Presently, the waiting Finn heard heavy footsteps in the yard outside, and the muscles of his body gathered themselves together for action. The door opened, and Finn saw Matey standing there with a stick and a chain in his hand. Instinct told Finn on the instant that he must at all hazards avoid both the stick and the chain; but, more than anything else, the chain.

"Come 'ere!" said Matey. And Finn came. But, whereas Matey had reckoned on a slow movement, in the course of which his hand would have fallen on Finn's slip-collar preparatory to fixing the chain on that, the movement was actually very swift and low to the ground, and resulted in Finn's passing out scathless into the walled-in yard.

"Oho! So we don't like our new master, don't we? Haven't forgotten our blooming gruellin', eh? Better take care we don't get some more o' the same sort, Mister Wolfhound, if you arst me!"

The walled-in yard was quite safe. Matey was in nowise perturbed, and, moreover, having slept soundly and breakfasted copiously, he was, for him, in an amiable mood. Still, he had no wish to waste time, and he wanted to overhaul his plunder, and groom Finn up a little before the prospective purchaser arrived. So Matey turned round, leaned forward with a hand resting on one knee, and tried to twist his features into an ingratiating expression, as he said—

"Here, then, good dog! Come on, Finn! Here, boy!"

But instinct made Finn's intelligence upon the whole superior to Matey's in this matter, and, having already satisfied himself by means of hurried investigation that at present he could not escape from the walled-in yard, the Wolfhound stood half a dozen paces distant from the man, waiting, with every nerve and muscle at concert pitch. The man moved forward, with hand outstretched invitingly. The Wolfhound moved backward, with hackles slightly raised. Thus they followed each other round the little yard perhaps six times, the distance between them being maintained with nicety and precision by Finn. Then Matey's mental inferiority appeared. He was expecting very shortly now the man from whom he hoped to receive his reward—the price of Finn. His intelligence, such as it was, told him that strategy would now be necessary to enable him to lay hands on the Wolfhound; but, even while recognising that, he could not refrain from angrily flinging his chain in Finn's face, after his sixth promenade of the yard, and cursing the dog savagely, before retiring into the house to prepare a stratagem.

Finn did not snarl as the chain struck him. Instinct had not carried him so far from education. But he barked angrily, and bounded to one side. While the man was away Finn examined the gate of the yard through which he had been driven on the previous night, and, though it rattled hopefully when he plunged against it with his fore-paws, raised high above its fastening, it remained solidly closed.

As Finn turned away from the doors of the yard, Matey appeared from the house, holding in one outstretched hand a piece of the same kind of meat with which he had seduced Finn into accompanying him on the previous evening, and calling the hound to him in a friendly tone. But Finn had learned a good deal since his first taste of that savoury meat; more a good deal than the man who offered the meat had learned in the same time. Taking the middle of the yard, so as to leave himself ample space for retreat, he remained watchfully regarding Matey, and refused to advance a step. Matey's spoken blandishments were now a dead letter to Finn. Having once discovered the possibilities of human treachery, he would never forget them. And here the folk who belong to what we call the brute creation are apt to be a good deal wiser than their betters in the scale of evolution. They do not forget the teaching of experience so readily as do those of us who are farther removed from Nature. To be sure, Matey's notion of strategy was puerile enough; but, apart from that, it is safe to assume that Finn would never again completely trust this man, who had been the first to introduce him to fear and misery, to humiliation, and to knowledge of the existence of treachery and cruelty in men folk.

Matey cursed the Wolfhound angrily, but that did not incline Finn to trust him any the more. Then the man advanced a little in his strategy, and tossed a piece of the meat on to the ground, before Finn, to inspire confidence. But Finn's mistrust was too profound to admit of his stooping to pick this up. He was not very specially hungry, in any case; and if Matey had been an observant creature, or even one who used his memory wisely, he would have known that the offer of drinking-water would have been infinitely more tempting to Finn than any quantity of savoury meat. But, as a fact, Finn was too much possessed just now by his determination to escape from Matey and all his works to be very clearly conscious of any other need.

Then, his petty strategy exhausted, and his paltry measure of self-control with it, Matey started to chase Finn with a stick. Now and again he succeeded in getting a blow home, as Finn wheeled and leapt before him within the narrow limits of the yard; and every time the stick touched him Finn barked angrily. This performance was extremely bad for Finn. It was calculated to break down some of the most valuable among his acquired qualities; the characteristics that he acquired with his blood through many generations of wisely-bred and humanely-reared hounds. In one sense it was more harmful than the merciless and unreasonable punishment of the previous night, because there was no faintest hint of a punishment about it; not even of the sort of punishment that had followed his howling. That had had the bad qualities of cruelty and unreasonableness, unjustifiableness. This was not punishment at all, it was sheer savagery, the savagery of a running fight in which the man, though he might hurt occasionally, could not conquer. And that is a most demoralizing sort of a happening, as between dog and man. Its demoralizing influence could have been detected by an observant spectator in the notes of Finn's barks when the stick reached him. They approached momentarily nearer the threatening nature of a growl; a new, dangerous note to hear in Finn's speech with mankind.

