Part 6

"No hurry, no hurry a-tall," gloated the tramp, enjoying the torture of this helpless captive who had walked into his hands. "I ain't goin' to hurt you none--only make sure that you don't wander off an' hurt yourself while I'm gone. Won't do to let you be damagin' yoreself; you're valuable property. Trimm, now, I'll tell you wot we'll do! We'll just back you up agin one of these trees an' then we'll jest slip this here belt through yore elbows an' buckle it around behind at the back; an' I kinder guess you'll stay right there till I go down yonder to that town that I passed comin' up here an' see wot kind of a bargain I kin strike up with the marshal. Come on, now," he threatened with a show of bluster, reading the resolution that was mounting in Mr. Trimm's face. "Come on peaceable, if you don't want to git hurt."

Of a sudden Mr. Trimm became the primitive man. He was filled with those elemental emotions that make a man see in spatters of crimson. Gathering strength from passion out of an exhausted frame, he sprang forward at the tramp. He struck at him with his head, his shoulders, his knees, his manacled wrists, all at once. Not really hurt by the puny assault, but caught by surprise, the freckled man staggered bade, clawing at the air, tripped on the washboiler in the fire, and with a yell vanished below the smooth edge of the cut.

Mr. Trimm stole forward and looked over the bluff. Half-way down the cliff on an outcropping shelf of rock the man lay, face downward, motionless. He seemed to have grown smaller and to have shrunk into his clothes. One long, thin leg was bent up under the skirts of the overcoat in a queer, twisted way, and the cloth of the trouser leg looked flattened and empty. As Mr. Trimm peered down at him he saw a red stain spreading on the rock under the still, silent figure's head.

Mr. Trimm turned to the washboiler. It lay on its side, empty, the last of its recent contents sputtering out into the half-drowned fire. He stared at this ruin a minute. Then without another look over the cliff edge he stumbled slowly down the hill, muttering to himself as he went. Just as he struck the level it began to rain, gently at first, then hard, and despite the shelter of the full-leaved forest trees, he was soon wet through to his skin and dripped water as he lurched along without sense of direction and, indeed, without any active realization of what he was doing.

* * * * *

Late that night it was still raining--a cold, steady, autumnal downpour. A huddled figure slowly climbed upon a low fence running about the house-yard of the little farm where the boy lived who got thrashed for losing a milk-pail. On the wet top rail, precariously perching, the figure slipped and sprawled forward in the miry yard. It got up, painfully swaying on its feet. It was Mr. Trimm, looking for food. He moved slowly toward the house, tottering from weakness and because of the slick mud underfoot; peering near-sightedly this way and that through the murk; starting at every sound and stopping often to listen.

The outlines of the lean-to kitchen at the back of the house were looming dead ahead of him when from the corner of the cottage sprang a small terrier. It made for Mr. Trimm, barking shrilly. He retreated backward, kicking at the little dog and, to hold his balance, striking out with short, dabby jerks of his fettered hands--they were such motions as the terrier itself might make trying to walk on its hindlegs. Still backing away, expecting every instant to feel the terrier's teeth in his flesh, Mr. Trimm put one foot into a hotbed with a great clatter of the breaking glass. He felt the sharp ends of shattered glass tearing and cutting his shin as he jerked free. Recovering himself, he dealt the terrier a lucky kick under the throat that sent it back, yowling, to where it had come from, and then, as a door jerked open and a half-dressed man jumped out into the darkness, Mr. Trimm half hobbled, half fell out of sight behind the woodpile.

Back and forth along the lower edge of his yard the farmer hunted, with the whimpering, cowed terrier to guide him, poking in dark corners with the muzzle of his shotgun for the unseen intruder whose coming had aroused the household. In a brushpile just over the fence to the east Mr. Trimm lay on his face upon the wet earth, with the rain beating down on him, sobbing with choking gulps that wrenched him cruelly, biting at the bonds on his wrists until the sound of breaking teeth gritted in the air. Finally, in the hopeless, helpless frenzy of his agony he beat his arms up and down until the bracelets struck squarely on a flat stone and the force of the blow sent the cuffs home to the last notch so that they pressed harder and faster than ever upon the tortured wrist bones.

