Albert Payson Terhune

TO MY TEN BEST FRIENDS:

Who are far wiser in their way and far better in every way, than I; and yet who have not the wisdom to know it

Who do not merely think I am perfect, but who are calmly and permanently convinced of my perfection;—and this in spite of fifty disillusions a day

Who are frantically happy at my coming and bitterly woebegone in my absence

Who never bore me and never are bored by me

Who never talk about themselves and who always listen with rapturous interest to anything I may say

Who, having no conventional standards, have no respectability; and who, having no conventional consciences, have no sins

Who teach me finer lessons in loyalty, in patience, in true courtesy, in unselfishness, in divine forgiveness, in pluck and in abiding good spirits than do all the books I have ever read and all the other models I have studied

Who have not deigned to waste time and eyesight in reading a word of mine and who will not bother to read this verbose tribute to themselves

In short, to the most gloriously satisfactory chums who ever appealed to human vanity and to human desire for companionship

TO OUR TEN SUNNYBANK COLLIES MY STORY IS GRATEFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED

BRUCE

by

Albert Payson Terhune

CHAPTER I. The Coming Of Bruce

She was beautiful. And she had a heart and a soul—which were a curse. For without such a heart and soul, she might have found the tough life-battle less bitterly hard to fight.

But the world does queer things—damnable things—to hearts that are so tenderly all-loving and to souls that are so trustfully and forgivingly friendly as hers.

Her "pedigree name" was Rothsay Lass. She was a collie—daintily fragile of build, sensitive of nostril, furrily tawny of coat. Her ancestry was as flawless as any in Burke's Peerage.

If God had sent her into the world with a pair of tulip ears and with a shade less width of brain-space she might have been cherished and coddled as a potential bench-show winner, and in time might even have won immortality by the title of "CHAMPION Rothsay Lass."

But her ears pricked rebelliously upward, like those of her earliest ancestors, the wolves. Nor could manipulation lure their stiff cartilages into drooping as bench-show fashion demands. The average show-collie's ears have a tendency to prick. By weights and plasters, and often by torture, this tendency is overcome. But never when the cartilage is as unyielding as was Lass's.

Her graceful head harked back in shape to the days when collies had to do much independent thinking, as sheep-guards, and when they needed more brainroom than is afforded by the borzoi skull sought after by modern bench-show experts.

Wherefore, Lass had no hope whatever of winning laurels in the show-ring or of attracting a high price from some rich fancier. She was tabulated, from babyhood, as a "second"—in other words, as a faulty specimen in a litter that should have been faultless.

These "seconds" are as good to look at, from a layman's view, as is any international champion. And their offspring are sometimes as perfect as are those of the finest specimens. But, lacking the arbitrary "points" demanded by show-judges, the "seconds" are condemned to obscurity, and to sell as pets.

If Lass had been a male dog, her beauty and sense and lovableness would have found a ready purchaser for her. For nine pet collies out of ten are "seconds"; and splendid pets they make for the most part.

But Lass, at the very start, had committed the unforgivable sin of being born a female. Therefore, no pet-seeker wanted to buy her. Even when she was offered for sale at half the sum asked for her less handsome brothers, no one wanted her.

A mare—or the female of nearly any species except the canine—brings as high and as ready a price as does the male. But never the female dog. Except for breeding, she is not wanted.

This prejudice had its start in Crusader days, some thousand years ago. Up to that time, all through the civilized world, a female dog had been more popular as a pet than a male. The Mohammedans (to whom, by creed, all dogs are unclean) gave their European foes the first hint that a female dog was the lowest thing on earth.

The Saracens despised her, as the potential mother of future dogs. And they loathed her accordingly. Back to Europe came the Crusaders, bearing only three lasting memorials of their contact with the Moslems. One of the three was a sneering contempt for all female dogs.

There is no other pet as loving, as quick of wit, as loyal, as staunchly brave and as companionable as the female collie. She has all the male's best traits and none of his worst. She has more in common, too, with the highest type of woman than has any other animal alive. (This, with all due respect to womanhood.)

Prejudice has robbed countless dog-lovers of the joy of owning such a pal. In England the female pet dog has at last begun to come into her own. Here she has not. The loss is ours.

And so back to Lass.

