The rapid walk set him into a glow. But by the time he had reached home and had stripped off his wet clothes and swathed himself in a rough blanket, his racked nerves rea.s.serted themselves. He craved a drink--a number of drinks--to restore his wonted poise. Lighting the kitchen lamp, he set the whisky bottle on the table and put a thick tumbler alongside it. Chum was lying at his master"s feet. In front of Ferris was a pint of good cheer. The lamplight made the kitchen bright and cozy. Link felt a sense of utter well-being pervade him.
This was home--this was the real thing. Three successive and man-size drinks of whisky presently made it seem more and more the real thing.
They made all things seem possible, and most things highly desirable.
Link wanted to sing. And after two additional drinks he gratified this taste by lifting his voice in a hiccup-punctuated ditty addressed to one Jenny, whom the singer exhorted to wait till the clouds rolled by.
He was following this appeal by a rural lyric which recited in somewhat wearisome tonal monotony the adventures of a Little Black Bull that came Over the Mountain, when he observed that Chum was no longer lying at his feet. Indeed, the dog was in a far corner of the room, pressed close to the closed outer door, and with crest and ruff a-droop.
Puzzled by his pet"s defection, Link imperiously commanded Chum to return to his former place. The collie, in most unwilling obedience, turned about and came slowly toward the drinker.
Every line of Chum"s splendid body told of reluctance to approach his master. The deep-set, dark eyes were eloquent of a frightened disgust.
He looked at Ferris as at some loathely stranger. The glad light of loyalty, which always had transfigured his visage when Link called to him, was woefully lacking. Drunk as he was Ferris could not help noticing the change. And he marveled at it.
"Wha.s.ser matter?" he demanded truculently. "What ails yer? C"m here, I"m tellin" you!"
He stretched out his hand in rough caress to the slowly approaching collie. Chum shrank back from the touch as a child from a dose of castor oil. There was no fear now in his aspect. Only disgust and a poignant unhappiness.
And, all suddenly, Link Ferris understood.
He himself did not know how the knowledge came to him. A canine psychologist might perhaps have told him that there is always an occult telepathy between the mind of a thoroughbred dog and its master, a power which gives them a glimpse into each other"s processes of thought. But there was no such psychologist there to explain the thing.
Nor did Link need it explained. It was enough for him that he knew.
He knew, as by revelation, that his adoring dog now shunned him because Link was drunk.
From the first, Chum"s look of utter worship and his eagerly happy obedience had been a joy to Link. The subtly complete change in his worshiper"s demeanor jarred sharply on the man"s raw nerves. He felt vaguely unclean--shamed.
The contempt of such of his pious human neighbors as had pa.s.sed him in the road during his sprees had affected Link not at all. Nor now could he understand the queer feeling of humiliation that swept over him at sight of the horrified repugnance in the eyes of this mere brute beast.
It roused him to a gust of hot vexation.
"Shamed of me, are you?" he grunted fiercely. "A dirty four-legged critter"s "shamed of a he-man, hey? Well, we"ll lick that out of you, dam" soon!"
Lurching to his feet, he s.n.a.t.c.hed up a broom handle. He waved it menacingly over the dog. Chum gave back not an inch. Under the threat of a beating he stood his ground, his brave eyes steadfast, and, lurking in their mystic depths, that same glint of sorrowful wonder and disgust.
Up whirled the broomstick. But when it fell it did not smite athwart the shoulders of the sorrowing dog. Instead, it clattered harmlessly to the board floor. And to the floor also slumped Link Ferris, his nerve all gone, his heart soggy with sudden remorse.
To his knees thudded the man, close beside the collie. From Link"s throat were bursting great strangled sobs which tortured his whole body and made his speech a tangled jumble that was not pretty to hear.
"Chum!" he wailed brokenly, clutching the dog"s huge ruff in both shaky hands. "Chum, old friend! Gawd forgive me! You saved me from drowndin"
an" from goin" broke, this night! You been the only friend that ever cared a hang if I was alive or dead! An"--an" I was goin" to lick you!
I was goin" to lambaste you. Because I was a beastlier beast than YOU be. I was goin" to do it because you was so much better than me that you was made sick by my bein" a hawg. An" I was mad at you fer it.
I"m--oh, I"m shameder than you are! Chum! Honest to Gawd, I am! Won"t you make friends again? PLEASE, Chum!"
Now, of course, this was a most ridiculous and maudlin way to talk.
Moreover, no man belongs on his knees beside a dog, even though the man be a sot and the dog a thoroughbred. In his calmer moments Link Ferris would have known this. A high-bred collie, too, has no use for sloppy emotion, but shuns its exhibition well-nigh as disgustedly as he shuns a drunkard.
Yet, for some illogical reason, Chum did not seek to withdraw his aristocratic self from the shivering clutch of the repentant souse.
Instead, the expression of misery and repugnance fled as if by magic from his brooding eyes. Into them in its place leaped a light of keen solicitude. He pressed closer to the swayingly kneeling man, and with upthrust muzzle sought to kiss the blubbering face.
The whisky reek was as strong as ever. But something in Chum"s soul was stronger. He seemed to know that the maudlin Unknown had vanished, and that his dear master was back again--his dear master who was in grievous trouble and who must be comforted.
Wherefore, the sickening liquor fumes no longer held him aloof from Link. Just as the icy lake had not deterred him from springing into the water after his drowning G.o.d, although, like most collies, Chum hated to swim.
