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+Project Gutenberg's etext, Bruce by Albert Payson Terhune
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+Bruce
+
+by Albert Payson Terhune
+
+November, 2000  [Etext #2391]
+[Date last updated: July 10, 2005]
+
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+Project Gutenberg Etext, Bruce, by Albert Payson Terhune
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+
+
+
+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
+
+
+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 naïvely:
+"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 façade.
+
+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 Project Gutenberg's etext, Bruce by Albert Payson Terhune
+
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