When would-be purchasers were conducted to the puppy-run at the Rothsay kennels, Lass and her six brethren and sisters were wont to come galloping to the gate to welcome the strangers. For the pups were only three months old—an age when every event is thrillingly interesting, and everybody is a friend. Three times out of five, the buyer's eye would single Lass from the rollicking and fluffy mass of puppyhood.

She was so pretty, so wistfully appealing, so free from fear (and from bumptiousness as well) and carried herself so daintily, that one's heart warmed to her. The visitor would point her out. The kennel-man would reply, flatteringly—

"Yes, she sure is one fine pup!"

The purchaser never waited to hear the end of the sentence, before turning to some other puppy. The pronoun, "she," had killed forever his dawning fancy for the little beauty.

The four males of the litter were soon sold; for there is a brisk and a steady market for good collie pups. One of the two other females died. Lass's remaining sister began to "shape up" with show-possibilities, and was bought by the owner of another kennel. Thus, by the time she was five months old, Lass was left alone in the puppy-run.

She mourned her playmates. It was cold, at night, with no other cuddly little fur-ball to snuggle down to. It was stupid, with no one to help her work off her five-months spirits in a romp. And Lass missed the dozens of visitors that of old had come to the run.

The kennel-men felt not the slightest interest in her. Lass meant nothing to them, except the work of feeding her and of keeping an extra run in order. She was a liability, a nuisance.

Lass used to watch with pitiful eagerness for the attendants' duty-visits to the run. She would gallop joyously up to them, begging for a word or a caress, trying to tempt them into a romp, bringing them peaceofferings in the shape of treasured bones she had buried for her own future use. But all this gained her nothing.

A careless word at best—a grunt or a shove at worst were her only rewards. For the most part, the men with the feed-trough or the water-pail ignored her bounding and wrigglingly eager welcome as completely as though she were a part of the kennel furnishings. Her short daily "exercise scamper" in the open was her nearest approach to a good time.

Then came a day when again a visitor stopped in front of Lass's run. He was not much of a visitor, being a pallid and rather shabbily dressed lad of twelve, with a brand-new chain and collar in his hand.

"You see," he was confiding to the bored kennel-man who had been detailed by the foreman to take him around the kennels, "when I got the check from Uncle Dick this morning, I made up my mind, first thing, to buy a dog with it, even if it took every cent. But then I got to thinking I'd need something to fasten him with, so he wouldn't run away before he learned to like me and want to stay with me. So when I got the check cashed at the store, I got this collar and chain."

"Are you a friend of the boss?" asked the kennel-man.

"The boss?" echoed the boy. "You mean the man who owns this place? No, sir. But when I've walked past, on the road, I've seen his 'Collies for Sale' sign, lots of times. Once I saw some of them being exercised. They were the wonderfulest dogs I ever saw. So the minute I got the money for the check, I came here. I told the man in the front yard I wanted to buy a dog. He's the one who turned me over to you. I wish—OH!" he broke off in rapture, coming to a halt in front of Lass's run. "Look! Isn't he a dandy?"

Lass had trotted hospitably forward to greet the guest. Now she was standing on her hind legs, her front paws alternately supporting her fragile weight on the wire of the fence and waving welcomingly toward the boy. Unknowingly, she was bidding for a master. And her wistful friendliness struck a note of response in the little fellow's heart. For he, too, was lonesome, much of the time, as is the fate of a sickly only child in an overbusy home. And he had the true craving of the lonely for dog comradeship.

He thrust his none-too-clean hand through the wire mesh and patted the puppy's silky head. Lass wiggled ecstatically under the unfamiliar caress. All at once, in the boy's eyes, she became quite the most wonderful animal and the very most desirable pet on earth.

"He's great!" sighed the youngster in admiration; adding naïvely: "Is he Champion Rothsay Chief—the one whose picture was in The Bulletin last Sunday?"

The kennel-man laughed noisily. Then he checked his mirth, for professional reasons, as he remembered the nature of the boy's quest and foresaw a bare possibility of getting rid of the unwelcome Lass.

"Nope," he said. "This isn't Chief. If it was, I guess your Uncle Dick's check would have to have four figures in it before you could make a deal. But this is one of Chief's daughters. This is Rothsay Lass. A grand little girl, ain't she? Say,"—in a confidential whisper,—"since you've took a fancy for her, maybe I could coax the old man into lettin' you have her at an easy price. He was plannin' to sell her for a hundred or so. But he goes pretty much by what I say. He might let her go for—How much of a check did you say your uncle sent you?"

