“I’m sorry you take it this way,” reproved Glure. “I had hoped you were more broad-minded, but you are as pigheaded as the rest.”
“The ‘rest,’ hey?” the Master caught him up. “The ‘rest’? Then I’m not the first? I’m glad they had sense enough to send you packing.”
“They were blind animal worshipers, both of them,” said Glure aggrievedly, “just as you are. One of them yelled something after me that I sincerely hope I didn’t hear aright. If I did I have a strong action of slander against him. The other chucklehead so far forgot himself as to threaten to take a shotgun to me if I didn’t get off his land.”
“I’m sorry!” sighed the Master. “For both of them seem to have covered the ground so completely that there isn’t anything unique for me to say—or do. Now listen to me for two minutes. I’ve read a few of those antidog letters in the newspapers, but you’re the first person I’ve met in real life who backs such rot. And I’m going—”
“It is not a matter for argument,” loftily began Glure.
“Yes it is,” asserted the Master. “Everything is, except religion and love and toothache. You say dogs ought to be destroyed as a patriotic duty because they aren’t utilitarian. There’s where you’re wrong at the very beginning. Dead wrong. I’m not talking about the big kennels where one man keeps a hundred dogs as he’d herd so many prize hogs. Though look what the owners of such kennels did for the country at the last New York show at Madison Square Garden! Every penny of the thousands and thousands of dollars in profits from the show went to the Red Cross. I’m speaking of the man who keeps one dog or two or even three dogs, and keeps them as pets. I’m speaking of myself, if you like. Do you know what it costs me per week to feed my dogs?”
“I’m not looking for statistics In—”
“No, I suppose not. Few fanatics are. Well, I figured it out a few weeks ago, after I read one of those antidog letters. The total upkeep of all my dogs averages just under a dollar a week. A bare fifty dollars a year. That’s true. And—”
“And that fifty dollars,” interposed Glure eagerly, “would pay for a soldier’s—”
“It would not!” contradicted the Master, trying to keep some slight grip on his sliding temper. “But I can tell you what it would do: Part of it would go for burglar insurance, which I don’t need now, because no stranger dares to sneak up to my house at night. Part of it would go to make up for things stolen around The Place. For instance, in the harness room of my stable there are five sets of good harness and two or three extra automobile tires. Unless I’m very much mistaken, the best of those would be gone now if Lad hadn’t just treed the man who was after them.”
“Pshaw!” exploded Glure in fine scorn. “We saw no man there. There was no proof of—”
“There was proof enough for me,” continued the Master. “And if Lad hadn’t scented the fellow one of the other dogs would. As I told you, mine is the only house—and mine is the only stable—on this side of the lake that has never been looted. Mine is the only orchard—and mine is the only garden—that is never robbed. And this is the only place, on our side of the lake, where dogs are kept at large for twelve months of the year. My dogs’ entry fees at Red Cross shows have more than paid for their keep, and those fees went straight to charity.”
“But”
“The women of my family are as safe here, day and night, as if I had a machine-gun company on guard. That assurance counts for more than a little, in peace of mind, back here in the North Jersey hinterland. I’m not taking into account the several other ways the dogs bring in cash income to us. Not even the cash Lad turned over to the Red Cross when we sent that $1,600 ‘Gold Hat’ cup he won, to be melted down. And I’m not speaking of our dogs’ comradeship, and what that means to us. Our dogs are an asset in every way—not a liability. They aren’t deadheads either. For I pay the state tax on them every year. They’re true, loyal, companionable chums, and they’re an ornament to The Place as well as its best safeguard. All in return for table scraps and skim milk and less than a weekly dollar’s worth of stale bread and cast-off butcher-shop bones. Where do you figure out the ‘saving’ for the war chest if I got rid of them?”
