Lad: A Dog (8 page)

Before the scream could leave the fear-chalked lips, Baby was knocked flat by a mighty and hairy shape that lunged across her toward her foe.

And the copperhead's fangs sank deep in Lad's nose.

He gave no sign of pain, but leaped back. As he sprang his jaws caught Baby by the shoulder. The keen teeth did not so much as bruise her soft flesh as he half-dragged, half-threw her into the grass behind him.

Athwart the rug again, Lad launched himself bodily upon the coiled snake.

As he charged, the swift-striking fangs found a second mark—this time in the side of his jaw.

An instant later the copperhead lay twisting and writhing and thrashing impotently among the grass roots, its back broken, and its body sheared almost in two by a slash of the dog's saberlike tusk.

The fight was over. The menace was past. The child was safe.

And, in her rescuer's muzzle and jaw were two deposits of mortal poison.

Lad stood panting above the prostrate and crying Baby. His work was done; and instinct told him at what cost. But his idol was unhurt and he was happy. He bent down to lick the convulsed little face in mute plea for pardon for his needful roughness toward her.

But he was denied even this tiny consolation. Even as he leaned downward he was knocked prone to earth by a blow that all but fractured his skull.

At the child's first terrified cry, her mother had turned back. Nearsighted and easily confused, she had seen only that the dog had knocked her sick baby flat and was plunging across her body. Next, she had seen him grip Baby's shoulder with his teeth and drag her, shrieking, along the ground.

That was enough. The primal mother instinct (that is sometimes almost as strong in woman as in lioness—or cow) was aroused. Fearless of danger to herself, the guest rushed to her child's rescue. As she ran she caught her thick parasol by the ferrule and swung it aloft.

Down came the agate handle of the sunshade on the head of the dog. The handle was as large as a woman's fist, and was composed of a single stone, set in four silver claws.

As Lad staggered to his feet after the terrific blow felled him, the impromptu weapon arose once more in air, descending this time on his broad shoulders.

Lad did not cringe—did not seek to dodge or run—did not show his teeth. This mad assailant was a woman. Moreover, she was a guest, and as such, sacred under the Guest Law which he had mastered from puppyhood.

Had a man raised his hand against Lad—a man other than the Master or a guest—there would right speedily have been a case for a hospital, if not for the undertaker. But, as things now were, he could not resent the beating.

His head and shoulders quivered under the force and the pain of the blows. But his splendid body did not cower. And the woman, wild with fear and mother love, continued to smite with all her random strength.

Then came the rescue.

At the first blow the child had cried out in fierce protest at her pet's ill-treatment. Her cry went unheard.

“Mother!” she shrieked, her high treble cracked with anguish. “Mother! Don‘t!
Don't!
He kept the snake from eating me! He—!”

The frantic woman still did not heed. Each successive blow seemed to fall upon the little onlooker's own bare heart. And Baby, under the stress, went quite mad.

Scrambling to her feet, in crazy zeal to protect her beloved playmate, she tottered forward three steps, and seized her mother by the skirt.

At the touch the woman looked down. Then her face went yellow-white; and the parasol clattered unnoticed to the ground.

For a long instant the mother stood thus, her eyes wide and glazed, her mouth open, her cheeks ashy—staring at the swaying child who clutched her dress for support and who was sobbing forth incoherent pleas for the dog.

The Master had broken into a run and into a flood of wordless profanity at sight of his dog's punishment. Now he came to an abrupt halt and was glaring dazedly at the miracle before him.

The child had risen and had walked.

The child had
walked!—
she whose lower motive centers, the wise doctors had declared, were hopelessly paralyzed-she who could never hope to twitch so much as a single toe or feel any sensation from the hips downward!

Small wonder that both guest and Master seemed to have caught, for the moment, some of the paralysis that so magically departed from the invalid!

And yet—as a corps of learned physicians later agreed—there was no miracle—no magic—about it. Baby's was not the first, nor the thousandth case in pathologic history, in which paralyzed sensory powers had been restored to their normal functions by means of a shock.