When he had wasted ten or fifteen minutes in a vain search the farmer went shivering back indoors to dry put his wet shirt. But the groveling figure in the brushpile lay for a long time where it was, only stirring a little while the rain dripped steadily down on everything.

* * * * *

The wreck was on a Tuesday evening. Early on the Saturday morning following, the chief of police, who was likewise the whole of the day police force in the town of Westfield, nine miles from the place where the collision occurred, heard a peculiar, strangely weak knocking at the front door of his cottage, where he also had his office. The door was a Dutch door, sawed through the middle, so that the top half might be opened independently, leaving the lower panel fast. He swung this top half bade.

A face was framed in the opening--an indescribably dirty, unutterably weary face, with matted white hair and a rime of whitish beard stubble on the jaws. It was fallen in and sunken and it drooped on the chest of its owner. The mouth, swollen and pulpy, as if from repeated hard blows, hung agape, and between the purplish parted lips showed the stumps of broken teeth. The eyes blinked weakly at the chief from under lids as colorless as the eyelids of a corpse. The bare white head was filthy with plastered mud and twigs, and dripping wet.

"Hello, there!" said the chief, startled at this apparition. "What do you want?"

With a movement that told of straining effort the lolled head came up off the chest. The thin, corded neck stiffened back, rising from a dirty, collarless neckband. The Adam's apple bulged out prominently, as big as a pigeon's egg.

"I have come," said the specter in a wheezing rasp of a voice which the chief could hardly hear, "I have come to surrender myself. I am Hobart W. Trimm."

"I guess you got another think comin'," said the chief, who was by the way of being a neighborhood wag. "When last seen Hobart W. Trimm was only fifty-two years old. Besides which, he's dead and buried. I guess maybe you'd better think ag'in, grandpap, and see if you ain't Methus'lah or the Wanderin' Jew."

"I am Hobart W. Trimm, the banker," whispered the stranger with a sort of wan stubbornness.

"Go on and prove it," suggested the chief, more than willing to prolong the enjoyment of the sensation. It wasn't often in Westfield that wandering lunatics came a-calling.

"Got any way to prove it?" he repeated as the visitor stared at him.

"Yes," came the creaking, rusted hinge of a voice, "I have."

Slowly, with struggling attempts, he raised his hands into the chief's sight. They were horribly swollen hands, red with the dried blood where they were not black with the dried dirt; the fingers puffed up out of shape; the nails broken; they were like the skinned paws of a bear. And at the wrists, almost buried in the bloated folds of flesh, blackened, rusted, battered, yet still strong and whole, was a tightly locked pair of Bean's Latest Model Little Giant handcuffs.

"Great God!" cried the chief, transfixed at the sight. He drew the bolt and jerked open the lower half of the door.

"Come in," he said, "and lemme get them irons off of you--they must hurt something terrible." "They can wait," said Mr. Trimm very humbly. "I have worn them a long, long while, I think--I am used to them. Wouldn't you please get me some food first?"

[Footnote 2: _From Irvin Cobb's The Escape of Mr. Trimm, His Plight and Other Plights, Copyright, 1913, by George H. Doran Company. By permission of the publishers._]

_FOREWORD_

_In the days of my youth I was happy. I had no money, hence no responsibilities. All I had was a job with wages that never developed into a position with salary. However, out of my stipend I managed to buy a good shotgun and, each fall thereafter, a case of shells with my own special load for quail--one ounce of No. 9 chilled shot with twenty-four grains of Laflin & Rand powder. In "those old days of the lost sunshine" I possessed also two additional treasures--the most wonderful and lovable shooting crony a man ever had and the finest little English setter any man ever killed a quail over. My pal presented me with this dog because he loved me; moreover, he had a weakness for pointers and owned a bitch named Lou._