Matey was rapidly becoming exhausted, and in another moment or two would probably have flung his stick at Finn and given up his senseless pursuit, when, just as the Wolfhound bounded forward from under his stick at the house end of the yard, the gate leading into that yard opened, and Bill appeared. In an instant Finn had sprung for the opening, Bill's legs were thrust from under him, and as he stumbled, with one hand on the ground and an oath on his lips, Finn reached the open road outside. Behind him, for a moment, Finn heard a hurried scrambling, and a deal of broken, breathless whistling, and calling aloud of his name. And then he heard no more from the place of his captivity and anguish, for the reason that he was already nearing the limits of the little town, and galloping hard for the open country, over the road by which he had travelled some ten hours earlier in Matey's cart.



Finn galloped for about three miles, his heart swelling within him for joy in his freedom. Then, gradually, his gait slackened to a canter, and then to a trot, and, finally, the sight of a wayside pond brought him to a standstill; and, after a mechanical look behind him, he walked into the water and drank, and drank, and drank till he could drink no more. Finn emerged from the pond with heaving flanks and dripping muzzle, conscious now of some of his hurts and bruises, but licking his wet chops with satisfaction, and supremely glad of his freedom. He lay down on the grass near the pond and proceeded to lick those of his wounds and bruises which were within licking reach, and to pity himself regarding the sharp pain in his side which his broken rib was causing. Presently a cart came jolting along from the direction in which Finn had come, and the Wolfhound shrank back as far as possible into the hedge behind him. But the driver of the cart took no further notice of Finn than to stare idly at him, possibly without even seeing him; at all events with an absolutely incurious stare. With renewed confidence, the young hound stretched himself out again on the cool grass and presently began to doze, this being the wise manner of all his kind in assisting Nature to cure them of their various ills.

While Finn dozed, another cart approached him from the little town he had left behind, and in this second cart were two extremely angry men, one of whom strongly desired Finn's recapture on mercenary grounds, while the other desired it upon these grounds and others also. Bill wanted his share of Finn's price; Matey wanted his larger share of that price, and he also wanted badly to have Finn securely tied up in a convenient position for being soundly beaten. Matey would almost rather have foregone the money than the satisfaction of administering the beating, the very thorough beating which he pictured himself administering to Finn. His heavy mouth twitched viciously as Matey thought about it. Suddenly Bill pulled the pony on to its haunches with a jerk.

"I'm jiggered if that ain't 'im a-waitin' for us!" exclaimed Bill, in a hoarse whisper.

Matey was out of the trap in an instant, and, with meat in his hand, was already beginning a whining call, which was meant to be extremely ingratiating. But Finn sprang to his feet at the sound of the cart coming to a standstill, and, after one glance at Matey, was off like a wolf down the empty country road.

This was yet another lesson learned. Finn would not be in a hurry to rest by the wayside again. After two miles of galloping at the rate of nearly twenty miles an hour, Finn steadied down to a fast loping gait, which would have kept him abreast of any other road vehicle than a motor-car, and maintained this for quite a long while. Then, by reason of the pain in his side, and of other pains, he decided to stop. But, with his last-learned lesson fresh in his mind, he had no intention of resting by the roadside. With a twist of pain that cut into his side like a knife, he leapt a field gate, and crept along the inner side of the hedge for some distance before finally curling up in a dry hollow beside a hayrick. Here, sheltered by the rick and half buried in dry hay and straw, Finn courted the sleep he needed, so that it came to him swiftly. In his sleep the young Wolfhound whimpered occasionally, and once or twice his whole great body shook to the sound of a growling bark, causing two bloodshot eyes to be half opened, and then mechanically closed again, with a small grunt, as Finn's muzzle drove a little deeper into the dry hay under his hocks, and he allowed sleep to strengthen its healing hold upon him.

It was a dream that caused Finn to give that growling bark, and it was a dream of a kind that had been foreign to his breed for generations. He dreamed that he was chasing Matey, in the form of a huge rabbit, armed with a stick. Matey, the rabbit, bounded away from him, just as ordinary rabbits did; but sounds came from Matey's rabbit mouth, and they were the horrid, venomous sounds of the curses with which Matey had followed him that morning in the walled-in yard. In the dream Finn was always on the point of leaping upon the back of rabbit-Matey's neck, with jaws stretched wide for slaughter. But something always intervened to prevent Finn taking the leap. The something was this: at the moment of the leap, Matey always looked more like a man and less like a rabbit, and the instinct which told Finn not to slay a man was a very strong one. But, somehow, rabbit-Matey seemed an exception. Finn was very anxious to feel the crunching of his shoulder and neck bones; and altogether it was unfortunate that such a dream should have been inspired in the brain of so nobly born a hound.

