Part 3

Instead of denning in, as had his former mate and Ruff, he went on with his own hunt. Lacking a confederate like the collie to help him find food which was beyond his own vulpine powers to capture or slay, Whitefoot had begun to feel the pinch of winter-hunger. Unappeasable appetite made him take chances from which the vixen would have recoiled.

For example, the sound and smell of the distant hunt, this morning, did not send him to cover. All autumn and early winter he had been hearing such far-off sounds, had been catching the man-and-dog scent. Never had he come to harm from any of it. He had been able to keep out of its way. Until that afternoon when Holt chanced upon him, no human eye had seen him. And even then there had been no trouble about getting away clean.

There were rabbits hiding in these clefts and crevices along the ridge-side. Whitefoot could smell them. With luck he might be able to stampede one of them into a cul-de-sac cranny big enough to admit his own slim body.

An empty and gnawing stomach urged him on. It urged him on, even after he caught the scent of human footprints which had passed that way, not an hour agone. It urged him on, even when, in a cranny, he came upon a contrivance of wood and iron which fairly reeked of human touch. The thing reeked of something else—of an excessively dead chicken which lay just beyond it in the cleft.

Too crafty to go past such a man-made and man-scented contrivance, yet Whitefoot felt his mouth water at the ancient odour of the chicken. He craved it beyond anything. Detouring the top of the ridge, he entered the cleft from the other side. No visible object of man’s workmanship checked him here or stood between him and the tempting food. Of course the man-scent was as strong here as at the opposite end. But the morning wind was shifting through the cleft, bearing the reek with it.

Cautiously the half-starved fox padded forward through the drift of dead leaves toward the chicken which itself was half buried in leafage. His jaws closed on it.

As he backed out with his treasure-trove, steel jaws closed on his left forefoot.

An hour later, Rance Venner and Holt climbed the ridge to visit the former’s newfangled patent fox-trap. In the centre of a patch of bloody trampled snow lay a magnificent silver fox; moveless, his eyes rolled back; his teeth curled away from his upper jaw. Limp and pitifully still he lay.

Venner ran forward with a cry of joy and knelt to unfasten the trap jaws from the lifeless creature’s paw.

“It’s our King Whitefoot II!” he exulted, laying the supine body in his lap and smoothing the rumpled glory of pelt. “But I can’t figure why he’s dead. Maybe the shock killed him, or else he broke a blood-vessel in his brain trying to tear loose. He—”

The rambling conjecture ended in a hoot of pain. There was an indescribably swift whirl of the inert black body. Rance Venner’s thumb received a lightning bite from teeth which scraped sickeningly into its very bone. Whitefoot was flying like mad for the nearest available rock-cranny.

Venner once more was increasing his knowledge of fox-character. Apart from enacting prodigies at digging and at climbing, it appeared now that foxes, in emergency, understood to perfection the trick of playing dead.

Away flashed Whitefoot, his lacerated forepaw marring his speed not at all. Jeffreys Holt was an old enough huntsman to act on sheer instinct. Through no conscious volition of his own he whipped to his shoulder the gun that had hung idle in his grasp while he watched Rance open the trap. Taking snap aim, he pulled trigger.

Whitefoot did not stop at once his panic flight. He continued it for two yards longer; rolling over and over like a mechanical toy, before thumping against the rock-side, stone dead.

“There’s another good stunt we done, in getting that ol’ feller,” remarked Holt, ten minutes later, as he and Venner made their way downhill with their prize. “I’ll bet my share of his pelt he’s the fox that’s been working the hencoops all along the valley, this winter. He’s a whooping big cuss. And no common-size fox could ’a busted in the coop doors like he did at a couple of places. Now that we got the fox, I s’pose it’s up to us to get the wolf.”

“What wolf?” mumbled Venner, still sucking his bitten thumb.

“Why, the one the Grange reward is out for, of course,” answered Holt in surprise at such ignorance. “First wolf that’s been in this section in thutty years or more. He’s been at sheepfolds, all over. At hencoops, too. First-off folks thought maybe it was a stray cur. But no dog c’d do the smart wolf-stunts that feller’s done. Pizen-shy and trap-wise. It’s a wolf, all right, all right.”