_Lee Clark and his good dog Lou! What memories they evoke! As I write the years fall away and Lee and Lou and Dick and I are quail-hunting in the hills of California. I see a little swale covered with stunted sage, blackberry bushes and dried nettles, and the dogs are questing through it. Lee Clark is on one side of this swale and I am on the other, and for a moment the dogs are invisible to me. Then, borne to me on the crisp October air, comes Lee's voice_:

"_Point!_"

_I move fifteen or twenty feet. I am in no hurry, for I know those dogs. It is a matter of personal honor with them not to break point. Presently I see them. Little lemon-and-white Lou has found the bird, and Dicky thorough little gentleman that he was, is honoring her point! Lee walks down to his dog; the quail lies close. "Good old Lou," Lee says, and stoops to give her the caress she craves. Then he kicks out the bird--for me! (Lee was like that. He would never kill a bird over his own dog's point while his field companion stood by, nor could any protest move him from this exhibition of his inherent graciousness and courtesy.) So I fire--and miss--and then at forty yards Lee gets the bird, and Lou trots sedately down and picks the little feathered martyr up very gently, scarcely disturbing a feather, and carries the trophy uphill to Lee. As I write, with twenty years behind me, I tan see her yet, her tail and rear end swishing pridefully and her beautiful eyes abeam with love; she is even trying to smile with the bird in her mouth!_

_Lee takes the bird from her and tucks it in his hunting-coat pocket. Then he strokes Lou's head and says: "Good girl," and Lou licks his hand and scurries away to find another bird. And this time she points so close to me that Lee calls cheerily to me to kick the bird out and kill it. I do--and again Lou retrieves the bird. But she does not bring it to her master this time. Ah, no! Lou is wiser than that. She brings it to me, for she knows it is my bird!_

_Meanwhile Dick is frozen on another bird! And so it goes. At noon we rest under an oak beside a creek, and over a barbecued steak and a bottle of good wine, discuss the morning shoot and the prospects of as good shooting in the afternoon. And late that night we drive home in the moonlight in an old side-bar buggy, with Dick curled up in back and Lou in her master's lap, with her muzzle in his hand . . ._

_Well, there will never be another Dick or another Lou or another gallant, kindly, unselfish, understanding friend and shooting crony like Lee Clark. A fiend stole Dick from me and Lou died in puppy-birth; when Lee told me about it he wept, and I honored him for his tears. And then the pressure of life commenced to be felt. After twelve years of Lou, Lee Clark could not accustom himself to other dogs--and the hopelessness of finding another Lou was quite apparent, for Lou had been one of those rare dogs that do not require training! And I could never find another Dicky and had no place to keep him if I had. I became an author and married, and a multitude of interests claimed us, and we gave up quail-shooting, although every few years we meet and talk bravely about the necessity for renewing our youth afield._

_A man who has trained field dogs for me has much of Lee Clark in him, and that man's wife is a rare good sport. One day I went to his kennels, and he showed me a five-year-old setter that had been the unbeautiful runt of his litter. He called this dog Jeff, and Jeff was a failure. His litter mates had made field trial history but Jeff was so little and homely, nobody had ever wanted him, and he had never been trained. He was a stud dog._

_He was the reincarnation of my lost Dick! I bought him for a hundred and twenty-five dollars, and ignoring the theory that you cannot teach an old dog new tricks, I had Jeff trained. He was such a bright, cunning, fast little old man of a dog that the trainer, who names my dogs after the heroes and heroines of my stories, renamed him Cappy Ricks and registered him by that name. Cappy Ricks did not win in the field trials that year, but he lost on a hair-line decision and after an exhibition of bird work that made him great, even in defeat, and brought me offers of far more than I had spent on him from men who knew a real dog when they saw one. Well, I have bought many dogs, but I have never sold one, and I never shall . . . too much like selling old Uncle Tom down the river! So Cappy is rounding out his years questing through the alfalfa field at my ranch for quail that aren't there. However, I gave him his chance, for dead Dick's sake, and he made good, and I hope he enjoyed it._

