Buff: A Collie, and Other Dog-Stories

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Buff: A Collie and other dog-stories, by Albert Payson Terhune.CHAPTER ONE: THE FIGHTING STRAINSHE was a mixture of the unmixable. Not one expert in eighty could have guessed at her breed or breeds.Her coat was like a chow’s, except that it was black and white and tan—as is no chow’s between here and the Chinese Wall. Her deep chest was as wide as a bulldog’s; her queer little eyes slanted like a collie’s; her foreface was like a Great Dane’s, with its barrel muzzle and dewlaps. She was as big as a mastiff.She was Nina, and she belonged to a well-to-do farmer named Shawe, a man who went in for registered cattle, and, as a side line, for prize collies.To clear up, in a handful of words, the mystery of Nina’s breeding, her dam was Shawe’s long-pedigreed and registered and prize-winning tricolour collie, Shawemere Queen. Her sire was Upstreet Butcherboy, the fiercest and gamest and strongest and most murderous pit-terrier ever loosed upon a doomed opponent.Shawe had decided not to breed Shawemere Queen that season. Shawemere Queen had decided differently. Wherefore, she had broken from her enclosure by the simple method of gnawing for three hours at the rotting wood that held a rusty lock-staple.This had chanced to befall on a night when Tug McManus had deputed the evening exercising of Upstreet Butcherboy to a new handy-man. The handy-man did not know Butcherboy’s odd trick of going slack on the chain for a moment and then flinging himself forward with all his surpassing speed and still more surpassing strength.As a result, the man came back to McManus’s alone, noisily nursing three chain-torn fingers. Butcherboy trotted home to his kennel at dawn, stolidly taking the whaling which McManus saw fit to administer.When Shawemere Queen’s six bullet-headed pups came into the world, sixty-three days later, there was loud and lurid blasphemy, at her master’s kennels. Shawe, as soon as he could speak with any degree of coherence, bade his kennelman drown five of the pups at once, and to give like treatment to the sixth as soon as its mother should have no further need of the youngster.At random the kennelman scooped up five-sixths of the litter and strolled off to the horse-pond.CONTENTS. FOREWORDI. BUFF: A COLLIE CHAPTER ONE: THE FIGHTING STRAINCHAPTER TWO: “THE HUNT IS UP!”CHAPTER THREE: MASTERLESS! 80 CHAPTER FOUR: THE END OF THE TRAILII. “SOMETHING”III. CHUMSIV. HUMAN-INTEREST STUFFV. “ONE MINUTE LONGER”VI. THE FOUL FANCIERVII. THE GRUDGEVIII. THE SUNNYBANK COLLIESFOREWORDA swirl of gold-and-white and gray and black,—Rackety, vibrant, glad with life’s hot zest,—Sunnybank collies, gaily surging pack,—These are my chums; the chums that love me best.Not chums alone, but courtiers, zealots, too,—Clean-white of soul, too wise for fraud or sham;Yet senseless in their worship ever new.These are the friendly folk whose god I am.A blatant, foolish, stumbling, purblind god,—A pinchbeck idol, clogged with feet of clay!Yet, eager at my lightest word or nod,They crave but leave to follow and obey.We humans are so slow to understand!Swift in our wrath, deaf to the justice-plea,Meting out punishment with lavish hand!What, but a dog, would serve such gods as we?Heaven gave them souls, I’m sure; but dulled the brain,Lest they should sadden at so brief a spanOf heedless, honest life as they sustain;Or doubt the godhead of their master, Man.Today a pup; to-morrow at life’s prime;Then old and fragile;—dead at fourteen years.At best a meagre little inch of time.Oblivion then, sans mourners, memories, tears!Service that asks no price; forgiveness freeFor injury or for injustice hard.Stanch friendship, wanting neither thanks nor feeSave privilege to worship and to guard:—That is their creed. They know no shrewder wayTo travel through their hour of lifetime here.Would Man but deign to serve his God as they,Millennium must dawn within the