Sam did not reply.
"I"m gettin" tired of waitin", anyhow."
Still Sam did not reply.
And his silence must have had its effect; for when they reached home the burly man made the dog come into the shack. The wind had ceased, the night turned chilly, and they let him lie down before the fire of pine knots. The woman brought him a pot of hominy; the men felt his ribs as gently as they could. He shrank from the touch more than from the pain.
Kindness had come too late, even for a dog.
He lay before the hearth, indifferent to all that happened in this shabby room, for the sight of this fire had made him see another and kindlier fire, in another and kindlier world. These people did not notice his growing restlessness, his furtive glances, his panting breaths, the burning light in his eyes. For steps had come up on the porch; somebody had knocked at the door; the night of their fortune was here!
The burly man hurried to answer, shaking the floor. The open door showed a Negro who handed in a paper. Somebody had sent it from town, he explained, and was gone. The woman s.n.a.t.c.hed the paper. Heads close together, the three stood about a smoking kerosene lamp. The woman was reading in a whiny, excited drawl: ""One thousand dollars reward for----""
"I told you so!" burst from the burly man.
"Shut up! Listen!" cried the other.
""Irish setter,"" she read. ""Answers to name Frank. Notify R. A.
Lancaster"--Oh, here"s a lot of streets and numbers--"New York City.""
"I told you!" the burly man was shouting. "I told you I knew a dog when I saw one! Look at him, Sam! Look at that head! Look at that dome above the ears! Look at that hair--like silk! The mould that dog was made in is broke!"
"One thousand dollars!" gasped the woman. "One thousand dollars!"
When the two men came out with him to his prison the excitement was still rising. The woman had already gone into another room, and the men had got out a bottle. Their voices as they bolted his door and propped a pole against it sounded loud and thick. They stamped up the steps, and he could hear them laughing and shouting in the shack. Surely they could not hear him gnawing--gnawing frantically at his board behind the boxes.
They could not hear him jerking at the end of the board, freed at last from the sleeper below. They could not hear the board give way, throwing him on his haunches. Surely they could not hear the little bark that escaped him when the floor opened.
But out in the yard, free at last, he sank suddenly down flat, head between his paws, very still. The back door of the shack had opened and the light shone out across the littered yard, up the walls of his prison, into his very eyes. The burly man had stepped out on the porch.
It was one of those hollow nights when sounds carry far, when a spoken word is a shout.
"I don"t hear nothin", Sam."
The other man staggered out.
"Maybe it was a rat," he said.
He could almost hear them breathing.
"Guess I imagined," said Sam.
"Sure," said the other.
Their figures darkened the doorway. The burly man clapped the other on the back.
"What I tell you, Sam! One thousand----"
The door closed. The merriment would go on till morning. And old Frank, muscles limbering as he ran, soreness pa.s.sing out of his side, was galloping through the night, toward the railroad--and home.
Morning found him loping easily along the railroad, nose pointed north like a compa.s.s. Now and then he left the track to let a train pa.s.s, looking at it, if it went north, with wistful eyes, then keeping in sight of it as far as he could. He pa.s.sed a few small stations with big water tanks, he crossed long, low trestles over boundless marshes, he came at dusk to a village.
Hungry, lonely, he approached an unpainted cottage on its outskirts. Two dogs rushed at him; he faced them and they turned back. He trotted on, hair risen in an angry tuft down his back. He slept curled up in an abandoned shed, but not for long. The morning stars lingering low over the flat horizon kept pace with him, then a sea of mottled pink clouds, then the huge red face of the rising sun.
At midday he pounced on an animal like a muskrat that tried to cross the track--a tough thing to kill, a tougher to eat. At dusk he drew near a farmhouse, where a man was chopping wood. The man picked up a stick, ordered him away, then went on chopping.
He made no more overtures after this, but many a farmer thought a fox had been among his chickens. Habits of civilization had given way perforce to habits of outlawry. Only as he galloped north day after day his eyes still shone with the eager light of the bird dog"s craving for human companionship and love.