The child had had no malformation, no accident, to injure the spine or the coordination between limbs and brain. A long illness had left her powerless. Country air and new interest in life had gradually built up wasted tissues. A shock had reestablished communication between brain and lower body—a communication that had been suspended; not broken.

When, at last, there was room in any of the human minds for aught but blank wonder and gratitude, the joyously weeping mother was made to listen to the child's story of the fight with the snake—a story corroborated by the Master's find of the copperhead's half-severed body.

“I'll—I'll get down on my knees to that heaven-sent dog,” sobbed the guest, “and apologize to him. Oh, I wish some of you would beat me as I beat him! I'd feel so much better! Where is he?”

The question brought no answer. Lad had vanished. Nor could eager callings and searchings bring him to view. The Master, returning from a shout-punctuated hunt through the forest, made Baby tell her story all over again. Then he nodded.

“I understand,” he said, feeling a ludicrously unmanly desire to cry. “I see how it was. The snake must have bitten him, at least once. Probably oftener, and he knew what that meant. Lad knows everything—
knew
everything I mean. If he had known a little less he'd have been human. But—if he'd been human, he probably wouldn't have thrown away his life for Baby.”

“Thrown away his life,” repeated the guest. “I—I don't understand. Surely I didn't strike him hard enough to—”

“No,” returned the Master, “but the snake did.”

“You mean, he has-?”

“I mean it is the nature of all animals to crawl away, alone, into the forest to die. They are more considerate than we. They try to cause no further trouble to those they have loved. Lad got his death from the copperhead's fangs. He knew it. And while we were all taken up with the wonder of Baby's cure, he quietly went away—to die.”

The Mistress got up hurriedly and left the room. She loved the great dog, as she loved few humans. The guest dissolved into a flood of sloppy tears.

“And I beat him,” she wailed. “I beat him—horribly! And all the time he was dying from the poison he had saved my child from! Oh, I'll never forgive myself for this, the longest day I live.”

“The longest day is a long day,” dryly commented the Master. “And self-forgiveness is the easiest of all lessons to learn. After all, Lad was only a dog. That's why he is dead.”

The Place's atmosphere tingled with jubilation over the child's cure. Her uncertain, but always successful, efforts at walking were an hourly delight.

But, through the general joy, the Mistress and the Master could not always keep their faces bright. Even the guest mourned frequently, and loudly, and eloquently the passing of Lad. And Baby was openly inconsolable at the loss of her chum.

At dawn on the morning of the fourth day, the Master let himself silently out of the house, for his usual before-breakfast cross-country tramp—a tramp on which, for years, Lad had always been his companion. Heavy-hearted, the Master prepared to set forth alone.

As he swung shut the veranda door behind him, Something arose stiffly from a porch rug—Something the Master looked at in a daze of unbelief.

It was a dog—yet no such dog as had ever before sullied the cleanness of The Place's well-scoured veranda.

The animal's body was lean to emaciation. The head was swollen—though, apparently, the swelling had begun to recede. The fur, from spine to toe, from nose to tail tip, was one solid and shapeless mass of caked mud.

The Master sat down very suddenly on the veranda floor beside the dirt-encrusted brute and caught it in his arms, sputtering disjointedly:

“Lad!
—Laddie!—
Old
friend!
You're alive again! You‘re—you're
—alive!
”

Yes, Lad had known enough to creep away to the woods to die. But, thanks to the wolf strain in his collie blood, he had also known how to do something far wiser than die.

Three days of self-burial, to the very nostrils, in the mysteriously healing ooze of the marshes, behind the forest, had done for him what such mud baths have done for a million wild creatures. It had drawn out the viper poison and had left him whole again—thin, shaky on the legs, slightly swollen of head—but
whole.

“He's—he's awfully dirty, though! Isn't he?” commented the guest, when an idiotic triumph yell from the Master had summoned the whole family, in sketchy attire, to the veranda. “Awfully dirty and—”

“Yes,” curtly assented the Master, Lad's head between his caressing hands. “ ‘Awfully dirty.' That's why he's still alive.”