The store was jammed, for two hours or more, that evening, by folk who came to stare at the wonder-fox. Next day and the next the whole community was out in quest of the priceless vixen.

All the second day, after a night of successful forage, Ruff and Pitchdark denned amid the rocks of their peak. At nightfall they fared forth again, as usual. But as they were padding contentedly back to their safe eyrie at grey dawn, Pitchdark failed to note a deadfall which had been placed in a hillside gully three months earlier.

Going back and forth—always of course by different routes—during the past three days, she and Ruff had scented and avoided a score of shrewdly-laid traps scattered here and there. But this clumsy deadfall had been in place since November, when a farm lad had set it and then forgotten all about it. Rains and snow and winds had rubbed it clean of any vestige of man-scent. It seemed nothing but a fallen log propped against a tree-trunk.

By way of a short cut, Pitchdark ran under it.

There was a thump, followed at once by an astounded yell. The vixen, flattened out, lay whimpering under the tumbled log.

Ruff was trotting along; a yard or so behind her. The fall of the log had made him spring instinctively sideways. Now he went over to where Pitchdark lay moaning and writhing. Tenderly he sniffed at her; then he walked around the log and her pinioned body. In another second he was at work clawing and shoving at the weight that imprisoned her.

The log was too light for its purpose. Also the boy who made and set the trap was a novice. The end of the log had come to rest on a knot of wood near the tree base. Ruff’s weight and applied strength set it a-rolling. Off from the vixen it bumped; while she cried out again in agony.

Ruff turned to greet her as she should leap joyously to her feet. But she did not leap. The impact of the falling log had injured her spine. The best she could do was to crawl painfully along, stomach to the ground; whining with pain at every step. Her hindlegs sagged useless. Her forepaws made all the progress.

Yet she was a gallant sufferer. Keenly aware that she was in no condition to face or flee any possible dangers of the open, she made pluckily for the eyrie on the distant peak. The great collie slackened his pace to hers. At a windfall, too high for her to clamber over, he caught her gently by the nape of the neck with his mighty jaws and scrambled over the impediment, carrying her with him.

Thus, at snail-pace, they made their way homeward; the collie close beside his crippled chum; quivering from head to foot in distress as now and then the pain forced from her a sharp outcry.

Dawn deepened into daylight. Up came the winter sun, shouldering its sulky way through dun horizon mists. The day was on. And Ruff and Pitchdark were not yet within a mile of their hiding place.

The last mile promised to be the worst mile; rising as it did, almost precipice-like, to the summit; and strewn with boulder and rift. To the light-footed pair, such a clamber had ever been childishly easy. Now it threatened to be one long torment to the vixen.

No longer, since the accident, did they seek as usual to confuse or obliterate their homeward trail. There was no question now of wasting a step or of delaying the needful moment of safety.

Then, as they came to a ten-foot cliff, at the base of the peak’s last stiff climb, they halted and looked miserably upward. Along the face of this rock wall a narrow rudimentary trail ran, from bottom to top; a widened rock-fissure. The fox and the collie were wont to take it almost at a bound.

But now there was no question of bounding. Nor was the collie able to navigate the tricky climb with Pitchdark suspended from his jaws. It was not a matter of weight but of leverage and of balance. He had sense enough to know that.

For the past half-mile he had been carrying the vixen, her helpless hindlegs dragging along the ground. Very tenderly, by the nape of the neck, he had borne her along. Yet the wrenching motion had forced cries from her, so that once and again he had set her down and stared in pitiful sorrow at her.

Now, Pitchdark took matters into her own hands. At the base of the cliff was an alcove niche of rock, perhaps two feet deep and eighteen inches wide; roofed over by a slant of half-fallen stone. It was bedded with dead leaves. There were worse holes into which to crawl to die, than was this natural den. Into it, painfully, wearily, the vixen dragged her racked body. There she laid herself down on the leaf-couch; spent and in torture. She had come to the end of her journey; though still a mile on the hither side of the den where she and Ruff were wont to hide.