Link, through his own nervous collapse, recognized the instant change in Chum"s demeanor, and read it aright. It strengthened the old bond between himself and the dog. It somehow gave him a less scornful opinion of himself.
Presently he got to his feet, and with the collie at his side went back to the table, where stood the threeparts-empty flask. His face working, Link opened the window and poured what was left of the whisky out on the ground. There was nothing dramatic about his action. Rather it was tinged by very visible regret. Turning back to Chum, he said sheepishly:
"There it goes. An" I ain"t sayin" I"m tickled at wastin" such good stuff. But--somehow I guess we"ve come to a showdown, Chum; you an" me.
If I stick to booze, I"m li"ble to see you looking at me that queer way an" sidlin" away from me all the time; till maybe at last you"d get plumb sick of me for keeps, an" light out. An"--I"d rather have YOU than the booze, since I can"t have both of you. Bein" only a dawg and never havin" tasted good red liquor, you can"t know what a big bouquet I"m a-throwin" at you when I say that, neither. I--Oh, let"s call it a day and go to sleep."
Next morning, in the course of nature, Link Ferris worked with a splitting headache. He carried it and a bad taste in his mouth, for the best part of the day.
But it was the last drink headache which marred his labor, all that long and happy summer. His work showed the results of the change. So did the meager hill farm. So did Link"s system and his pocketbook.
As he was a real, live human and not a temperance tract hero, there were times when he girded bitterly at his self-enforced abstinence.
Where were times, too--when he had a touch of malaria and again when the cutworms slaughtered two rows of his early tomatoes--when he yearned unspeakably for the solace of an evening at the Hampton tavern.
He had never been a natural drinker. Like many a better man he had drunk less for what he sought to get than for what he sought to forget.
And with the departure of loneliness and the new interest in his home, he felt less the need for wet conviviality and for drugging his fits of melancholy.
The memory of Chum"s grieving repulsion somehow stuck in Ferris"s mind.
And it served as a brake, more than once, to his tavernward impulses.
Two or three times, also, when Link"s babyish gusts of destructive bad temper boiled to the surface at some setback or annoyance, much the same wonderingly distressed look would creep into the collie"s glance--a look as of one who is revolted by a dear friend"s failure to play up to form. And to his own amused surprise, Ferris found himself trying to curb these outbursts.
To the average human, a dog is only a dog. To Ferris, this collie of his was the one intimate friend of his life. Unversed in the ways of dogs, he overestimated Chum, of course, and valued his society and his good opinion far more highly than the average man would have done.
Thus, perhaps, his desire to stand well in the dog"s esteem had in it more that was commendable than ludicrous. Or perhaps not.
If the strange a.s.sociation did much for Link, it did infinitely more for Chum. He had found a master who had no social interests in life beyond his dog, and who could and did devote all his scant leisure hours to a.s.sociation with that dog. Chum"s sagacity and individuality blossomed under such intensive tutelage, as might that of a clever child who is the sole pupil of its teacher.
Link did not seek to make a trick dog of his pet. He taught Chum to shake hands, to lie down, to "speak" and one or two more simple accomplishments. It was by talking constantly to the collie, as to a fellow human, that he broadened the dog"s intelligence. Chum grew to know and to interpret every inflection of Ferris"s voice, every simple word he spoke and every gesture of his.
Apart from mere good fellowship the dog was proving of great use on the farm. Morning and night, Chum drove the sheep and the cattle to their respective pastures and then back to the barnyard at night. At the entrances to the pastures, now, Ferris had rigged up rude gates with "bar catch" fastenings--simple contrivances which closed by gravity and whose bars the dog was readily taught to shove upward with his nose.
It was thus a matter of only a few days to teach Chum to open or close the light gates. This trick has been taught to countless collies, of course, in Great Britain, and to many here. But Link did not know that.
He felt like another Columbus or Edison, at his own genius in devising such a scheme; and he felt an inordinate pride in Chum for learning the simple exploit so quickly.
Of old, Link had fretted at the waste of time in taking out the sheep and cows and in going for them at night. This dual duty was now a thing of the past. Chum did the work for him, and reveled in the excitement of it. Chum also--from watching Link perform the task twice--had learned to drive the chickens out of the garden patches whenever any of them chanced to stray thither, and to scurry into the cornfield with harrowing barks of ejection when a flock of crows hovered hungrily above the newly-planted crops.
All of which was continual amus.e.m.e.nt to Chum, and a tremendous help to his owner.
Link, getting over his initial wonder at the dog"s progress, began to take these accomplishments as a matter of course. Indeed, he was sometimes perplexed at the otherwise sagacious dog"s limitations of brain.
For example, Chum loved the fire on the chilly evenings such as creep over the mountain region even in midsummer. He would watch Link replenish the blaze with fresh sticks whenever it sank low.
Yet, left to himself, he would let the fire go out, and he never knew enough to pick up a stick in his mouth and lay it on the embers. This lack of reasoning powers in his pet perplexed Ferris.
Link could not understand why the same wit which sent Chum half a mile, of his own accord, in search of one missing sheep out of the entire flock, should not tell him that a fire is kept alive by the putting of wood on it.
In search of some better authority on dog intelligence, Link paid his first visit to Hampton"s little public library. There, shamefacedly, he asked the boy in charge for some books about dogs. The youth looked idly for a few minutes in a crossindex file. Then he brought forth a tome called "The Double Garden," written by someone who was evidently an Eyetalian or Polack or other foreigner, because he bore the grievously un-American name of "Maeterlinck".