two, his hearing re-enforced his scent. He could
+catch the pad-pad-pad of running feet. And the increasing of the sound
+told him he was gaining fast.
+
+But in another bound his ears told him something else--something he
+would have heard much sooner, had not the night wind been setting so
+strongly in the other direction. He heard not only the pounding of his
+prey's heavy-shod feet, but the soft thud of hundreds--perhaps
+thousands--of other army shoes. And now, despite the adverse wind, the
+odor of innumerable soldiers came to his fiercely sniffing nostrils.
+Not only was it the scent of soldiers, but of German soldiers.
+
+For the first time, Bruce lifted his head from the ground, as he ran,
+and peered in front of him. The moon had risen above the low-lying
+horizon vapors into a clear sky, and the reach of country was sharply
+visible.
+
+Bruce saw the man he was chasing,--saw him plainly. The German was
+still running, but not at all as one who flees from peril. He ran,
+rather, as might the bearer of glad tidings. And he was even now
+drawing up to a group of men who awaited eagerly his coming. There must
+have been fifty men in the group. Behind them--in open formation and as
+far as the dog's near-sighted eyes could see--were more men, and more,
+and more--thousands of them, all moving stealthily forward.
+
+Now, a collie (in brain, though never in heart) is much more wolf than
+dog. A bullterrier, or an Airedale, would have charged on at his foe,
+and would have let himself be hacked to pieces before loosing his hold
+on the man.
+
+But--even as a wolf checks his pursuit of a galloping sheep when the
+latter dashes into the guarded fold--Bruce came to an abrupt halt, at
+sight of these reenforcements. He stood irresolute, still mad with
+vengeful anger, but not foolish enough to assail a whole brigade of
+armed men.
+
+It is quite impossible (though Mahan and Vivier used to swear it must
+be true) that Bruce had the reasoning powers to figure out the whole
+situation which confronted him. He could not have known that a German
+brigade had been sent to take advantage of the "Here-We-Comes"
+temporarily isolated position--that three sentries had been killed in
+silence and that their deaths had left a wide gap through which the
+brigade hoped to creep unobserved until they should be within striking
+distance of their unsuspectingly slumbering victims.
+
+Bruce could not have known this. He could not have grasped the
+slightest fraction of the idea, being only a real-life dog and not a
+fairytale animal. But what he could and did realize was that a mass of
+detested Germans was moving toward him, and that he could not hope to
+attack them, single-handed; also, that he was not minded to slink
+peacefully away and leave his friend unavenged.
+
+Thwarted rage dragged from his furry throat a deep growl; a growl that
+resounded eerily through that silent place of stealthy moves. And he
+stepped majestically forth from the surrounding long grass, into the
+full glare of moonlight.
+
+The deceptive glow made him loom gigantic and black, and tinged his
+snowy chest with the phosphorous gleam of a snowfield. His eyes shone
+like a wild beast's.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Corporal Rudolph Freund, of the Konigin Luise Regiment, had just
+finished his three-word report to his superior. He had merely saluted
+and announced
+
+"He is dead!"
+
+Corporal Freund did not thrill, as usual, to the colonel's grunt of
+approval. The Corporal was worried. He was a Black Forest peasant; and,
+while iron military life had dulled his native superstitions, it had
+not dispelled them.
+
+The night was mystic, in its odd blend of moon and shadows. However
+hardened one may be, it is a nerve-strain to creep through long grass,
+like a red Indian, to the murder of a hostile sentinel. And every
+German in the "Pocket" had been under frightful mental and physical
+stress, for the past week.
+
+Corporal Rudolph Freund was a brave man and a brute. But that week had
+sapped his nerve. And the work of this night had been the climax. The
+desolate ground, over which he had crawled to the killing, had suddenly
+seemed peopled with evil gnomes and goblins, whose existence no true
+Black Forest peasant can doubt. And, on the run back, he had been
+certain he heard some unseen monster tearing through the underbrush in
+hot pursuit of him. So certain had he been, that he had redoubled his
+speed.
+
+There were no wolves or other large wild animals in that region. When
+he had wriggled toward the slow-pacing American sentinel, he had seen
+and heard no creature of any sort. Yet he was sure that on the way back
+he had been pursued by--by Something! And into his scared memory, as he
+ran, had flashed the ofttold Black Forest tale of the Werewolf--the
+devil--beast that is entered by the soul of a murdered man and which
+tracks the murderer to his death.