The number of tracks that branched out from the city whose environs he skirted bewildered him for a minute; then he took the one that pointed due north. All the days he travelled, part of the nights. Sometimes at first he had wondered why he did not reach home, at last to travel always north had become a habit, and he wondered no more.
But the time came when he could not keep on going as fast and as long as formerly. There were days when he found hardly anything at all to eat.
The endless ties pa.s.sing under him began to make him dizzy and faint.
His long hair was matted; his ribs showed; his eyes grew haggard. It was a wonder the young man knew him for what he was.
He had come into the freight yards of a town at nightfall, in a cold, driving rain, a bedraggled, forlorn figure, a stray dog. A pa.s.senger train had just pa.s.sed him, stopped at the station ahead, then pulled out. A light glistened down wet rails into his hungry eyes and blinded him. Rows of silent dripping box cars hid the man crossing the track at the street. Frank almost ran into him. Both stopped. The man was b.u.t.toned up to his neck in an overcoat and carried a satchel.
"h.e.l.lo!" he said.
Frank started to slink back under a box car.
"Come here!" He stooped down and looked into the dog"s eyes. "Where did you drop from?" he said. "You come with me! Let"s talk it over."
In a warm, firelit cottage room a young woman ran to meet the man--then for the first time she saw the dog.
"Why, John!" she cried. "Where did you get him?"
"He got me," laughed the man, "on the way home from the station. He"s starving. Get him something to eat. Then I"ll tell you about it."
She glanced at a cradle, whose covers were being suddenly and violently agitated.
"I"ll answer for this old fellow," a.s.sured the man. "He"s seen better days. I think I"ve seen him before."
Out in the bright little kitchen, where they sc.r.a.ped together all the sc.r.a.ps they could find, he went on:
"Of course I may be mistaken. But at a little station where I sell goods sometimes, I used to see a big red Irish setter following a tall man and a little boy. I think they lived out in the country from there. The kind of folks and the kind of dog you don"t forget. If it wasn"t so far--hang it, I believe it"s the dog, anyhow! Well, we"ll take good care of him, and next week when I go through I"ll find out."
The young woman in a raincoat came out in the back yard and held the streaming lantern while the man arranged some sacks underneath the porch and closed and bolted the back gate. He heard them go up the back steps, heard them moving about in the house. Like a decent old fellow he licked the rain from his silken coat, smoothed out the matted strands, then curled up comfortably in his dry bed and slept deep and long.
He stayed with them a week, while strength returned to his muscles, fire to his eyes, courage to his heart. But as he lay before their hearth at night he saw always in his mind that other fire--the fire of home. The stars were still shining that morning when he scrambled over the high back fence and was gone.
But it was with new life and confidence that he continued his journey.
He slunk no more on the outskirts of towns; he pa.s.sed boldly through.
Fortune favoured him now; on the second day after he left them he ran into snow, and rabbits are almost helpless before a swift pounce in the snow.
The drifts grew deeper as he travelled north. Fields of dead cotton stalks were varied by fields of withered corn stubble, yellow, broken rows on white hills. There was an occasional big farmhouse now, a house with white pillars like his master"s, set in a grove of naked oaks. And at last, following fence rows and hedges, lines of cylindrical cedars climbed over and over high hills. The look of home was on the face of nature, the smell of home was in the air.
It was a bitter cold afternoon when the mountains first took shape in the distance. He could make them out, though the sky was heavily overcast. Those were the mountains he saw every morning from the back porch of his home. He barked at them as he ran. He would lie before his own fire this night.
At dusk sudden hunger a.s.sailed him. On a hill was a big farmhouse, the windows aglow, smoke veering wildly from the chimneys. And on the wind came the smell of cooking meat. He stopped on an embankment, p.r.i.c.ked his ears, licked his chops. Then he scrambled down the embankment and like a big fox made his way along a fence row toward that house from whence came the smell of cooking meat. At the same time flakes of snow began to drive horizontally across the white fields.