Then, early one spring, came Knave—a showy, magnificent collie; red-gold of coat save for a black “saddle,” and with alert topaz eyes.
Knave did not belong to the Master, but to a man who, going to Europe for a month, asked him to care for the dog in his absence. The Master, glad to have so beautiful an ornament to The Place, had willingly consented. He was rewarded when, on the train from town, an admiring crowd of commuters flocked to the baggage-car to stare at the splendid-looking collie.
The only dissenting note in the praise-chorus was the grouchy old baggage-man’s.
“Maybe he’s a thoroughbred, like you say,” drawled the old fellow to the Master, “but I never yet saw a yellow-eyed, prick-eared dog I’d give hell-room to.”
Knave showed his scorn for such silly criticism by a cavernous yawn.
“Thoroughbred?” grunted the baggage-man. “With them streaks of pinkish-yeller on the roof of his mouth? Ever see a thoroughbred that didn’t have a black mouth-roof?”
But the old man’s slighting words were ignored with disdain by the crowd of volunteer dog-experts in the baggage-car. In time the Master alighted at his station, with Knave straining joyously at the leash. As the Master reached The Place and turned into the drive, both Lad and Lady, at sound of his far-off footsteps, came tearing around the side of the house to greet him.
On simultaneous sight and scent of the strange dog frisking along at his side, the two collies paused in their madly joyous onrush. Up went their ruffs. Down went their heads.
Lady flashed forward to do battle with the stranger who was monopolizing so much of the Master’s attention. Knave, not at all averse to battle (especially with a smaller dog), braced himself and then moved forward, stiff-legged, fangs bare.
But of a sudden his head went up; his stiff-poised brush broke into swift wagging; his lips curled down. He had recognized that his prospective foe was not of his own sex. (And nowhere, except among humans, does a full-grown male ill-treat or even defend himself against the female of his species.)
Lady, noting the stranger’s sudden friendliness, paused irresolute in her charge. And at that instant Lad darted past her. Full at Knave’s throat he launched himself.
The Master rasped out:
“Down, Lad! Down!”
Almost in midair the collie arrested his onset—coming to earth bristling, furious and yet with no thought but to obey. Knave, seeing his foe was not going to fight, turned once more toward Lady.
“Lad,” ordered the Master, pointing toward Knave and speaking with quiet intentness, “let him alone. Understand? Let him alone.”
And Lad understood—even as years of training and centuries of ancestry had taught him to understand every spoken wish of the Master’s. He must give up his impulse to make war on this intruder whom at sight he hated. It was the Law; and from the Law there was no appeal.
With yearningly helpless rage he looked on while the newcomer was installed on The Place. With a wondering sorrow he found himself forced to share the Master’s and Mistress’ caresses with this interloper. With growing pain he submitted to Knave’s gay attentions to Lady, and to Lady’s evident relish of the guest’s companionship. Gone were the peaceful old days of utter contentment.
Lady had always regarded Lad as her own special property—to tease and to boss and to despoil of choice food-bits. But her attitude toward Knave was far different. She coquetted, human-fashion, with the gold-and-black dog—at one moment affecting to scorn him, at another meeting his advances with a delighted friendliness.
She never presumed to boss him as she had always bossed Lad. He fascinated her. Without seeming to follow him about, she was forever at his heels. Lad, cut to the heart at her sudden indifference toward his loyal self, tried in every way his simple soul could devise to win back her interest. He essayed clumsily to romp with her as the lithely graceful Knave romped, to drive rabbits for her on their woodland rambles, to thrust himself, in a dozen gentle ways, upon her attention.
But it was no use. Lady scarcely noticed him. When his overtures of friendship chanced to annoy her, she rewarded them with a snap or with an impatient growl. And ever she turned to the all-conquering Knave in a keenness of attraction that was all but hypnotic.
As his divinity’s total loss of interest in himself grew too apparent to be doubted, Lad’s big heart broke. Being only a dog and a Grail-knight in thought, he did not realize that Knave’s newness and his difference from anything she had known, formed a large part of Lady’s desire for the visitor’s favor; nor did he understand that such interest must wane when the novelty should wear off.
All Lad knew was that he loved her, and that for the sake of a flashy stranger she was snubbing him.
As the Law forbade him to avenge himself in true dog-fashion by fighting for his Lady’s love, Lad sadly withdrew from the unequal contest, too proud to compete for a fickle sweetheart. No longer did he try to join in the others’ lawn-romps, but lay at a distance, his splendid head between his snowy little forepaws, his brown eyes sick with sorrow, watching their gambols.
Nor did he thrust his undesired presence on them during their woodland rambles. He took to moping, solitary, infinitely miserable. Perhaps there is on earth something unhappier than a bitterly aggrieved dog. But no one has ever discovered that elusive something.
Knave from the first had shown and felt for Lad a scornful indifference. Not understanding the Law, he had set down the older collie’s refusal to fight as a sign of exemplary, if timorous prudence, and he looked down upon him accordingly. One day Knave came home from the morning run through the forest without Lady. Neither the Master’s calls nor the ear-ripping blasts of his dog-whistle could bring her back to The Place. Whereat Lad arose heavily from his favorite resting-place under the living-room piano and cantered off to the woods. Nor did he return.
Several hours later the Master went to the woods to investigate, followed by the rollicking Knave. At the forest edge the Master shouted. A far-off bark from Lad answered. And the Master made his way through shoulder-deep underbrush in the direction of the sound.
In a clearing he found Lady, her left forepaw caught in the steel jaws of a fox-trap. Lad was standing protectingly above her, stooping now and then to lick her cruelly pinched foot or to whine consolation to her; then snarling in fierce hate at a score of crows that flapped hopefully in the tree-tops above the victim.
The Master set Lady free, and Knave frisked forward right joyously to greet his released inamorata. But Lady was in no condition to play—then nor for many a day thereafter. Her forefoot was so lacerated and swollen that she was fain to hobble awkwardly on three legs for the next fortnight.
It was on one pantingly hot August morning, a little later, that Lady limped into the house in search of a cool spot where she might lie and lick her throbbing forefoot. Lad was lying, as usual, under the piano in the living-room. His tail thumped shy welcome on the hardwood floor as she passed, but she would not stay or so much as notice him.
On she limped, into the Master’s study, where an open window sent a faint breeze through the house. Giving the stuffed eagle a wide berth, Lady hobbled to the window and made as though to lie down just beneath it. As she did so, two things happened: she leaned too much weight on the sore foot, and the pressure wrung from her an involuntary yelp of pain; at the same moment a crosscurrent of air from the other side of the house swept through the living-room and blew shut the door of the adjoining study. Lady was a prisoner.
Ordinarily this would have caused her no ill-ease, for the open window was only thirty inches above the floor, and the drop to the veranda outside was a bare three feet. It would have been the simplest matter in the world for her to jump out, had she wearied of her chance captivity.
But