Albert Payson Terhune

“ And now a puff of west wind brought Wolf’s sense of smell into action. A dog remembers odors as humans remember faces. And the breeze bore to him the scent of the same man who had flung ashore that bit of meat which had caused all his suffering. ”

“ Silent, in agony, the man beat at the dog with his free hand; but an attacking collie is hard to locate in the darkness. A bulldog will secure a grip and will hang on; a collie is everywhere at once.
Wolf’s snapping jaws had already deserted the robber’s mangled hand and slashed the man’s left shoulder to the bone. Then the dog made another furious lunge for the face.
Down crashed the man, losing his balance under the heavy impact; Wolf atop of him. To guard his throat, the man rolled over on his face, kicking madly at the dog, and reaching back for his own hip-pocket. ”

“ A man, its only occupant, sat at the oars, scarcely moving them as he kept his boat in motion.
A dog is ridiculously near-sighted. More so than almost any other beast. Keen hearing and keener scent are its chief guides. At three hundred yards’ distance it cannot, by eye, recognize its master, nor tell him from a stranger. But at close quarters, even in the darkest night, a dog’s vision is far more piercing and accurate than man’s under like conditions.
Wolf thus saw the skiff and its occupant, while he himself was still invisible. ”

“ For Wolf was a collie only by courtesy. His breeding was as pure as was any champion’s, but he was one of those luckless types to be found in nearly every litter—a throwback to some forgotten ancestor whose points were all defective. Not even the glorious pedigree of Lad, his father, could make Wolf look like anything more than he was—a dog without a single physical trait that followed the best collie standards. ”

“ Evidently, Lad and Bruce were not the only collies on The Place to receive prizes that day.
Wolf stooped over the meat, sniffed at it, then caught it up between his jaws.
Now, a dog is the easiest animal alive to poison, just as a cat is the hardest, for a dog will usually bolt a mouthful of poisoned meat without pausing to chew or otherwise investigate it. A cat, on the contrary, smells and tastes everything first and chews it scientifically before swallowing it. The slightest unfamiliar scent or flavor warns her to sheer off from the feast. ”

“ Bruce—“Sunnybank Goldsmith”—was six years Lad’s junior. He was tawny of coat, kingly of bearing; a dog without a fault of body or of disposition; stately as the boar-hounds that the painters of old used to love to depict in their portraits of monarchs.
The Place’s third collie was Lad’s son, Wolf. But neither cup nor ribbon did Wolf have to show as an excuse for his presence on earth, nor would he have won recognition in the smallest and least exclusive collie-show. ”

“ The bullet had grazed Wolf’s scalp and then had passed along the foreleg; scarring and numbing it. No damage had been done that a week’s good nursing would not set right.
The marks in the grass and the poisoned meat on the porch told their own tale; so did the neat kit of burglar tools and a rubber glove found near the foot of the lawn; and then the telephone was put to work.
At dawn, a man in torn and muddy clothes, called at the office of a doctor three miles away to be treated for a half-dozen dog-bites received, he said, from a pack of stray curs he had met on the turnpike. ”

“ Under-sized (for a collie) , slim, graceful, fierce, affectionate, Wolf was the Boy’s darling, and he was Lad’s successor as official guardian of The Place. But all his youthful life, thus far, had brought him nothing more than this—while Lad and Bruce had been winning prize after prize at one local dog show after another within a radius of thirty mites. ”

“ He must know what class of undesirable to scare off with a growl and what class needs stronger measures. He must also know to the inch the boundaries of his own master’s land.
Few of these things can be taught; all of them must be instinctive. Wolf had been born with them. Most dogs are not.
His value as a watch-dog gave Wolf a settled position of his own on The Place. Lad was growing old and a little deaf. He slept, at night, under the piano in the music-room. Bruce was worth too much money to be left at large in the night time for any clever dog-thief to steal. ”

“ Wolf paused, uncertain. The average watchdog, his attention thus attracted, would have barked. But Wolf knew the lake was public property. Boats were often rowed as close to shore as this without intent to trespass. It was not the skiff that caught Wolf’s attention as he paused there on the brink, it was the man’s furtive scrutiny of the house. ”

“ Lad’s his father, and Squire of Tytton was his grandfather, and Wishaw Clinker was his—”
“I’m sorry, son,” interposed the Master, catching his wife’s eye and dropping his tone of banter. “I apologize to you and Wolf. He’s not a ‘mutt.’ There’s no better blood in colliedom than his, on both sides. But Mother is right. You’d only be putting him up to be beaten, and you wouldn’t like that. He hasn’t a single point that isn’t hopelessly bad from a judge’s view. We’ve never taken a loser to a show from The Place. ”

“ We didn’t hear of the Veteran Cup till Dr. Hooper telephoned to us about it this morning. So we’re getting Lad ready. There can’t be any other veteran as splendid as he is.”
“No,” agreed the Boy, dully, “I suppose not.’
He went into the dining-room, surreptitiously helped himself to a handful of lump-sugar and passed on out to the veranda. Wolf was sprawled half-asleep on the driveway lawn in the sun.
The dog’s wolflike brush began to thump against the shaven grass. ”

“ Surrounding the pictures and pedigrees, the whole remaining space in both frames was filled with blue ribbons—the very meanest bit of silk in either was a semi-occasional “Reserve Winners”—while, strung along the tops of the frames from side to side, ran a line of medals. ”