Bruce Part 2

Timidly d.i.c.k asked leave to have La.s.s 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 d.i.c.k's cubby-hole room. He gazed down at the slumberous pair for a s.p.a.ce, while he fought and conquered an impulse toward fair play. Then he stooped to pick up the dog.

La.s.s, 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. d.i.c.k stirred uneasily.

Patting the puppy lightly on her upraised head, Hazen picked up La.s.s 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. La.s.s 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 La.s.s 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 ca.n.a.l, 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 La.s.s, 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 La.s.s up by the neck, tucked her under his arm and made off through the dark.

He did not take the road toward the ca.n.a.l, 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 La.s.s into the slimy ca.n.a.l 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 pa.s.sed. The fourth he came to was unlocked. He slid back the newly greased side door, thrust La.s.s 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 La.s.s.

The car was dark and cold and smelly. La.s.s 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 La.s.s 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 La.s.s 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 La.s.s 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 s.h.i.+pment 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, La.s.s, 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 appet.i.te of a puppy. La.s.s 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 La.s.s 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 La.s.s,--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 p.r.i.c.k-eared and apple-domed; and her head's as wide as a church door!"

Apparently these humans were not glad to see her. La.s.s 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 La.s.s's one accomplishment. It had been taught her by d.i.c.k. 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 fas.h.i.+on of all new arrivals who came to The Place, La.s.s 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 La.s.s'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 La.s.s 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.