“As I said,” repeated Glure with cold austerity, “it’s not a matter for argument. I came here hoping to—”
“I’m not given to mawkish sentiment,” went on the Master shamefacedly, “but on the day your fool law for dog exterminating goes into effect there’ll be a piteous crying of little children all over the whole world—of little children mourning for the gentle protecting playmates they loved. And there’ll be a million men and women whose lives have all at once become lonely and empty and miserable. Isn’t this war causing enough crying and loneliness and misery without your adding to it by killing our dogs? For the matter of that, haven’t the army dogs over in Europe been doing enough for mankind to warrant a square deal for their stay-at-home brothers? Haven’t they?”
“That’s a mass of sentimental bosh,” declared Glure. “All of it.”
“It is,” willingly confessed the Master. “So are most of the worth-while things in life, if you reduce them to their lowest terms.”
“You know what a fine group of dogs I had,” said Glure, starting off on a new tack. “I had a group that cost me, dog for dog, more than any other kennel in the state. Grand dogs too. You remember my wonderful Merle, for instance, and-”
“And your rare ‘Prussian sheep dog’—or was it a prune hound?—that a Chicago man sold to you for $1,100,” supplemented the Master, swallowing a grin. “I remember. I remember them all. What then?”
“Well,” resumed Glure, “no one can accuse me of not practicing what I preach. I began this splendid campaign by getting rid of every dog I owned. So I—”
“Yes,” agreed the Master. “I read all about that last month in your local paper. Distemper had run through your kennel, and you tried doctoring the dogs on a theory of your own instead of sending for a vet. So they all died. Tough luck! Or perhaps you got rid of them that way on purpose? For the good of the Cause? I’m sorry about the Merle. He was—”
“I see there’s no use talking to you,” sighed Glure in disgust, ponderously rising and waddling toward his car. “I’m disappointed; because I hoped you were less bone-brained and more patriotic than these yokels round here.”
“I’m not,” cheerily conceded the Master. “I’m not, I’m glad to say. Not a bit.”
“Then,” pursued Glure, climbing into the car, “since you feel that way about it, I suppose there’s no use asking you to come to the little cattle show I’m organizing for week after next, because that’s for the Food Conservation League too. And since you’re so out of sympathy with—”
“I’m not out of sympathy with the League,” asserted the Master. “Its card is in our kitchen window. We’ve signed its pledge and we’re boosting it every way we know how, except by killing our dogs; and that’s no part of the League’s program, as you know very well. Tell me more about the cattle show.”
“It’s a neighborhood affair,” said Glure sulkily, yet eager to secure any possible entrants. “Just a bunch of home-raised cattle. Cup and rosette for best of each recognized breed, and the usual ribbons for second and third. Three dollars an entry. Only one class for each breed. Every entrant must have been raised by the exhibitor. Gate admission fifty cents. Red Cross to get the gross proceeds. I’ve offered the use of my south meadow at Glure Towers—just as I did for the specialty dog show. I’ve put up a hundred dollars toward the running expenses too. Micklesen’s to judge.”
“I don’t go in for stock raising,” said the Master. “My little Alderney heifer is the only head of quality stock I ever bred. I doubt if she is worth taking up there, but I’ll be glad to take her if only to swell the competition list. Send me a blank, please.”
Lad trotted dejectedly back to the house as Glure’s car chugged away up the drive. Lad was glumly unhappy. He had had no trouble at all in catching the scent of the man he h
ad treed. He had followed the crashingly made trail through undergrowth and woodland until it had emerged into the highroad.
And there, perforce, Lad had paused. For, taught from puppyhood, he knew the boundaries of The Place as well as did the Mistress or the Master, and he knew equally well that his own jurisdiction ended at those boundaries. Beyond them he might not chase even the most loathed intruder. The highroad was sanctuary.
Wherefore at the road edge he stopped and turned slowly back. His pursuit was ended, but not his anger, nor his memory of the marauder’s scent. The man had trespassed slyly on The Place. He had gotten away unpunished. These things rankled in the big dog’s mind....
It was a pretty little cattle show and staged in a pretty setting withal—at Glure Towers, two weeks later. The big sunken meadow on the verge of the Ramapo River was lined on two sides with impromptu sheds. The third side was blocked by something between a grandstand and a marquee. The tree-hung river bordered the fourth side. In the field’s center was the roped-off judging inclosure into which the cattle, class by class, were to be led.