When Finn finally woke he gaped right in the eye of the setting sun, and all about him was the solemn silence of a fine October twilight. He yawned cavernously, and, raising his haunches, stretched his huge trunk from fore-paws placed far out. But, in the midst of the stretch, he gave a little smothered yelp of pain, and came to earth again, solicitously licking at the ribs of his right side. Matey's heavy boot had done great execution there. Slowly, then, Finn rose, and walked out into the darkening twilight of the field. Before he had covered a hundred yards, a rabbit started up from behind a bush, and scurried hedgewards for its life. But the distance was too great for bunny by three yards, and Finn's jaws snapped his backbone in sunder within six feet of his own burrow. This was hard on the rabbit; but it was no more than one tiny instance of the outworking of Nature's most inexorable law. Finn had killed many rabbits before this evening; but in the past he had merely obeyed his hunting and killing instinct. Now this instinct in him was sharpened by hunger, by having slept on the open earth, and by being conscious of no human control or protection. Finn proceeded to eat this particular rabbit, and that was distinctly a new experience for him, and one that left him upon the whole pleased with himself. He was not aware of the fact, of course, but this simple act placed him more nearly on terms with his ancestors than anything else he had ever done, unless, perhaps, one counts the dream acts of that afternoon.

After his meal Finn strolled along the hedge-side till he came to a gap, and then slipped through to the road. For a mile or two he trotted along the silent road with no particular object in view, and then, coming to a grassy lane, turned into that, and trotted for another mile or two, leaping a gate and a stile which barred his way at intervals, and coming presently to a group of three large ricks. His side was aching dully, and Finn was rather unhappy over finding no sign of the home beside the Downs where his friends were, and his own comfortable bed. Having allowed his mind to dwell upon this for several minutes, he sat down on his haunches near one of the ricks, and howled to the stars about it all for quite a while, and so effectively that a farmer, sitting in his comfortable dining-room nearly half a mile away, made a remark to his daughter about the new-fangled way these pesky motor-car people have of blowing fog-horns like the ships at sea, and carrying on as if the road belonged to them—drat 'un!

It was not active unhappiness, let alone misery like that of the previous night, that moved Finn to this vocal display; but only a kind of gentle melancholy such as we call home-sickness, and after five minutes of it, he curled up beside one of the ricks, after scratching and turning round and round sufficiently to make a kind of burrow for himself, and was fast asleep in about two minutes.

In the morning, long before the dew was off the grass, Finn set out to do what he had never done a before: he set out deliberately to hunt and kill some creature for his breakfast. He very nearly caught an unwary partridge, though the bird did not tempt him nearly so strongly as a thing that ran upon the earth, and ran fast. In the end his menu was that of the previous evening, and, as he eyed its still warm and furry remains, Finn felt that life was really a very good thing, even when one had a pain in one's side, and a large assortment of bruises and sore places in various other parts of one's body.

Towards midday Finn lounged into a rather large village, and did not like it at all. It stirred up in him the recollection of Matey and his horrible environment, and he began to hurry, impelled by a nervous dread of some kind of treachery. Towards the end of the village he passed a pretty, creeper-grown cottage, from the door of which a policeman issued. The policeman stared at Finn, and smacked his own leg. Then he bent his body in an insinuating manner and called to the Wolfhound: "Here, boy! Here, good dog! Come along!" But Finn only lengthened his stride, and presently broke into a gallop. He was no longer the guileless, trustful Finn of a week ago. The rural constable sighed as he resumed an erect position and watched Finn's disappearing form.

"He must be the dog that's wanted, all right; reg'ler monster, I'm blessed if he isn't. But, takin' one thing with another, I'd just as soon they catched him somewhere else than here. Why, I reckon my missis 'ud have a fit. I don't call it hardly right, myself; not 'avin' 'em that size."

Half an hour later, to his great delight, Finn found himself clear of roads and houses, and on the warm, chalky slopes of the Sussex Downs. These great, smooth, immemorial hills, with their blunt crests, and close-cropped, springy turf, brought a rush of home-feeling into Finn's heart, which made his eyes misty, so that he had to sit down and give vent to two or three long-drawn howls by way of expressing his gentle melancholy. But Finn's nose told him plainly that he had never before been on these particular Downs. And so, good and kindly as this ancient British soil was to him, it brought him no sight of actual home.

Towards evening he coursed and killed another rabbit, eating half of it, and providing, in the other half which he left, a substantial repast for a prowling weasel who followed in his trail.