+
+Glad was the unnerved Corporal Freund when his run ceased and he stood
+close to his grossly solid and rank-scented fellowmen once more. Almost
+he was inclined to laugh at his fears of the fabled Werewolf--and
+especially at the idea that he had been pursued. He drew a long breath
+of relief. He drew the breath in. But he did not at once expel it. For
+on his ears came the sound of a hideous menacing growl.
+
+Corporal Freund spun about, in the direction of the mysterious threat.
+And there, not thirty feet from him, in the ghostly moonlight, stood
+the Werewolf!
+
+This time there could be no question of overstrained nerves and of
+imagination. The Thing was THERE!
+
+Horribly visible in every detail, the Werewolf was glaring at him. He
+could see the red glow of the gigantic devil-beast's eyes, the white
+flash of its teeth, the ghostly shimmering of its snowy chest. The soul
+of the man he had slain had taken this traditional form and was hunting
+down the slayer! A thousand stories of Freund's childhood verified the
+frightful truth. And overwrought human nature's endurance went to
+pieces under the shock.
+
+A maniac howl of terror split the midnight stillness. Shriek after
+shriek rent the air. Freund tumbled convulsively to the ground at his
+colonel's feet, gripping the officer's booted knees and screeching for
+protection. The colonel, raging that the surprise attack should be
+imperiled by such a racket, beat the frantic man over the mouth with
+his heavy fist, kicking ferociously at his upturned writhing face, and
+snarling to him to be silent.
+
+The shower of blows brought Freund back to sanity, to the extent of
+changing his craven terror into Fear's secondary phase--the impulse to
+strike back at the thing that had caused the fright. Rolling over and
+over on the ground, under the impact of his superior's fist blows and
+kicks, Freund somehow regained his feet.
+
+Reeling up to the nearest soldier, the panic-crazed corporal snatched
+the private's rifle and fired three times, blindly, at Bruce. Then,
+foaming at the mouth, Freund fell heavily to earth again, chattering
+and twitching in a fit.
+
+Bruce, at the second shot, leaped high in the air, and collapsed, in an
+inert furry heap, among the bushes. There he lay,--his career as a
+courier-dog forever ended.
+
+Corporal Rudolph Freund was perhaps the best sniper in his regiment.
+Wildly though he had fired, marksman-instinct had guided his bullets.
+And at such close range there was no missing. Bruce went to earth with
+one rifle ball through his body, and another in his leg. A third had
+reached his skull.
+
+Now, the complete element of surprise was all-needful for the attack
+the Germans had planned against the "Here-We-Comes." Deprived of that
+advantage the expedition was doomed to utter failure. For, given a
+chance to wake and to rally, the regiment could not possibly be
+"rushed," in vivid moonlight, before the nearest Allied forces could
+move up to its support. And those forces were only a mile or so to the
+rear. There can be no possible hope for a surprise attack upon a
+well-appointed camp when the night's stillness has been shattered by a
+series of maniac screams and by three echoing rifle-shots.
+
+Already the guard was out. A bugle was blowing. In another minute, the
+sentry-calls would locate the gap made by the three murdered sentinels.
+
+A swift guttural conference among the leaders of the gray-clad
+marauders was followed by the barking of equally guttural commands. And
+the Germans withdrew as quietly and as rapidly as they had come.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+It was the mouthing and jabbering of the fit-possessed Corporal Rudolph
+Freund that drew to him the notice of a squad of Yankees led by
+Top-Sergeant Mahan, ten minutes later. It was the shudder--accompanied
+pointing of the delirious man's finger, toward the nearby clump of
+undergrowth, that revealed to them the still warm body of Bruce.
+
+Back to camp, carried lovingly in Mahan's strong arms, went all that
+was left of the great courier-dog. Back to camp, propelled between two
+none-too-gentle soldiers, staggered the fit-ridden Corporal Freund.
+
+At the colonel's quarters, a compelling dose of stimulant cleared some
+of the mists from the prisoner's brain. His nerve and his will-power
+still gone to smash, he babbled eagerly enough of the night attack, of
+the killing of the sentries and of his encounter with the Werewolf.
