Lad: A Dog Read Free Page B

annoying domestic mystery. He gave up trying to solve any of the puzzle—from Lady’s incredible vandalism to this newest turn of the affair.
    Not until two days later could Lad bring himself to risk a meeting with Lady, the cause and the witness of his beating. Then, yearning for a sight of her and for even her grudged recognition of his presence, after his forty-eight hours of isolation, he sallied forth from the house in search of her.
    He traced her to the cool shade of a lilac clump near the outbuildings. There, having with one paw dug a little pit in the cool earth, she was curled up asleep under the bushes. Stretched out beside her was Knave.
    Lad’s spine bristled at sight of his foe. But ignoring him, he moved over to Lady and touched her nose with his own in timid caress. She opened one eye, blinked drowsily and went to sleep again.
    But Lad’s coming had awakened Knave. Much refreshed by his nap, he woke in a playful mood. He tried to induce Lady to romp with him, but she preferred to doze. So, casting about in his shallow mind for something to play with, Knave chanced to remember the prize he had hidden beneath the chicken house.
    Away he ambled, returning presently with the eagle’s head between his teeth. As he ran, he tossed it aloft, catching it as it fell—a pretty trick he had long since learned with a tennis ball.
    Lad, who had lain down as near to sleepily scornful Lady as he dared, looked up and saw him approach. He saw, too, with what Knave was playing; and as he saw, he went quite mad. Here was the thing that had caused Lady’s interrupted punishment and his own black disgrace. Knave was exploiting it with manifest and brazen delight.
    For the second time in his life—and for the second time in three days—Lad broke the Law. He forgot, in a trice, the command “Let him alone!” And noiseless, terrible, he flew at the gamboling Knave.
    Knave was aware of the attack, barely in time to drop the eagle’s head and spring forward to meet his antagonist. He was three years Lad’s junior and was perhaps five pounds heavier. Moreover, constant exercise had kept him in steel-and-whalebone condition; while lonely brooding at home had begun of late to soften Lad’s tough sinews.
    Knave was mildly surprised that the dog he had looked on as a dullard and a poltroon should have developed a flash of spirit. But he was not at all unwilling to wage a combat whose victory must make him shine with redoubled glory in Lady’s eyes.
    Like two furry whirlwinds the collies spun forward toward each other. They met. upreared and snarled, slashing wolflike for the throat, clawing madly to retain balance. Then down they went, rolling in a right unloving embrace, snapping, tearing, growling.
    Lad drove straight for the throat. A half-handful of Knave’s golden ruff came away in his jaws. For except at the exact center, a collie’s throat is protected by a tangle of hair as effective against assault as were Andrew Jackson’s cotton-bale breastworks at New Orleans. And Lad had missed the exact center.
    Over and over they rolled. They regained their footing and reared again. Lad’s saber-shaped tusk ripped a furrow in Knave’s satiny forehead; and Knave’s half-deflected slash in return set bleeding the big vein at the top of Lad’s left ear.
    Lady was wide awake long before this. Standing immovable, yet wildly excited—after the age-old fashion of the female brute for whom males battle and who knows she is to be the winner’s prize—she watched every turn of the fight.

    Up once more, the dogs clashed, chest to chest. Knave, with an instinctive throwback to his wolf forebears of five hundred years earlier, dived for Lad’s forelegs, with the hope of breaking one of them between his foaming jaws.
    He missed the hold by a fraction of an inch. The skin alone was torn. And down over the little white forepaw—one of the forepaws that