_So I wrote a story about Cappy and a fictitious trainer and his wife, because field dog trainers and the field dog "fancy" are different from all other sportsmen. And when my little story had been written and my editor, Ray Long, asked me what I was going to call it, I had a swift and poignant vision of a lovely October morning in the hills of California. There was a little swale grown over with stunted sage, blackberry vines and dried nettles, and in the cover Lou was standing at point, with Dick honoring her; from across the swale I heard again the voice of the best friend and the best field companion any man ever had. And he was calling warningly_:

"_Point!_"

_Yes, this story is dedicated to Lee Clark and his good dog, Lou!_

POINT[3]

BY PETER B. KYNE

Little Old Dan Pelly occupied a position in life analogous to that of a tragedian who aspires to play comedy rôles. By reason of early environment, natural inclination and years of practice, he was a dog trainer; now, in the sunset of his rather futile life, he was a cross between a chicken raiser, farmer and dreamer of old dreams that had to do mostly with dogs and good quail cover. In a word, old Dan was not happy, and this morning as he sat on a fallen scrub oak tree on the highest point on his alleged ranch and gazed off into Little Antelope Valley, he almost wished that a merciful Providence would waft him out of this cold world.

"The Indians had the right idea of a hereafter," mused Dan Pelly. "To them the next world was a happy hunting ground. This world is no longer fit for a white man to live in. It's getting too civilized. Travel as far as you will for good trout-fishing and upland hunting and you'll find some scrub there ahead of you in a flivver. Get out on your own ground at dawn on the day the shooting season opens--and you'll find empty shotgun shells a week old. Tim, old pal, the more I see of some men the more I love you."

Tim--or, to accord him his registered name. Tiny Tim--ran his cool muzzle into Dan Pelly's horny palm and rested it there. Just rested it and spoke never a word, for Tiny Tim was one of those rare dogs who know when their masters are troubled of soul and forbear to weary their loved ones with unnecessary outbursts of affection or sympathy. He leaned his shoulder against Dan's knee and rested his muzzle in Dan's hand as who should say: "Well, man alone is vile. Here I am and I'll stick, depend upon it."

Tiny Tim was an English setter and the last surviving son of Keepsake, the greatest bitch Dan Pelly had ever seen or owned. Dan had wept when an envious scoundrel had poisoned her the night before a field trial up Bakersfield way. All of her puppies out of Kenwood Boy had survived, and all had made history in dogdom. Three of them had been placed--one, two, three--in the Derby. The other two had been the runners-up, and the least promising of these runners-up had been Tiny Tim.

Tim had been the runt of the litter and as if his physical deficiency had not been sufficient handicap, he had grown into a singularly unbeautiful dog. He had a butterfly nose, one black ear, a solid white coat with the exception of a black spot as big as a man's hand just over the root of his tail; and his tail was his crowning misfortune. Dog fanciers like a setter with a merry tail, but Tiny Tim carried his very low when he ran that Derby, and he had never carried it very high since. As if to offset the tragedy of his tail, however, Tiny Tim ran with a high head, for he had, tucked away in that butterfly nose, a pair of olfactory nerves that carried him unerringly to birdy ground. He could always manage to locate a bird lying close in cover that had been thoroughly prospected by other dogs.

Dan Pelly had sold Tiny Tim's litter mates at a fancy figure after that memorable Derby, but for homely Tiny Tim there were no bidders; so Dan Pelly expressed him back to the kennels. He was homely and lacked style and dash in his bird work; he appeared a bit nervous and uncertain and inclined to limit his range, and it seemed to Dan that as a field trial prospect he was so much inferior to other dogs that it was scarcely worth while spending any time or money on his education. However, he did have a grand nose; when he grew older Dan hoped he might outgrow his nervousness and be steadier to shot and wing; in view of his undoubted instinct for birds, it seemed the part of wisdom to make a "plug" shooting dog of him. Every dog trainer keeps such an animal, if not for his own use then for the use of stout old bank presidents and of retired brewers whose idea of the sport of hunting is to come home with "the limit." A grand hunting dog means little in the lives of such "sportsmen"; they want a dog that will work close to the gun, thus enabling them to proceed leisurely, as becomes a fat man. It is no pleasure to them to be forced to walk down a steep hill, clamber across a deep gully and climb the opposite hill to kill a bird their dog has been pointing for fifteen or twenty minutes. It is reserved for idealists like old Dan Pelly to thrill to the work of a dog like that. The dead bird is a secondary consideration.