Above the pastoral scene brooded the architectural crime, known as The Towers—homestead and stronghold of Hamilcar Q. Glure, Esquire.
Glure had made much money in Wall Street—a crooked little street that begins with a graveyard and ends in a river. Having waxed indecently rich, he had erected for himself a hideously expensive estate among the Ramapo Mountains and had settled down to the task of patronizing his rural neighbors. There he elected to be known as the “Wall Street Farmer,” a title that delighted not only himself but everyone else in the region.
There was, in this hinterland stretch, a friendly and constant rivalry among the natives and other old residents in the matter of stock raising. Horses, cattle, pigs, chickens, even a very few sheep were bred for generations along lines which their divers owners had laid out—lines which those owners fervently believed must some day produce perfection.
Each owner or group of owners had his own special ideas as to the best way to produce this superstock result. The local stock shows formed the only means of proving or disproving the excellence of the varied theories. Hence these shows were looked upon as barnyard supreme courts.
Mr. Glure had begun his career in the neighborhood with a laudable aim of excelling everybody else in everything. He had gone, heart and soul, into stock producing and as he had no breeding theories of his own he proceeded to acquire a set. As it would necessarily take years to work out these beliefs, he bridged the gap neatly by purchasing and importing prize livestock and by entering it against the home-raised products of his neighbors.
Strangely enough, this did not add to the popularity which he did not possess. Still more strangely, it did not add materially to his prestige as an exhibitor, for the judges had an exasperating way of handing him a second- or third-prize ribbon and then of awarding the coveted blue rosette to the owner and breeder of some local exhibit.
After a long time it began to dawn upon Glure that narrow neighborhood prejudice deemed it unsportsmanlike to buy prize stock and exhibit it as one’s own. At approximately the same time three calves were born to newly imported prize cows in the two-acre model barns of Glure Towers, and with them was born Glure’s newest idea.
No one could deny he had bred these calves himself. They were born on his own place and of his own high-pedigreed cattle. Three breeds were represented among the trio of specimens. By points and by lineage they were well-nigh peerless. Wherefore the plan for a show of neighborhood “home-raised” cattle. At length Glure felt he was coming into his own.
The hinterland folk had fought shy of Glure since the dog show wherein he had sought to win the capital prize by formulating a set of conditions that could be filled by no entrant except a newly imported champion Merle of his own.
But the phrase “home-raised” now proved a bait that few of the region’s stock lovers could resist; and on the morning of the show no fewer than fifty-two cattle of standard breeds were shuffling or lowing in the big impromptu sheds.
A farm hand, the day before, had led to the show ground The Place’s sole entrant—the pretty little Alderney heifer of which the Master had spoken to Glure and which, by the way, was destined to win nothing higher than a third-prize ribbon.
For that matter, to end the suspense, the best of the three Glure calves won only a second prize, all the first for their three breeds going to two nonplutocratic North Jerseymen who had bred the ancestors of their entrants for six generations.
The Mistress and the Master motored over to Glure Towers on the morning of the show in their one car. Lad went with them. He always went with them.
Not that any dog could hope to find interest in a cattle show, but a dog would rather go anywhere with his Master than to stay at home without him. Witness the glad alacrity wherewith the weariest dog deserts a snug fireside in the vilest weather for the joy of a master-accompanying walk.
A tire puncture delayed the trip. The show was about to begin when the car was at last parked behind the sunken meadow. The Mistress and the Master, with Lad at their heels, started across the meadow afoot toward the well-filled grandstand.
Several acquaintances in the stand waved to them as they advanced. Also, before they had traversed more than half the meadow’s area their host bore down upon them.
Mr. Glure (dressed, as usual, for the Occasion) looked like a blend of Landseer’s “Edinburgh Drover” and a theater-program picture of “What the Man Will Wear.”
He had been walking beside a garishly liveried groom who was leading an enormous Holstein bull toward the judging inclosure. The bull was steered by a five-foot bar, the end snapped to a ring in his nose.