Something—it may have been merely the fact that the day had not been in any way exhausting like its predecessors—prevented Finn from being inclined to curl down and sleep, when he passed a convenient wheat rick in a valley an hour after his supper. The night was fine and clear, and night life in the open, with its many mysterious rustlings, bird and animal calls, and other enticing sounds and smells, was beginning to present considerable attractions to Finn. The events of the past few days had aroused all sorts of latent tendencies and inclinations in him; feelings which resembled memories of bygone days in their effects upon him, but yet were not memories of any life that he had known, though they may have been blood memories of the experiences of his forbears. Later on, however, the young Wolfhound began to tire of the freedom of the night, and home-sick longings rose in his heart as he thought of the coach-house and of Kathleen. It was at about this time that Finn fell to walking along a narrow, white sheep-walk, on the side of a big, billowy down, which seemed to him pleasanter and more homely than any of the hills he had traversed that evening. Gradually the track in the chalk deepened and widened a little, until it became a path sunk in the hill-side to a depth of fifteen or twenty feet, and ended in a five-barred gate beside a road. Finn leaped the gate with a strange feeling of exultation in his heart, which made him careless of the sharp pain the leap brought to his side. Something rose in his throat as he reached the road. His eyes became misty, his nose drooped eagerly to the surface of the road, and he whimpered softly as he ran, with tail swaying from side to side, and a great tenderness welling up within him.

Two minutes later he came to a white gate leading to a shrub-sheltered garden before a small, low, rambling little house. He leaped the little gate, and turned sharply to the right in the garden. But then his way was blocked by high doors, set in masonry, which could not possibly be climbed or jumped. Before these gates, which evidently led to the stables and rear of the house, Finn sat down on his haunches. Then he lifted his long muzzle heavenward and howled lugubriously. He continued his howling steadily for about one minute and a half, and at the end of that time a door opened behind him in the front of the house, and a man clad in pyjamas rushed out into the garden. Finn had studiously avoided men for these two days past now; but, so far from avoiding this man, he rose on his hind-legs to give greeting, and could hardly be induced to lower his front paws, even when the man in pyjamas had removed his caressing arms from about the Wolfhound's shoulders. The man, you see, was the Master, and three minutes afterwards he was joined by the Mistress of the Kennels. But they were all three in the Master's outside den then with Tara.



CHAPTER IX

THE HEART OF TARA

The Mistress of the Kennels held on to one of Finn's fore-paws as though she feared he might be spirited away from the den, even while he was being welcomed home there. The fatted calf took the form of a dish of new milk and some sardines on toast which had been prepared for the next morning's breakfast. But this came later, and was polished off by Finn more by reason of its rare daintiness and his desire to live up to what the occasion seemed to demand of him, than because he was hungry. At an early stage in proceedings the Master noticed, and removed, the slip-collar.

"Well, that disposes of the theory that Finn wandered away of his own accord," said the Master. "If the police know their business this ought to help them." Then he turned to Finn again. "You didn't know there was a twenty-five pound reward out for you, my son, did you? It was to have been made fifty in another day or two; though, if you did but know it, our solvency demands rather that you should be sold, than paid for in that fashion."

The Mistress nodded thoughtfully.

"But that's quite impossible after this," she said; "selling Finn, I mean."

The Master smiled. "I suppose it is. That seems to be rather our way. It's a dead sure thing there can be no selling of Tara, and—I'm inclined to think you're right about Finn, too. Heavens! If I could lay my hands on the man who took that chip off his muzzle, I think I'd run to the length of a ten pounds fine for assault. I'd get my money's worth, too. The dog has been clubbed; he has been man-handled; I could swear he has had to fight for his freedom. Poor old Finn! What a dog! What a Finn it is!"

While the last of these remarks was being made the Master was carefully examining Finn all over, parting the Wolfhound's dense hard hair over places in which the skin beneath had been broken, and pressing his fingers along the lines of different bones and muscles solicitously. There was a half-spoken oath on the Master's lips when Finn winced from him as his hand passed down the ribs of the hound's right side.

"There is a rib broken here," he said to the Mistress, "unless I am much mistaken. When the post office opens in the morning we must wire for Turle, the vet. Thieving's bad enough, but—there are some stupid brutes in this world!"

The Mistress stared.

"Oh, no, I don't mean Finn; nor any of his honest four-legged kind. I meant two-legged brutes. Finn has been handled more roughly than an understanding man would handle a tiger. And look at his face. Look into his eyes. Notice his keenly watchful air, even while I am handling him. Well, Finn, my son, you have said good-bye to puppyhood with a vengeance now. Unless I am much mistaken he has crowded more into the last three days than all the rest of his life till now had taught him. That dog's years older than Kathleen to-night in some ways. Do you get the effect I mean? The youth has gone; there is a certain new hardness. Watch his eye now as I lift my hand!"

