Lad: A Dog by Albert Payson Terhune Read Free Book Online

nearly half an hour.
    Then, feeling much, much better, he ambled homeward, to take up normal life again after a whole fortnight of martyrdom.

3
    A MIRACLE OR TWO
    THE CONNECTING POINTS BETWEEN THE INNER AND OUTER Lad were a pair of the wisest and darkest and most sorrowful eyes in all dogdom—eyes that gave the lie to folk who say no dog has a soul. There are such dogs once in a human generation.
    Lad had but one tyrant in all the world. That was his dainty gold-and-white collie mate, Lady; Lady, whose affections he had won in fair life-and-death battle with a younger and stronger dog; Lady, who bullied him unmercifully and teased him and did fearful things to his stately dignity; and to whom he allowed liberties that would have brought any other aggressor painfully near to death.
    Lady was high-strung and capricious; a collie de luxe. Lad and she were as oddly contrasted a couple, in body and mind, as one could find in a day’s journey through their North Jersey hinterland. To The Place (at intervals far too few between to suit Lad), came human guests; people, for the most part, who did not understand dogs and who either drew away in causeless fear from them or else insisted on patting or hauling them about.
    Lad detested guests. He met their advances with cold courtesy, and, as soon as possible, got himself out of their way. He knew the Law far too well to snap or to growl at a guest. But the Law did not compel him to stay within patting distance of one.
    The careless caress of the Mistress or the Master—especially of the Mistress—was a delight to him. He would sport like an overgrown puppy with either of these deities, throwing dignity to the four winds. But to them alone did he unbend—to them and to his adored tyrant, Lady.
    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 fingertips 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