It was no hiding place, no safe refuge, this niche of rock wherein she lay. But it was the best substitute. Panting, she settled down to bear her anguish as best she might. Above her, at the opening of the niche, stood the heartsick dog that loved her.

Puzzled, miserable, tormented, he stood there. At times he would bend down to lick the sufferer, crooning softly to her. But she gave him scant heed.

A rabbit scuttled across the snowy open space in front of the cliff. With a dash, Ruff was after him. A few rods away the chase ended in a reddened swirl of the snow. Back to Pitchdark trotted Ruff, the rabbit in his mouth. He laid the offering in front of her. But she was past eating or so much as noticing food.

Then, as he watched her, his deepset dark eyes sick with pity and grief, he stiffened to attention; and his lip curled away from his curving white teeth. The morning breeze bore to him a scent and a sound that had but one meaning.

The scent was of dogs. The sound was of multiple baying.

Instinctively he glanced at the cliff-trail—the trail he could surmount so quickly and easily, to the safety of the peak’s upper reaches. Then his unhappy gaze fell on Pitchdark. The baying and the odour had reached her even more keenly than it had reached Ruff. She read it aright; and the realisation brought her out of the pain-daze into which she had fallen. She tried to get to her feet. Failing, she fell to whimpering softly.

Once she peered up, questioningly, at Ruff. The big collie was standing in front of the niche, shielding it with his strong body. His head was high and his eye had the look of eagles. Gone from his expression was the furtiveness of the wild. In this crisis he was all collie. The sun blazed on his flaming red-gold coat and his snowy mass of ruff and frill. Every muscle was tense. Every faculty was alert.

Zeb Harlow knew nothing about fox-hunting. Indeed, he knew little enough about anything. But at the store conclave, the preceding night, his fancy had been fired by tales of the silver foxhunt. He had an inspiration.

Before daybreak he was abroad; gun in hand. Going from one sleeping neighbour’s to another’s, he loosed and took along with him no fewer than five chained foxhounds.

The dogs all knew him well enough to let him handle them. There was not one of the five that would not have followed anybody who carried a gun. So his one-man hunt was organised. He and the five hounds made for the ridge where, two days before, Whitefoot had been caught.

From reading nature-faked tales of rattlesnakes, Zeb argued that the slain fox’s mate would be haunting the scene of her spouse’s death. It was a pretty theory; as pretty as it was asinine. Like many another wholly idiotic premise it led to large results—of a sort.

As Zeb was traversing a wooded gully on the way to the ridge, the foremost hound gave tongue. The pack had come to the spot where Pitchdark had been crippled. From that point a blind mongrel puppy could have followed the pungent trail.

Oblivious of Harlow, for whom they had all a dog’s amusedly tolerant contempt for an inefficient human leader, the quintet swept away on the track. Zeb made shift to follow as best he could. Not being a woodsman, his progress was slow.

Up the gully they roared and out into the hillside birch woods beyond and thence to the patch of broken ground over which Ruff had carried Pitchdark so tenderly. The scent was rankly strong now. It was breast-high. No longer was there need to work with nostrils to earth. The dragging hindfeet of the vixen were easier to follow than an aniseseed lure.

Out into the cleared space they swung—the clearing with the ten-foot cliff behind it. There, not fifty yards in front of them, clearly visible between the braced legs of a shimmering gold-and-white collie on guard at the niche opening, crouched their prey.

Deliriously they rushed to the kill.

The kill was there. But so was the killer.

Perhaps there are two foxhounds on earth which together can down a normal collie. Assuredly there is no one foxhound that can hope to achieve the deed. Most assuredly such a hound was not the half-breed black-and-yellow leader of that impromptu pack.

The black-and-yellow made for the niche, a clean dozen lengths ahead of his nearest follower. Blind to all but the lust of slaughter, he dived between the braced legs of the movelessly-waiting collie, and struck for the cowering vixen.

Ruff drove downward at him as the hound dived. The collie’s terrible jaws clamped shut behind the base of the leader’s skull. The aim, made accurate by a thousand snaps at fleeing rabbits and rising birds, was flawless. The jaws had been strengthened past normal by the daily grinding of bony food.