The Master lifted his hand with a sudden jerk, and the two who were watching Finn's eyes saw that in them which they had never seen in Kathleen's, nor yet even in Tara's eyes; for neither Tara nor her daughter had ever pitted their agility against man's brutality. They had never been clubbed or kicked; they had never seen as far into the ugly places of human nature as Finn; and you might brandish your arms in any way you chose before old Tara or Kathleen, and, while the one would have blinked at you with courteous tolerance of your foolishness, the other would have suspected you of inventing a new game, and gambolled before you like a huge kitten.

It was not, of course, that Finn was foolish enough to distrust the Master, or suspect him of any hostile intention. But certain instincts had been awakened in the young Wolfhound, and, for a long time, at all events, and probably for the rest of his life, those instincts would not again become latent. In some respects he may have been the better off; certainly he was better equipped to face the world; but the Master, naturally enough, could not withhold a sigh for the old utter trustfulness which had held even the instincts of self-preservation in abeyance. But, as has been said, Finn was better equipped to face the world than either his sister, or that gentle great lady, his mother; all his instincts were more alert, and his senses also. His eyes moved more rapidly than their eyes; his attitude toward life and toward men-folk was more elastic and less absolute. Men-folk remained his superiors in Finn's eyes, his superiors in a hundred ways, and it might be his dearly loved friends; but they were not any more the absolute, omnipotent, and all-perfect gods that they had been, and still were to Kathleen, for example, who would not have felt the slightest uneasiness if the Master had placed his heel on her throat, or touched her head with a club, as she lay on the ground before him.

To a great extent, however, the Master's sympathetic anger over Finn's wounds, and twinges of regret regarding the subtle changes which he recognised in the hound he affectionately called "son," were out-balanced by the joy he felt at seeing Finn safe in his den again. The loss of Finn had been hard to bear, and not the less hard because it came immediately after the great triumph of the Show. There were the seven prize cards adorning the wall over Tara's great bed in the den; but their presence had been something of a mockery in the absence of their winner. When the Master and the Mistress finally bade Finn good night, after making him thoroughly comfortable in his own clean, big bed, the coach-house door was carefully padlocked.

It could not have been said a month later that Finn was physically the worse for his adventure in the hands of Matey. His ribs were sound once more, and all his wounds and bruises were healed, though a light-coloured scar remained, and would remain on his muzzle, where the dog-stealer's stick had bitten into the bone. If it had come nine months earlier, such an experience would have been bad indeed, for sets-back in puppyhood are hard to make up. But at fifteen months Finn had as perfect a physical foundation to go upon as any living creature could have. He was fortified against physical ills as few animals can be; his system lacked nothing that makes for resisting power; he had attained his full growth without having known a day's illness, and his reserve strength was enormous.

And now came a long and rather severe winter, in which no evil thing befell Finn, and the process of "furnishing" went on in him with never a hitch of any sort, and in circumstances that could not possibly have been more favourable. All day long he drank in the heartiest air in England; on every day he had ample exercise and ample food, and when young summer of the next year brought him to his second birthday, Finn scaled 149 lbs., and his shoulder bones just skimmed the under side of the measuring standard at thirty-six inches. Hard measurement brought him within an eighth of an inch of the yard, and it was fair to say that, favourably measured, standing well up, he did reach full thirty-six inches at the shoulder.

Remember that, when his head was inclined upward, the tip of his nose would be more than a foot higher than his shoulder. With all four feet on the floor, he could rest his nose on a window-ledge that was exactly four feet high. His eyes, and shaggy brows and beard, like the tip of his tail, were dark as night; there were some extra dark hairs at his hocks, fetlocks and shoulder blades; and all the rest of Finn was of a hard, steely grey brindle colour; the typical wolf colour of northern climes, very steely, and with odd suggestions about it of ghostly fleetness, of great speed and enduring strength. His fore-legs were straight as gun-barrels, his knees flat as the palm of your hand; his feet hard, close, round, and rather cat-like, save that his claws were more like chisels, black, and hard, and strongly curved. His hind-legs, on the other hand, were finely curved, with swelling rolls of muscle in the upper thighs. The first or upper thighs were very long and strong, curving sharply out to hocks that were well let down, and without a hint of turn inward or outward. His loins were well arched, his chest deep, like an Arab stallion's, his neck long, arched, and very strong, like the massy muscles of his fore-arms. It was difficult to say that he had grown much since his fifteenth month, and yet he looked a very much bigger dog, and, above all, he looked and was very much stronger. There was no longer anything immature or unformed about Finn. During his next year he might possibly add half a score of pounds to his already great weight; but on his second birthday he was set and furnished, a superb specimen of pure breeding and perfect rearing in Irish Wolfhounds.