LAD'S MATE LADY WAS THE ONLY ONE OF THE LITTLE PEOPLE about The Place who refused to look on Lad with due. reverence. In her frolic moods she teased him unmercifully; in a prettily imperious way she bossed and bullied him—for all of which Lad adored her. He had other reasons, too, for loving Lady—not only because she was dainty and beautiful, and was caressingly fond of him, but because he had won her in fair mortal combat with the younger and showier Knave.

For a time after Knave's routing, Lad was blissfully happy in Lady's undivided comradeship. Together they ranged the forests beyond The Place in search of rabbits. Together they sprawled shoulder to shoulder on the disreputable old fur rug in front of the living-room fire. Together they did joyous homage to their gods, the Mistress and the Master.

Then in the late summer a new rival appeared—to be accurate, three rivals. And they took up all of Lady's time and thought and love. Poor old Lad was made to feel terribly out in the cold. The trio of rivals that had so suddenly claimed Lady's care were fuzzy and roly-poly, and about the size of month-old kittens. In brief, they were three thoroughbred collie puppies.

Two of them were tawny brown, with white forepaws and chests. The third was not like Lad in color, but like the mother—at least, all of him not white was of the indeterminate yellowish mouse-gray which, at three months or earlier, turns to pale gold.

When they were barely a fortnight old—almost as soon as their big mournful eyes opened—the two brown puppies died. There seemed no particular reason for their death, except the fact that a collie is always the easiest or else the most impossible breed of dog to raise.

The fuzzy grayish baby alone was left—the puppy which was soon to turn to white and gold. The Mistress named him “Wolf.”

Upon Baby Wolf the mother dog lavished a ridiculous lot of attention—so much that Lad was miserably lonely. The great collie would try with pathetic eagerness, a dozen times a day, to lure his mate into a woodland ramble or into a romp on the lawn, but Lady met his wistful advances with absorbed indifference or with a snarl. Indeed when Lad ventured overnear the fuzzy baby, he was warned off by a querulous growl from the mother or by a slash of her shiny white teeth.

Lad could not at all understand it. He felt no particular interest—only a mild and disapproving curiosity—in the shapeless little whimpering ball of fur that nestled so helplessly against his beloved mate's side. He could not understand the mother love that kept Lady with Wolf all day and all night. It was an impulse that meant nothing to Lad.

After a week or two of fruitless effort to win back Lady's interest, Lad coldly and wretchedly gave up the attempt. He took long solicary walks by himself in the forest, retired for hours at a time to sad brooding in his favorite “cave” under the living-room piano, and tried to console himself by spending all the rest of his day in the company of the Mistress and the Master. And he came thoroughly to disapprove of Wolf. Recognizing the baby intruder as the cause of Lady's estrangement from himself, he held aloof from the puppy.

The latter was beginning to emerge from his newborn shapelessness. His coat's texture was changing from fuzz to silk. Its color was turning from gray into yellow. His blunt little nose was lengthening and growing thin and pointed. His butterball body was elongating, and his huge feet and legs were beginning to shape up. He looked more like a dog now, and less like an animated muff. Also within Wolf's youthful heart awoke the devil of mischief, the keen urge of play. He found Lady a pleasant enough playfellow up to a certain point. But a painfully sharp pinch from her teeth or a reproving and breath-taking slap from one of her forepaws was likely to break up every game that she thought had gone far enough, when Wolf's clownish roughness at length got on her hair-trigger nerves.

So, in search of an additional playmate, the frolicsome puppy turned to Lad, only to find that Lad would not play with him at all. Lad made it very, very clear to everyone—except to the fool puppy himself—that he had no desire to romp or to associate in any way with this creature which had ousted him from Lady's heart! Being cursed with a soul too big and gentle to let him harm anything so helpless as Wolf, he did not snap or growl, as did Lady, when the puppy teased. He merely walked away in hurt dignity.