“Hello, good people!” Mr. Glure boomed, pump-handling the unenthusiastic Mistress’ right hand and bestowing a jarringly annoying slap upon the Master’s shoulder. “Glad to see you! You’re late. Almost too late for the best part of the show. Before judging begins, I’m having some of my choicest European stock paraded in the ring. Just for exhibition, you know. Not for a contest. I like to give a treat to some of these farmers who think they know how to breed cattle.”
“Yes?” queried the Master, who could think of nothing cleverer to say.
“Take that bull, Tenebris, of mine, for instance,” proclaimed Glure, with a wave toward the approaching Holstein and his guide. “Best ton of livestock that ever stood on four legs. Look how he—”
Glure paused in his lecture for he saw that both the Mistress and the Master were staring, not at the bull, but at the beast’s leader. The spectacle of a groom in gaudy livery, on duty at a cattle show, was all but too much for their gravity.
“You’re looking at that boy of mine, hey? Fine, well-setup chap, isn’t he? A faithful boy. Devoted to me. Slavishly devoted. Not like most of these grumpy, independent Jersey rustics. Not much. He’s a treasure, Winston is. Used to be chief handler for some of the biggest cattle breeders in the East he tells me. I got hold of him by chance, and just by the sheerest good luck, a week or so ago. Met him on the road and he asked for a lift. He—”
It was then that Lad disgraced himself and his deities, and proved himself all unworthy to appear in so refined an assembly. The man in livery had convoyed the bull to within a few feet of the proudly exhorting Glure. Now, without growl or other sign of warning, the hitherto peaceable dog changed into a murder machine.
In a single mighty bound he cleared the narrowing distance between himself and the advancing groom.
The leap sent him hurtling through the air, an eighty-pound furry catapult, straight for the man’s throat.
Over and beyond the myriad cattle odors, Lad had suddenly recognized a scent that spelt deathless hatred. The scent had been verified by a single glance at the brilliantly clad man in livery. Wherefore the mad charge.
The slashing jaws missed their mark in the man’s throat by a bare half inch. That they missed it at all was because the man also recognized Lad, and shrank back in mortal terror.
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Even before the eighty-pound weight, smashing against his chest, sent the groom sprawling backward to the ground, Lad’s slashing jaws had found a hold in place of the one they missed.
This grip was on the liveried shoulder, into which the fangs sank to their depth. Down went the man, screaming, the dog atop of him. ,
“Lad!” cried the Mistress, aghast. “Lad!”
Through the avenging rage that misted his brain the great dog heard. With a choking sound that was almost a sob he relinquished his hold and turned slowly from his prey.
. The Master and Glure instinctively took a step toward the approaching dog and the writhingly prostrate man. Then, still more instinctively, and without even coming to a standstill before going into reverse, they both sprang back. They would have sprung further had not the roped walls of the show ring checked them.
For Tenebris had taken a sudden and active part in the scene.
The gigantic Holstein during his career in Europe had trebly won his title to champion. And during the three years before his exportation to America he had gored to death no fewer than three overconfident stable attendants. The bull’s homicidal temper, no less than the dazzling price offered by Glure, had caused his owner to sell him to the transatlantic. bidder.
A bull’s nose is the tenderest spot of his anatomy. Next to his eyes, he guards its safety most zealously. Thus, with a stout leading-bar between him and his conductor, Tenebris was harmless enough.
But the conductor just now had let go of that bar, as Lad’s weight had smitten him. Freed, Tenebris had stood for an instant in perplexity.
Fiercely he flung his gnarled head to one side to see the cause of the commotion. The gesture swung the heavy leading-bar, digging the nose ring cruelly into his sensitive nostrils. The pain maddened Tenebris. A final plunging twist of the head—and the bar’s weight tore the nose ring free from the nostrils.
Tenebris bellowed thunderously at the climax of pain. Then he realized he had shaken off the only thing that gave humans a control over him. A second bellow—a furious pawing of the earth—and the bull lowered his head. His evil eyes glared about him in search of something to kill.
Lad: A Dog Page 17