For almost six months now Finn's only companion of his own kind had been Tara. He had not seen Kathleen's departure from the cottage beside the Downs, and for some days he was greatly puzzled by her absence. He even stood by the orchard gate and growled fiercely, with the hair on his shoulders standing almost erect, because the thought was in his mind that Matey may have had something to do with this disappearance. The Master saw him engaged in this way, and was greatly puzzled by it. He said to the Mistress of the Kennels afterwards—

"I really think old Finn must have gone mad for five minutes this morning. I never saw a more fearsome-looking creature than he was when he stood and growled beside the orchard gate. I assure you he was terrible. He looked about six feet high, and as fierce as any tiger. It made me think of his ancient godfather, or namesake, the Finn of fifteen hundred years ago, who kept King Cormac's three hundred Irish Wolfhounds in fighting trim, as the most awe-inspiring and death-dealing portion of his master's army. I must read over those 'Tales of the Cycle of Finn' again; they are fine, stirring things. But in these worrying days I hardly seem to get time for sleep, let alone for reading about old Finn. But I wish you had seen Finn—our Finn—this morning. He was very terrible, but I never saw a dog look more magnificent. Upon my word, I believe there are very few living things that Finn could not implant fear in, if he set his mind to it; yes, and pull down, to boot—a hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and bone, and teeth and fire and spirit!"

But Finn need not have worried for Kathleen's sake. She had gone to a good home, and lives there to-day in honoured old age. Her owner paid a hundred guineas for her, and would not sell her for ten times the figure. But there was no way of telling Finn these things, for though he could understand most things that the Master said to him, and was able to tell the Master most things that he wanted to tell; yet the matter of buying and selling and its causes were naturally beyond him. He had no way of telling that the Master was in sore straits financially, though he did know that his friend was not over and above happy. Neither could he tell that the mere keeping of a Wolfhound like Kathleen runs away with the better part of twenty pounds a year. Things were not prospering with the Master, and, feeling that he could not part with Finn or Tara, he had been absolutely obliged to sell Kathleen.

But that was by no means the end of the Master's troubles, the root of which lay in the fact that he loved the country, and hated the town, but was unable to earn money enough in the country to meet the various obligations with which he saddled himself, and was saddled by circumstances. And so it fell out that soon after Finn's second birthday the Master began to spend a good deal of time away from the house by the Downs. Tara liked to pass the greater part of her time in the Master's outside den with her muzzle on his slippers, but Finn was not like that. Tara was a matron getting on in years, and her matronhood had cost her dear in illness from which it had been thought she could never recover. Finn, on the other hand, was the very personification of lusty youth and tireless virility. The Mistress of the Kennels would take him out behind her bicycle, while Tara lay dreaming at home, and it may be that the Mistress fancied her gentle ten and twelve mile runs tired Finn. She never saw him when he would set off upon his hunting expeditions, in the course of which he covered every foot of the Downs for a dozen miles around. He was safe enough, too, for he would have had nothing but angry growls for any man of Matey's ilk, charmed he never so wisely with spiced meats and the like. The weasels and the stoats, and a score of other wild things that roamed that country-side, could have told the Mistress of the Kennels just why Finn did not always clear his dinner dish in these days, and thereby saved her an addition to her many worries of that period. She did not like to depress the Master with tales of half-eaten meals, and she had no knowledge of the half-eaten hares and rabbits and other wild creatures which Finn left behind him on his hunting trails.

From one point of view, Finn suffered at this stage from the absence of the Master's eye and hand, and so did the rabbits; but, from another point of view, Finn gained. He became harder, more wily, and a far more expert hunter than he would have been under a more disciplined regime. But certainly he also became less domesticated, and vastly less fastidious than, for example, that exquisite great lady, his mother.

There came a certain late summer's day, with more than a hint of autumn in the air, when something happened which Finn never quite forgot. The Master had been away for three weeks on end, and Tara had missed him sadly. In the evening the great bitch would often whimper quietly as she lay outstretched, with her long, grey muzzle resting on the slippers which the Mistress never thought of taking from her. Of late she had cared less and less for any kind of activity, and seemed more and more to desire the presence of the Master. Now, in the evening of the day which brought strong hints of coming autumn with it, Finn lay beside Tara in the outside den, thinking lazily of an upland meadow, with a copse at its far end, which he meant to hunt presently. Suddenly there came a sound of a man's footfall on the gravel beyond the gateway and in front of the house. Tara's nostrils quivered as her head rose. With one mighty bound she was outside the den. The gates stood open. The Master, at the garden's far end, called—

"Tara! Tara, girl! Here, girl!"

