Lad: A Dog. Albert Payson Terhune
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mountain air or because of her outdoor days with a chum who awoke her dormant interest in life, Baby was growing stronger and less like a sallow ghostling. And, in the relief of noting this steady improvement, her mother continued to tolerate Lad’s chumship with the child, although she had never lost her own first unreasoning fear of the big dog.
Two or three things happened to revive this foolish dread. One of them occurred about a week after the invalid’s arrival at The Place.
Lady, being no fonder of guests than was Lad, had given the veranda and the house itself a wide berth. But one day, as Baby lay in the hammock (trying in a wordy irritation to teach Lad the alphabet), and as the guest sat with her back to them, writing letters, Lady trotted around the corner of the porch.
At sight of the hammock’s queer occupant, she paused, and stood blinking inquisitively. Baby spied the graceful gold-and-white creature. Pushing Lad to one side, she called, imperiously:
“Come here, new Doggie. You pretty, pretty Doggie!”
Lady, her vanity thus appealed to, strolled mincingly forward. Just within arm’s reach, she halted again. Baby thrust out one hand, and seized her by the ruff to draw her into petting-distance.
The sudden tug on Lady’s fur was as nothing to the haulings and maulings in which Lad so meekly reveled. But Lad and Lady were by no means alike, as I think I have said. Boundless patience and a chivalrous love for the Weak, were not numbered among Lady’s erratic virtues. She liked liberties as little as did Lad; and she had a far more drastic way of resenting them.
At the first pinch of her sensitive skin there was an instant flash of gleaming teeth, accompanied by a nasty growl and a lightning-quick forward lunge of the dainty gold-white head. As the wolf slashes at a foe—and as no animals but wolf and collie know how to—Lady slashed murderously at the thin little arm that sought to pull her along.
And Lad, in the same breath, hurled his great bulk between his mate and his idol. It was a move unbelievably swift for so large a dog. And it served its turn.
The eye-tooth slash that would have cut the little girl’s arm to the bone, sent a red furrow athwart Lad’s massive shoulder.
Before Lady could snap again, or, indeed, could get over her surprise at her mate’s intervention, Lad was shouldering her off the edge of the veranda steps. Very gently he did this, and with no show of teeth. But he did it with much firmness.
In angry amazement at such rudeness on the part of her usually subservient mate, Lady snarled ferociously, and bit at him.
Just then, the child’s mother, roused from her letter-writing by the turmoil, came rushing to her endangered offspring’s rescue.
“He growled at Baby,” she reported hysterically, as the noise brought the Master out of his study and to the veranda on the run. “He growled at her, and then he and that other horrid brute got to fighting, and——”
“Pardon me,” interposed the Master, calling both dogs to him, “but Man is the only animal to maltreat the female of his kind. No male dog would fight with Lady. Much less would Lad—Hello!” he broke off. “Look at his shoulder, though! That was meant for Baby. Instead of scolding Lad, you may thank him for saving her from an ugly slash. I’ll keep Lady chained up, after this.”
“But——”
“But, with Lad beside her, Baby is in just about as much danger as she would be with a guard of forty U. S. Regulars,” went on the Master. “Take my word for it. Come along, Lady. It’s the kennel for you for the next few weeks, old girl. Lad, when I get back, I’ll wash that shoulder for you.”
With a sigh, Lad went over to the hammock and lay down, heavily. For the first time since Baby’s advent at The Place, he was unhappy—very, very unhappy. He had had to jostle and fend off Lady, whom he worshipped. And he knew it would be many a long day before his sensitively temperamental mate would forgive or forget. Meantime, so far as Lady was concerned, he was in Coventry.
And just because he had saved from injury a Baby who had meant no harm and who could not help herself! Life, all at once, seemed dismayingly complex to Lad’s simple soul.
He whimpered a little, under his breath; and lifted his head toward Baby’s dangling hand for a caress that might help make things easier. But Baby had been bitterly chagrined at Lady’s reception of her friendly advances. Lady could not be punished for this. But Lad could.
She slapped the lovingly upthrust muzzle with all her feeble force. For once, Lad was not amused by the castigation. He sighed, a second time; and curled up on the floor beside the hammock, in a right miserable heap; his head between his tiny forepaws, his great sorrowful eyes abrim with bewildered grief.
Spring drowsed into early summer. And, with the passing days, Baby continued to look less and less like an atrophied mummy, and more like a thin, but normal, child of five. She ate and slept, as she had not done for many a month.
The lower half of her body was still dead. But there was a faint glow of pink in the flat cheeks, and the eyes were alive once more. The hands that pulled at Lad, in impulsive friendliness or in punishment, were stronger, too. Their fur-tugs hurt worse than at first. But the hurt always gave Lad that same twinge of pleasure—a twinge that helped to ease his heart’s ache over the defection of Lady.
On a hot morning in early June, when the Mistress and the Master had driven over to the village for the mail, the child’s mother wheeled the invalid chair to a tree-roofed nook down by the lake—a spot whose deep shade and lush long grass promised more coolness than did the veranda.
It was just the spot a city-dweller would have chosen for a nap—and just the spot through which no countryman would have cared to venture, at that dry season, without wearing high boots.
Here, not three days earlier, the Master had killed a copperhead snake. Here, every summer, during the late June mowing, The Place’s scythe-wielders moved with glum caution. And seldom did their progress go unmarked by the scythe-severed body of at least one snake.
The Place, for the most part, lay on hillside and plateau, free from poisonous snakes of all kinds, and usually free from mosquitoes as well. The lawn, close-shaven, sloped down to the lake. To one side of it, in a narrow stretch of bottom-land, a row of weeping willows pierced the loose stone lake-wall.
Here, the ground was seldom bone-dry. Here, the grass grew rankest. Here, also, driven to water by the drought, abode eft, lizard and an occasional snake, finding coolness and moisture in the long grass, and a thousand hiding places amid the stone-crannies or the lake-wall.
If either the Mistress or the Master had been at home on this morning, the guest would have been warned against taking Baby there at all. She would have been doubly warned against the folly which she now proceeded to commit—of lifting the child from the wheel-chair, and placing her on a spread rug in the grass, with her back to the low wall.
The rug, on its mattress of lush grasses, was soft. The lake breeze stirred the lower boughs of the willows. The air was pleasantly cool here, and had lost the dead hotness that brooded over the higher ground.
The guest was well pleased with her choice of a resting place. Lad was not.
The big dog had been growingly uneasy from the time the wheel-chair approached the lake-wall. Twice he put himself in front of it; only to be ordered aside. Once the wheels hit his ribs with jarring impact. As Baby was laid upon her grassy bed, Lad barked loudly and pulled at one end of the rug with his teeth.
The guest shook her parasol at him and ordered him back to the house. Lad obeyed no orders, save those of his two deities. Instead of slinking away, he sat down beside the child; so close to her that his ruff pressed against her shoulder. He did not lie down as usual, but sat—tulip ears erect, dark eyes cloudy with trouble; head turning slowly from side to side, nostrils pulsing.
To a human, there was nothing to see or hear or smell—other than the cool beauty of the nook, the soughing of the breeze in the willows, the soft fragrance of a June morning. To a dog, there were faint rustling sounds that