Ruff tossed high his head. The black-and-yellow was flung in air and fell back amid his onrushing fellows; his neck broken, his spinal cord severed.

But that was Ruff’s last opportunity for individual fighting. The four following hounds were upon him; in one solid battling mass. Noting their leader’s fate they did not make the error of trying to jostle past to the vixen. Instead, they sought to clear the way by flinging themselves ravenously on her solitary guard.

The rest was horror.

There was no scope for scientific fighting or for craft. The four fastened upon the collie, in murderous unison. They might more wisely have fastened upon a hornet-nest.

Down, under their avalanche of weight went Ruff; battling as he fell. But a collie down is not a collie beaten. As he fell, he slashed to the bone the nearest gaunt shoulder. By the time he had struck ground on his back, he lunged upward for one flying spotted hindleg that chanced to flounder nearest to his jaws. The fighting tricks of his long-ago wolf ancestors came to him in his hour of stress. Catching the leg midway between hock and body he gave a sidewise wrench to it that wellnigh heaved off the pack that piled upon him. The possessor of the spotted hindleg screeched aloud and gave back, tumbling out of the ruck with a fractured and useless limb.

Up from the tangle of fighting hounds arose Ruff, his golden coat a-smear with blood. High he reared above the surrounding heads. Slashing, tearing, dodging, wheeling, he fought clear of his mangled foes.

For an instant, as they gathered their force for a new charge at this tigerlike adversary, the great collie stood clear of them all. A single bound would have carried him to the cliff trail. Thence, to its top would have been a climb of less than half a second. At the summit he could have fought back an army of dogs or he could have made his escape to the fastnesses beyond. Never was there a foxhound that could keep pace with a racing collie.

The coast was clear, if only for an instant. There was time—just time—for the leap. Ruff made the leap.

But he did not make it in the direction of the inviting trail. Instead, he sprang back again in front of the trembling vixen as she crouched in her niche.

A fox would have fled. So would any creature of the wild. But no longer was Ruff a creature of the wild. In his supreme moment he was all collie.

Whirling to face his oncoming enemies he took his stand. And there the charge of the hounds crashed into him.

By footwork, by dodging, by leading his foes into a chase where they should string out, he could have conquered them. But this he dared not do. He knew well what must befall Pitchdark the moment he should leave the niche unguarded. So he stood where he was; and went down once more under the rush.

There were but three opponents atop him, this time. The spotted hound was out of the fight, with a crunched leg and a craven heart. Nor were any of the three others unmarked by slash or nip or tear.

Now, as Ruff fell he pulled one of the three down with him; his awful fangs busy at the hound’s throat. A second of the trio rolled over with them; the forequarters of his inverted body sprawled within the niche. While he bit and roared at the fast-rolling Ruff, the vixen saw her chance. Darting her head forward, she set her needle teeth deep in the hound’s throat. Instantly, seared by the hurt, he was atop her; ripping away at her unprotected back; tearing it to ribbons. But, with death upon her and the rear half of her paralysed, she did not abate the merciless grinding at the hound’s throat. Presently, the needle teeth found their goal.

Ruff was up again; one of his assailants gasping out his life beneath him; the other with Pitchdark clinging in death to his throat. Torn and bleeding and panting as he was, Ruff flew at the fourth dog; the only one of the five still in fighting condition.

Before that one-to-one onset the mongrel hound’s heart went back on him. He turned and fled; but not before Ruff’s madly twisting jaws had lamed him for life.

The battle was fought and won. Of the five hounds, one lay dead; two more were dying, a fourth was lying helpless with a crunched hindleg. The fifth was in limping flight.

The young collie staggered, then righted himself. Crossing to Pitchdark, he bent painfully down and licked her face—the face whose teeth were locked in her oppressor’s throat.

Never now would that glorious pelt sell for hundreds of dollars; or even for hundreds of cents. The dying hound had seen to that. So had the dog now limping away. This latter had taken advantage of Ruff’s preoccupation with his two fellows, as they rolled in the snow, to tear destructively at the silken coat as the vixen’s teeth were finding their way to his comrade’s jugular.

