To The Place, of a cold spring morning, came a guest; or two guests. Lad at first was not certain which. The visible guest was a woman. And, in her arms she carried a long bundle that might have been anything at all.
Long as was the bundle, it was ridiculously light. Or, rather, pathetically light. For its folds contained a child, five years old; a child that ought to have weighed more than forty pounds and weighed barely twenty. A child with a wizened little old face, and with a skeleton body which was powerless from the waist down.
Six months earlier, the Baby had been as vigorous and jolly as a collie pup. Until an invisible Something prowled through the land, laying Its finger-tips on thousands of such jolly and vigorous youngsters, as frost’s fingers are laid on autumn flowers—and with the same hideous effect.
This particular Baby had not died of the plague, as had so many of her fellows. At least, her brain and the upper half of her body had not died.
Her mother had been counseled to try mountain air for the hopeless little invalid. She had written to her distant relative, the Mistress, asking leave to spend a month at The Place.
Lad viewed the arrival of the adult guest with no interest and with less pleasure. He stood, aloof, at one side of the veranda, as the newcomer alighted from the car.
But, when the Master took the long bundle from her arms and carried it up the steps, Lad waxed curious. Not only because the Master handled his burden so carefully, but because the collie’s uncanny scent-power told him all at once that it was human.
Lad had never seen a human carried in this manner. It did not make sense to him. And he stepped, hesitantly, forward to investigate.
The Master laid the bundle tenderly on the veranda hammock-swing, and loosed the blanket-folds that swathed it. Lad came over to him, and looked down into the pitiful little face.
There had been no baby at The Place for many a year. Lad had seldom seen one at such close quarters. But now the sight did something queer to his heart—the big heart that ever went out to the weak and defenseless, the heart that made a playfully snapping puppy or a cranky little lapdog as safe from his terrible jaws as was Lady herself.
He sniffed in friendly fashion at the child’s pathetically upturned face. Into the dull baby-eyes, at sight of him, came a look of pleased interest—the first that had crossed their blankness for many a long day. Two feeble little hands reached out and buried themselves lovingly in the mass of soft ruff that circled Lad’s neck.
The dog quivered all over, from nose to brush, with joy at the touch. He laid his great head down beside the drawn cheek, and positively reveled in the pain the tugging fingers were inflicting on his sensitive throat.
In one instant, Lad had widened his narrow and hard-established circle of Loved Ones, to include this half-dead wisp of humanity.
The child’s mother came up the steps in the Master’s wake. At sight of the huge dog, she halted in quick alarm.
“Look out!” she shrilled. “He may attack her! Oh, do drive him away!”
“Who? Lad,” queried the Mistress. “Why, Lad wouldn’t harm a hair of her head if his life depended on it! See, he adores her already. I never knew him to take to a stranger before. And she looks brighter and happier, too, than she has looked in months. Don’t make her cry by sending him away from her.”
“But,” insisted the woman, “dogs are full of germs. I’ve read so. He might give her some terrible——”
“Lad is just as clean and as germless as I am,” declared the Mistress, with some warmth. “There isn’t a day he doesn’t swim in the lake, and there isn’t a day I don’t brush him. He’s——”
“He’s a collie, though,” protested the guest, looking on in uneasy distaste, while Baby secured a tighter and more painful grip on the delighted dog’s ruff. “And I’ve always heard collies are awfully treacherous. Don’t you find them so?”
“If we did,” put in the Master, who had heard that same asinine question until it sickened him, “if we found collies were treacherous, we wouldn’t keep them. A collie is either the best dog or the worst dog on earth. Lad is the best. We don’t keep the other kind. I’ll call him away, though, if it bothers you to have him so close to Baby. Come, Lad!”
Reluctantly, the dog turned to obey the Law; glancing back, as he went, at the adorable new idol he had acquired; then crossing obediently to where the Master stood.
The Baby’s face puckered unhappily. Her pipe-stem arms went out toward the collie. In a tired little voice she called after him:
“Dog! Doggie! Come back here, right away! I love you, Dog!”
Lad, vibrating with eagerness, glanced up at the Master for leave to answer the call. The Master, in turn, looked inquiringly at his nervous guest. Lad translated the look. And, instantly, he felt an unreasoning hate for the fussy woman.
The guest walked over to her weakly gesticulating daughter and explained:
“Dogs aren’t nice pets for sick little girls, dear. They’re rough; and besides, they bite. I’ll find Dolly for you as soon as I unpack:”
“Don’t want Dolly,” fretted the child. “Want the dog! He isn’t rough. He won’t bite. Doggie! I love you! Come here!”
Lad looked up longingly at the Master, his plumed tail a-wag, his ears up, his eyes dancing. One hand of the Master’s stirred toward the hammock in a motion so imperceptible that none but a sharply watchful dog could have observed it.
Lad waited for no second bidding. Quietly, unobtrusively, he crossed behind the guest, and stood beside his idol. The Baby fairly squealed with rapture, and drew his silken head down to her face.
“Oh, well!” surrendered the guest, sulkily. “If she won’t be happy any other way, let him go to her. I suppose it’s safe, if you people say so. And it’s the first thing she’s been interested in, since——No, darling,” she broke off, sternly. “You shall not kiss him! I draw the line at that. Here! Let Mamma rub your lips with her handkerchief.”
“Dogs aren’t made to be kissed,” said the Master, sharing, however, Lad’s disgust at the lip-scrubbing process. “But she’ll come to less harm from kissing the head of a clean dog than from kissing the mouths of most humans. I’m glad she likes Lad. And I’m still gladder that he likes her. It’s almost the first time he ever went to an outsider of his own accord.”
That was how Lad’s idolatry began. And that, too, was how a miserably sick child found a new interest in life.
Every day, from morning to dusk, Lad was with the Baby. Forsaking his immemorial “cave” under the music-room piano, he lay all night outside the door of her bedroom. In preference even to a romp through the forest with Lady, he would pace majestically alongside the invalid’s wheelchair as it was trundled along the walks or up and down the veranda.
Forsaking his post on the floor at the left of the Master’s seat, at meals—a place that had been his alone since puppyhood—he lay always behind the Baby’s table couch. This to the vast discomfort of the maid who had to step over him in circumnavigating the board, and to the open annoyance of the child’s mother.
Baby, as the days went on, lost none of her first pleasure in her shaggy playmate. To her, the dog was a ceaseless novelty. She loved to twist and braid the great white ruff on his chest, to toy with his sensitive ears, to make him “speak” or shake hands or lie down or stand up at her bidding. She loved to play a myriad of intricate games with him—games ranging from Beauty and the Beast, to Fairy Princess and Dragon.
Whether as Beast (to her Beauty) or in the more complex and exacting rôle of Dragon, Lad entered wholesouledly into every such game. Of course, he always played his part wrong. Equally, of course, Baby always lost her temper at his stupidity, and pummeled him, by way of chastisement, with her nerveless fists—a punishment Lad accepted with