Finn was by Tara's flank, and he saw her leap forward, hurtling through the air like an arrow from a bow. Six great bounds she gave, while fleet Finn galloped a good twenty paces behind her, and then Tara stopped suddenly with a strange, moaning cry, staggered for a moment, as the Master ran towards her, and then fell sideways, against his knee, with glazing eyes turned up for a last glimpse of the face she loved. The Master was kneeling on the gravel, and Tara's shoulders were in his arms; but at the end of two long-drawn sighs, Tara was dead.

Finn was sniffing at his mother's back. He did not know just what had happened, but he was profoundly conscious that the happening was tragic, and that his beautiful mother was the victim. The shock to the Master was very great; for he was already unhappy, and he had loved this mother of heroes of his very dearly. But the shock to Finn, though far less complex, was scarcely less great. He had killed many scores of times, but it seemed that he had never seen death till now. He recognized it clearly enough. He knew that Tara was never going to move again; the instant his sensitive nostrils touched her still, warm body he knew that. But there had been no killing. That was what baffled Finn, and struck a kind of terror into his heart, to lend poignancy to his sorrow. One more look he gave at his mother's sightless face, this time where it rested on the crook of the Master's arm, and then he sat down on his haunches, and with muzzle raised high poured out his grief in the long-drawn Irish Wolfhound howl; the most melancholy cry in nature.

The Master had looked careworn and weary before he called Tara to him. It was a very grey, sad face he showed when he rose gently and bade Finn go into the coach-house and be silent. He had known that Tara's heart was weak, but this thing that had happened he had never anticipated, and the nature and circumstances of Tara's death were such as to move a man deeply. In a sense, her love of the Master had killed this beautiful hound. Her great love had burst her heart in sunder, and so she died, the very noble daughter of an ancient, noble line.



CHAPTER X

A TRANSITION STAGE

To Finn it seemed that life was never the same after the evening of Tara's death. He did not know, of course, that changes had been set afoot during many months before his mother's end came. And in a way he was right; life never was quite the same for him. Active changes, toward which the Master's circumstances had been leading for some time past, began immediately after that strange home-coming which finally separated Finn from his own kin.

For instance, the Master seemed generally to be away from the house beside the Downs; and the Mistress of the Kennels seemed always to be busy, and never to be in playful mood. Days passed without even one of those gentle runs behind a bicycle to which Finn had grown accustomed; days during which no one ever spoke to Finn except at meal-times, and the home seemed strangely silent and deserted. Finn was always locked up at night, or he would have chosen that time for hunting expeditions. As it was, however, the long days were his own, and he grew to devote less and less time out of these days to the home life. He was not inclined, as his mother had been, to lie dozing and dreaming for hours together in the outside den. He would slip through the orchard, and over its gate to the open Downs; and there, roaming that country-side for hours at a stretch, he would hunt; only occasionally killing to eat, and for the greater part of his time hunting for the sheer pleasure of it. For so great a hound, he became wonderfully adept and cunning in the pursuit of the small creatures of the open; stalking them as silently, cautiously, and surely as a cat, and acquiring, day by day, more and more of that most distinguishing characteristic of the wild creatures: indomitable patience. Great fleetness and great strength were his by birth; tireless patience and cunning he learned in these lonely days beside the Sussex Downs; and learned them so well that his silent, shadowy great form became a very real terror to all the wild things of that district. There was, of course, no creature among them that could attempt for an instant to meet Finn in open combat; and as time went on, there were few who could successfully pit their cunning and their agility against those of the great hound.

There was one wild creature, however, in this district, who grew to know Finn well, and to fear him not at all; and this was a large male fox, born and bred in a copse not half a mile from Finn's home. To this strong and cunning fox, Finn appeared in the light of a provider of good things, and for long he waxed fat and lazy upon Finn's numerous kills, without the Wolfhound ever having suspected his existence. Then, late one autumn afternoon, Finn saw Reynard descend from a little wooded hillock and seize upon the half of a rabbit which the Wolfhound had left lying there in the valley, beside a little brook, where he had killed it. Like a flash, Finn wheeled and gave chase; but the fox disdained even to drop his prize, and, by reason rather of his superior woodcraft, and his knowledge of every leaf and twig in that country-side, than of his fleetness, Reynard was the winner of the long race that followed.

This interested Finn more than anything that had happened for a long while. His trailing faculties, though they had been greatly developed of late, were nothing like so keen as those of a foxhound, or a pointer, or a setter; his race having always done their hunting by sight and sheer fleetness. But, as against that, the big fox had grown very lazy of late. He had done practically no hunting at all, preferring to trail Finn on his hunting expeditions, and fare sumptuously upon Finn's leavings. As it happened, this particular fox had never been hunted, and during a big slice of his life he had been wont to regard himself as the unquestioned monarch of that country-side; so far as its wild life went. He did not realize, even after Finn's first pursuit of him, that he had made a powerful enemy, and one in whom the determination to run him down had already taken firm root.