So Tiny Tim had been sent back to the kennel, and now, in his fifth year, he was still on Dan Pelly's hands. But that was no fault of Tiny Tim's. And he had never again been entered in a field trial. That was no fault of his, either. Dan Pelly had merely gone out of the dog business, and Tiny Tim, his last dog and best beloved, was neither a field trial dog nor yet a potterer for fat bankers and retired brewers who came down to Dan Pelly's place for a week-end shoot in the season. No, Tiny Tim had never achieved that disgrace. Dan Pelly had given up dog training and dog boarding and dog raising and dog trading after his return from that field trial where old Keepsake's litter had brought him more money than he had ever seen at any one time before. Consequently, Tiny Tim was Dan's own shooting dog and Dan had trained him not for filthy lucre but for that love and companionship for a good dog which idealists of the Dan Pelly type can never repress.

Tiny Tim had known but one master, and but one code of sportsmanship; he responded to but one set of signals; he had never been curbed in his range or speed; he had never been scolded or shouted at or beaten, but he had received much of love and caressing and praise. He had been fed properly, housed properly, wormed regularly every three months, bathed every Saturday afternoon and brushed and combed almost every day, and as a result he was an extremely healthy dog, albeit a small dog, even among small, field type English setters. Dan Pelly loved him just a little bit more because he was a runt and because, though royally bred, his bearing was a bit ignoble.

"I'll have none of your bench type setters," Dan was wont to remark when speaking of setters. "I could weep from just lookin' at them--the poor boobs, with their domed foreheads and their sad, bloodshot eyes and dribbling chops. Too heavy and slow for anybody but a fat man. An hour's hard going of a warm day and they're done. I'll have a light, neat little setter for a long, hard, drivin' day of it."

Dan Pelly's choice of dog was an index to his character. He, too, was a light, compact little man, with something of a lost dog's wistfulness about him. Dan didn't like pointers. They were too aggressive, too headstrong, too noisy for him. The sight of a bulldog or a bull terrier or an Airedale made him angry, for such dogs could always be depended upon to pounce upon a shooting dog and worry him. Toy dogs depressed him. They seemed so unworthy of human attention and moreover they had no brains.

This morning Dan Pelly was more than ordinarily unhappy. He needed five hundred dollars worse than he needed salvation . . .

And only the day before while he and Tim had been working a patch of low cover just off the county road, a man in a very expensive automobile driven by a liveried chauffeur had paused in the road to watch them. Presently Tim had made one of those spectacular points which always give a real dog lover a thrill. In mid-air, while leaping over a small bush, he had caught the scent of a quail crouching close under that bush. He had landed with his body half turned toward the bush, his head had swung around and there he had stood, "frozen." Dan had walked up, kicked the bird out, waited until the quail was forty yards away and fired. Meanwhile Tim had broken point and, head up, was following the flushed bird with anxious eyes.

As the gun barked the bird flinched slightly but did not reduce its speed. Wings spread stiffly, it sailed away out of sight and Dan Pelly, seeing himself watched by the man in the motor car, grinned deprecatingly.

"Missed him a mile," he called.

"You let him get too far away before you fired," the stranger replied with that hearty camaraderie which always obtains between lovers of upland shooting.

"My gun is a full choke; I can kill nicely with it at fifty yards, but I like to give the birds a chance for their white alley so I never shoot under forty yards."

"Grand point your little setter made then. Steady to flush and shot, too. Homely little rascal, but man, he's a dog! I must have a look at him, if you don't mind, my friend." And he got out of the car.

"Certainly, sir. Come, Timmy, lad. Shake hands with the gentleman."