"Twelve dollars," answered the boy,—"one for each year. Because I'm named for him. It's my birthday, you know. But—but a dollar of it went for the chain and the collar. How much do you suppose the gentleman would want for Rothsay Lass?"

The kennel-man considered for a moment. Then he went back to the house, leaving the lad alone at the gate of the run. Eleven dollars, for a high-pedigreed collie pup, was a joke price. But no one else wanted Lass, and her feed was costing more every day. According to Rothsay standards, the list of brood-females was already complete. Even as a gift, the kennels would be making money by getting rid of the prick-eared "second." Wherefore he went to consult with the foreman.

Left alone with Lass, the boy opened the gate and went into the run. A little to his surprise Lass neither shrank from him nor attacked him. She danced about his legs in delight, varying this by jumping up and trying to lick his excited face. Then she thrust her cold nose into the cup of his hand as a plea to be petted.

When the kennel-man came back, the boy was sitting on the dusty ground of the run, and Lass was curled up rapturously in his lap, learning how to shake hands at his order.

"You can have her, the boss says," vouchsafed the kennel-man. "Where's the eleven dollars?"

By this graceless speech Dick Hazen received the key to the Seventh Paradise, and a life-membership in the world-wide Order of Dog-Lovers.

The homeward walk, for Lass and her new master, was no walk at all, but a form of spiritual levitation. The half-mile pilgrimage consumed a full hour of time. Not that Lass hung back or rebelled at her first taste of collar and chain! These petty annoyances went unfelt in the wild joy of a real walk, and in the infinitely deeper happiness of knowing her friendship-famine was appeased at last.

The walk was long for various reasons—partly because, in her frisking gyrations, Lass was forever tangling the new chain around Dick's thin ankles; partly because he stopped, every block or so, to pat her or to give her further lessons in the art of shaking hands. Also there were admiring boy-acquaintances along the way, to whom the wonderful pet must be exhibited.

At last Dick turned in at the gate of a cheap bungalow on a cheap street—a bungalow with a discouraged geranium plot in its pocket-handkerchief front yard, and with a double line of drying clothes in the no larger space behind the house.

As Dick and his chum rounded the house, a woman emerged from between the two lines of flapping sheets, whose hanging she had been superintending. She stopped at sight of her son and the dog.

"Oh!" she commented with no enthusiasm at all. "Well, you did it, hey? I was hoping you'd have better sense, and spend your check on a nice new suit or something. He's kind of pretty, though," she went on, the puppy's friendliness and beauty wringing the word of grudging praise from her. "What kind of a dog is he? And you're sure he isn't savage, aren't you?"

"Collie," answered Dick proudly. "Pedigreed collie! You bet she isn't savage, either. Why, she's an angel. She minds me already. See—shake hands, Lass!" "Lass!" ejaculated Mrs. Hazen. "'SHE!' Dick, you don't mean to tell me you've gone and bought yourself a—a FEMALE dog?"

The woman spoke in the tone of horrified contempt that might well have been hers had she found a rattlesnake and a brace of toads in her son's pocket. And she lowered her voice, as is the manner of her kind when forced to speak of the unspeakable. She moved back from the puppy's politely out-thrust forepaw as from the passing of a garbage cart.

"A female dog!" she reiterated. "Well, of all the chuckle-heads! A nasty FEMALE dog, with your birthday money!"

"She's not one bit nasty!" flamed Dick, burying the grubby fingers of his right hand protectively in the fluffy mass of the puppy's half-grown ruff. "She's the dandiest dog ever! She—"

"Don't talk back to me!" snapped Mrs. Hazen. "Here! Turn right around and take her to the cheats who sold her to you. Tell them to keep her and give you the good money you paid for her. Take her out of my yard this minute! Quick!"

A hot mist of tears sprang into the boy's eyes. Lass, with the queer intuition that tells a female collie when her master is unhappy, whined softly and licked his clenched hand.

"I—aw, PLEASE, Ma!" he begged chokingly. "PLEASE! It's—it's my birthday, and everything. Please let me keep her. I—I love her better than 'most anything there is. Can't I please keep her? Please!"

"You heard what I said," returned his mother curtly.

The washerwoman, who one day a week lightened Mrs. Hazen's household labors, waddled into view from behind the billows of wind-swirled clothes. She was an excellent person, and was built for endurance rather than for speed. At sight of Lass she paused in real interest.