+
+"I saw him fall!" he raved. "But he is not dead. The Werewolf can be
+killed only by a silver bullet, marked with a cross and blessed by a
+priest. He will live to track me down! Lock me where he cannot find me,
+for the sake of sweet mercy!"
+
+And in this way, the "Here-We-Comes" learned of Bruce's part in the
+night's averted disaster.
+
+Old Vivier wept unashamed over the body of the dog he had loved.
+Top-Sergeant Mahan--the big tears splashing, unnoted, from his own red
+eyes--besought the Frenchman to strive for better self-control and not
+to set a cry-baby example to the men.
+
+Then a group of grim-faced soldiers dug a grave. And, carried by Mahan
+and Vivier, the beautiful dog's body was borne to its resting-place. A
+throng of men in the gray dawn stood wordless around the grave. Some
+one shamefacedly took off his hat. With equal shamefacedness, everybody
+else followed the example.
+
+Mahan laid the dog's body on the ground, at the grave's brink. Then,
+looking about him, he cleared his throat noisily and spoke.
+
+"Boys," he began, "when a human dies for other humans, there's a
+Christian burial service read over him. I'd have asked the chaplain to
+read one over Bruce, here, if I hadn't known he'd say no. But the Big
+Dog isn't going to rest without a word said over his grave, for all
+that."
+
+Mahan cleared his throat noisily once more, winked fast, then went on:--
+
+"You can laugh at me, if any of you feel like it. But there's some of
+you here who wouldn't be alive to laugh, if Bruce hadn't done what he
+did last night. He was only just a dog--with no soul, and with no life
+after this one, I s'pose. So he went ahead and did his work and took
+the risks, and asked no pay.
+
+"And by and by he died, still doing his work and asking no pay.
+
+"He didn't work with the idea of getting a cross or a ribbon or a
+promotion or a pension or his name in the paper or to make the crowd
+cheer him when he got back home, or to brag to the homefolks about how
+he was a hero. He just went ahead and WAS a hero. That's because he was
+only a dog, with no soul--and not a man.
+
+"All of us humans are working for some reward, even if it's only for
+our pay or for the fun of doing our share. But Bruce was a hero because
+he was just a dog, and because he didn't know enough to be anything
+else but a hero.
+
+"I've heard about him, before he joined up with us. I guess most of us
+have. He lived up in Jersey, somewhere. With folks that had bred him.
+I'll bet a year's pay he was made a lot of by those folks; and that it
+wrenched 'em to let him go. You could see he'd been brought up that
+way. Life must 'a' been pretty happy for the old chap, back there. Then
+he was picked up and slung into the middle of this hell.
+
+"So was the rest of us, says you. But you're wrong. Those of us that
+waited for the draft had our choice of going to the hoosgow, as
+'conscientious objectors,' if we didn't want to fight. And every
+mother's son of us knew we was fighting for the Right; and that we was
+making the world a decenter and safer place for our grandchildren and
+our womenfolks to live in. We didn't brag about God being on our side,
+like the boches do. It was enough for us to know WE was on GOD'S side
+and fighting His great fight for Him. We had patriotism and religion
+and Right, behind us, to give us strength.
+
+"Brucie hadn't a one of those things. He didn't know what he was here
+for--and why he'd been pitched out of his nice home, into all this. He
+didn't have a chance to say Yes or No. He didn't have any spellbinders
+to tell him he was making the world safe for d'mocracy. He was MADE to
+come.
+
+"How would any of us humans have acted, if a deal like that had been
+handed to us? We'd 'a' grouched and slacked and maybe deserted. That's
+because we're lords of creation and have souls and brains and such.
+What did Bruce do? He jumped into this game, with bells on. He risked
+his life a hundred times; and he was just as ready to risk it again the
+next day.
+
+"Yes, and he knew he was risking it, too. There's blame little he
+didn't know. He saw war-dogs, all around him, choking to death from
+gas, or screaming their lives out, in No Man's Land, when a bit of
+shell had disemboweled 'em or a bullet had cracked their backbones. He
+saw 'em starve to death. He saw 'em one bloody mass of scars and sores.
+He saw 'em die of pneumonia and mange and every rotten trench disease.
+And he knew it might be his turn, any time at all, to die as they were
+dying; and he knew the humans was too busy nursing other humans, to
+have time to spare on caring for tortured dogs. (Though those same dogs
+were dying for the humans, if it comes to that.)