Crooning, licking, Ruff sought to make his loved little foster-mother awaken. Then he lifted his head and wheeled wearily about to face a new intruder.

Across the snow toward him was clumping a slack-faced man who gripped in both hands a cocked gun and who was shouting foolishly in his excitement. Zeb Harlow had caught up to the hunt at last.

Ruff had not been so near to any human since he was a fortnight old. The carefully-taught lessons of Pitchdark warned him to turn and flee. The cliff trail was still open to him. But into the brain that was once again all collie there seeped a queer sensation the big dog could not analyse.

His dear little comrade was dead. Without her the old life would be empty. His was the collie heritage—the stark need for comradeship; coupled with the unconscious craving to be owned by man and to give his devotion to man, his god.

Still unable to analyse his own unwonted feelings, Ruff bent again and licked Pitchdark’s dead face. Then, hesitant, he took a step toward the stormily advancing Harlow. He took another irresolute step; paused again and wagged his plumy tail.

“Attacked me, he did!” bragged Zeb Harlow, that night at the store. “Come straight for me, like he was going to eat me alive. But I stopped him, all right, all right. I stood my ground. After the second step he took, I let him have both bar’ls. You saw for yourselves what he looked like after he tried to tackle ME.”

TWO: The Coming of Lad

TWO: The Coming of Lad

In the mile-away village of Hampton, there had been a veritable epidemic of burglaries—ranging from the theft of a brand-new ash-can from the steps of the Methodist chapel to the ravaging of Mrs. Blauvelt’s whole lineful of clothes, on a washday dusk.

Up the Valley and down it, from Tuxedo to Ridgewood, there had been a half-score robberies of a very different order—depredations wrought, manifestly, by professionals; thieves whose motor cars served the twentieth century purpose of such historic steeds as Dick Turpin’s Black Bess and Jack Shepard’s Ranter. These thefts were in the line of jewelry and the like; and were as daringly wrought as were the modest local operators’ raids on ash-can and laundry.

It is the easiest thing in the world to stir humankind’s ever-tense burglar-nerves into hysterical jangling. In house after house, for miles of the peaceful North Jersey region, old pistols were cleaned and loaded; window fastenings and door-locks were inspected and new hiding-places found for portable family treasures.

Across the lake from the village, and down the Valley from a dozen country homes, seeped the tide of precautions. And it swirled at last around the Place,—a thirty-acre homestead, isolated and sweet, whose grounds ran from highway to lake; and whose wisteria-clad grey house drowsed among big oaks midway between road and water; a furlong or more distant from either.

The Place’s family dog,—a pointer,—had died, rich in years and honour. And the new peril of burglary made it highly needful to choose a successor for him.

The Master talked of buying a whalebone-and-steel-and-snow bull terrier, or a more formidable if more greedy Great Dane. But the Mistress wanted a collie. So they compromised by getting the collie.

He reached the Place in a crampy and smelly crate; preceded by a long envelope containing an intricate and imposing pedigree. The burglary-preventing problem seemed solved.

But when the crate was opened and its occupant stepped gravely forth, on the Place’s veranda, the problem was revived.

All the Master and the Mistress had known about the newcomer,—apart from his price and his lofty lineage,—was that his breeder had named him “Lad.”

From these meagre facts they had somehow built up a picture of a huge and grimly ferocious animal that should be a terror to all intruders and that might in time be induced to make friends with the Place’s vouched-for occupants. In view of this, they had had a stout kennel made and to it they had affixed with double staples a chain strong enough to restrain a bull.

(It may as well be said here that never in all the sixteen years of his beautiful life did Lad occupy that or any other kennel nor wear that or any other chain.)

Even the crate which brought the new dog to the Place failed somehow to destroy the illusion of size and fierceness. But, the moment the crate door was opened the delusion was wrecked by Lad himself.

Out on to the porch he walked. The ramshackle crate behind him had a ridiculous air of a chrysalis from which some bright thing had departed. For a shaft of sunlight was shimmering athwart the veranda floor. And into the middle of the warm bar of radiance Laddie stepped,—and stood.