"My!" she exclaimed with flattering approval. "So you got your dog, did you? You didn't waste no time. And he's sure a handsome little critter. Whatcher goin' to call him?"

"It's not a him, Irene," contradicted Mrs. Hazen, with another modest lowering of her strong voice. "It's a HER. And I'm sending Dick back with her, to where she came from. I've got my opinion of people who will take advantage of a child's ignorance, by palming off a horrid female dog on him, too. Take her away, Dick. I won't have her here another minute. You hear me?"

"Please, Ma!" stammered Dick, battling with his desire to cry. "Aw, PLEASE! I—I—"

"Your ma's right, Dick," chimed in the washerwoman, her first interested glance at the puppy changing to one of refined and lofty scorn. "Take her back. You don't want any female dogs around. No nice folks do."

"Why not?" demanded the boy in sudden hopeless anger as he pressed lovingly the nose Lass thrust so comfortingly into his hand. "WHY don't we want a female dog around? Folks have female cats around them, and female women. Why isn't a female dog—"

"That will do, Dick!" broke in his shocked mother. "Take her away."

"I won't," said the boy, speaking very slowly, and with no excitement at all.

A slap on the side of his head, from his mother's punitive palm, made him stagger a little. Her hand was upraised for a second installment of rebellion-quelling—when a slender little body flashed through the air and landed heavily against her chest. A set of white puppy-teeth all but grazed her wrathful red face.

Lass, who never before had known the impulse to attack, had jumped to the rescue of the beaten youngster whom she had adopted as her god. The woman screeched in terror. Dick flung an arm about the furry whirlwind that was seeking to avenge his punishment, and pulled the dog back to his side.

Mrs. Hazen's shriek, and the obbligato accompaniment of the washerwoman, made an approaching man quicken his steps as he strolled around the side of the house. The newcomer was Dick's father, superintendent of the local bottling works. On his way home to lunch, he walked in on a scene of hysteria.

"Kill her, sir!" bawled the washerwoman, at sight of him. "Kill her! She's a mad dog. She just tried to kill Miz' Hazen!"

"She didn't do anything of the kind!" wailed Dick. "She was pertecting me. Ma hit me; and Lass—"

"Ed!" tearily proclaimed Mrs. Hazen, "if you don't send for a policeman to shoot that filthy beast, I'll—"

"Hold on!" interrupted the man, at a loss to catch the drift of these appeals, by reason of their all being spoken in a succession so rapid as to make a single blurred sentence. "Hold on! What's wrong? And where did the pup come from? He's a looker, all right a cute little cuss. What's the row?"

With the plangently useless iterations of a Greek chorus, the tale was flung at him, piecemeal and in chunks, and in a triple key. When presently he understood, Hazen looked down for a moment at the puppy—which was making sundry advances of a shy but friendly nature toward him. Then he looked at the boy, and noted Dick's hero-effort to choke back the onrush of babyish sobs. And then, with a roughly tolerant gesture, he silenced the two raucous women, who were beginning the tale over again for the third time.

"I see," he said. "I see. I see how it is. Needn't din it at me any more, folks. And I see Dicky's side of it, too. Yes, and I see the pup's side of it. I know a lot about dogs. That pup isn't vicious. She knows she belongs to Dick. You lammed into him, and she took up and defended him. That's all there is to the 'mad-dog' part of it."

"But Ed—" sputtered his wife.

"Now, you let ME do the talking, Sade!" he insisted, half-grinning, yet more than half grimly. "I'm the boss here. If I'm not, then it's safe to listen to me till the boss gets here. And we're goin' to do whatever I say we are—without any back-talk or sulks, either. It's this way: Your brother gave the boy a birthday check. We promised he could spend it any way he had a mind to. He said he wanted a dog, didn't he? And I said, 'Go to it!' didn't I? Well, he got the dog. Just because it happens to be a she, that's no reason why he oughtn't to be allowed to keep it. And he can. That goes."

"Oh, Dad!" squealed Dick in grateful heroworship. "You're a brick! I'm not ever going to forget this, so long as I live. Say, watch her shake hands, Dad! I've taught her, already, to—"

"Ed Hazen!" loudly protested his wife. "Of all the softies! You haven't backbone enough for a prune. And if my orders to my own son are going to be—"

"That'll be all, Sade!" interposed the man stiffly—adding: "By the way, I got a queer piece of news to tell you. Come into the kitchen a minute."