+
+"Yes, Bruce knew what the end was bound to be. He knew it. And he kept
+on, as gay and as brave as if he was on a day's romp. He never
+flinched. Not even that time the K.O. sent him up the hill for
+reenforcements at Rache, when every sharpshooter in the boche trenches
+was laying for him, and when the machine guns were trained on him, too.
+Bruce knew he was running into death--, then and a dozen other times.
+And he went at it like a white man.
+
+"I'm--I'm getting longwinded. And I'll stop. But--maybe if you boys
+will remember the Big Dog--and what he did for us,--when you get back
+home,--if you'll remember him and what he did and what thousands of
+other war-dogs have done,--then maybe you'll be men enough to punch the
+jaw of any guy who gets to saying that dogs are nuisances and that
+vivisection's a good thing, and all that. If you'll just do that much,
+then--well, then Bruce hasn't lived and died for nothing!
+
+"Brucie, old boy," bending to lift the tawny body and lower it into the
+grave, "it's good-by. It's good-by to the cleanest, whitest pal that a
+poor dub of a doughboy ever had. I--"
+
+Mahan glowered across at the clump of silent men.
+
+"If anybody thinks I'm crying," he continued thickly, "he's a liar. I
+got a cold, and--"
+
+"Sacre bon Dieu!" yelled old Vivier, insanely. "Regarde-donc! Nom d'une
+pipe!"
+
+He knelt quickly beside the body, in an ecstasy of excitement. The
+others craned their necks to see. Then from a hundred throats went up a
+gasp of amazement.
+
+Bruce, slowly and dazedly, was lifting his magnificent head!
+
+"Chase off for the surgeon!" bellowed Mahan, plumping down on his knees
+beside Vivier and examining the wound in the dog's scalp. "The bullet
+only creased his skull! It didn't go through! It's just put him out for
+a few hours, like I've seen it do to men. Get the surgeon! If that
+bullet in his body didn't hit something vital, we'll pull him around,
+yet! GLORY BE!"
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+It was late summer again at The Place, late opulent summer, with the
+peace of green earth and blue sky, the heavy droning of bees and the
+promise of harvest. The long shadows of late afternoon stretched
+lovingly across the lawn, from the great lakeside trees. Over
+everything brooded a dreamy amber light. The war seemed a million miles
+away.
+
+The Mistress and the Master came down from the vine-shaded veranda for
+their sunset walk through the grounds. At sound of their steps on the
+gravel, a huge dark-brown-and-white collie emerged from his
+resting-place under the wistaria-arbor.
+
+He stretched himself lazily, fore and aft, in collie-fashion. Then he
+trotted up to his two deities and thrust his muzzle playfully into the
+Mistress's palm, as he fell into step with the promenaders.
+
+He walked with a stiffness in one foreleg. His gait was not a limp. But
+the leg's strength could no longer be relied on for a ten-mile gallop.
+Along his forehead was a new-healed bullet-crease. And the fur on his
+sides had scarcely yet grown over the mark of the high-powered ball
+which had gone clear through him without touching a mortal spot.
+
+Truly, the regimental surgeon of the "Here-We-Comes" had done a job
+worthy of his own high fame! And the dog's wonderful condition had done
+the rest.
+
+Apart from scars and stiffness, Bruce was none the worse for his year
+on the battle-front. He could serve no longer as a dashing courier. But
+his life as a pet was in no way impaired.
+
+"Here's something that came by the afternoon mail, Bruce," the Master
+greeted him, as the collie ranged alongside. "It belongs to you. Take a
+look at it."
+
+The Master drew from his pocket a leather box, and opened it. On the
+oblong of white satin, within the cover, was pinned a very small and
+very thin gold medal. But, light as it was, it had represented much
+abstinence from estaminets and tobacco-shops, on the part of its donors.
+
+"Listen," the Master said, holding the medal in front of the collie.
+"Listen, while I read you the inscription: 'To Bruce. From some of the
+boys he saved from the boches.'"
+
+Bruce was sniffing the thin gold lozenge interestedly. The inscription
+meant nothing to him. But--strong and vivid to his trained nostrils--he
+scented on the medal the loving finger-touch of his old friend and
+admirer, Top-Sergeant Mahan.
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Bruce, by Albert Payson Terhune
+
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