And now, for days, Finn's great interest in life was the pursuit of the big fox. For the rest, he only killed rabbits and the like when they came in his way; and, even so, he supplied ample food for the cunning fox. At first, Finn spent his time largely in looking for his new quarry, and then giving forthright chase. But gradually he learned that the fox was his master in this work, if only by reason of its comparative smallness, which enabled it to twist and double through places which were impenetrable to the great hound who followed. So Finn fell back upon his recently acquired cunning. He killed a rabbit, and left three-quarters of its carcase in an exposed, open place, while he himself crawled into a clump of brush and lay waiting, with eager, watchful eyes peering through the leaves. Presently, Reynard approached from some undergrowth a hundred yards away on the other side of the kill. But he did not approach very nearly. His sharp, sensitive nose wrinkled and pointed skyward for a moment, and then, as the breeze gave him Finn's scent, he turned promptly round and trotted back to covert.

Finn gave an immense amount of reflection to this, and two days later, his cunning evolved a very much cleverer scheme. He killed another rabbit, and placed it in a convenient run-way of the big fox's. Then he trotted off on the lee side of the kill, and quietly made towards his entrance to the orchard at home. But, instead of entering the orchard, he circled again, and, keeping religiously to leeward of his track, flew at great speed for the far end of the run-way in which he had left his kill. When Reynard discovered the rabbit, he merely glanced at it, and then quietly took up Finn's trail, to make sure of the Wolfhound's whereabouts. This trail he followed to a point that was as near as he cared to venture to the orchard fence. Then, satisfied that Finn had gone home, he trotted back to where the kill lay, being naturally to windward all the while of Finn's second trail.



Arrived in the run-way, Reynard picked up the dead rabbit and slung it carelessly across his shoulder. Then he trotted leisurely down the run-way toward his own earth, where he meant to feast in security and comfort. At the end of the run-way came a wide, open stretch of waste land, on the far side of which lay the track to Reynard's cave. Well hidden by the bushes at the end of the run-way, on its lee side, crouched Finn, every nerve tensely alert. He waited till Reynard was well clear of the run-way and fairly started across the open, and then he sprang out from the place of his concealment, his leap carrying him to within a yard of Reynard's flank. The insolence of good and easy living, and long mastery over the creatures that dwelt about him, led the fox into perhaps two seconds of indecision; and those two seconds cost him dear. There was no indecision about his flight, of course, and almost before Finn's feet touched the ground, the fox was stretched to the full stride of his top gait. The indecision was in the matter of relinquishing his booty; and that it was which cost the fox dear by reducing his starting speed. At the end of his fourth stride, he dropped the rabbit; but at the end of his fifth stride the Wolfhound was abreast of him, with neck bent sideways, and jaws stretched wide. Less than a second later, Finn's great jaws closed upon the back of the fox's shoulders; and that was where Finn made his first mistake. He was, for all his recent experience, quite new to the killing of such a quarry as the fox, who himself was easily able, and big and strong enough for the killing of such prey as Finn had learned to hunt. The shoulders of a hare or a rabbit were easily smashed between Finn's jaws; but the shoulders of the big fox, with their mat of dense fur, were far otherwise. Finn's teeth sank deep, but they broke no bones.

Nevertheless, his weight and the force of the impact between the two, brought Reynard to earth, where he rolled smartly on his back, slashing at Finn's fore-arm with his sharp white fangs, and snarling ferociously. In the same instant almost, the fox was on his feet, but before he could leap away, Finn's jaws descended on the back of his neck, gripping him like a vice, and shaking him almost as a terrier shakes a rat. With a desperate squirm the fox wriggled earthward from this terrible grip, and, as Finn drew breath, stabbing at the fox with one fore-paw, as he would have stabbed at a still living rabbit, to hold it, Reynard's fangs cut deeply into the loose skin of his chest. As he slashed, the fox, after the manner of his kind, leaped clear. But he had no time to run before Finn was upon him, with a roar of awakened fury. The fox dodged and slashed again, drawing blood from the fleshy part of Finn's fore-arm. Reynard fought like a wolf, or a light-weight boxer; and after this last slash, he wheeled like lightning and flew for cover. But the Wolfhound's fighting blood was boiling in him now, and Finn swept down upon the fox, exactly as a greyhound sweeps upon a hare. When his great jaws closed upon the fox's neck this time, it was to kill. Reynard squirmed valiantly; but Finn flung him on his back, and took new hold upon his throat. The fox's two hind-feet, drawn well up, scored down Finn's belly like the feet of a lynx; but it was Reynard's last movement, for, as he made it, Finn's long fangs met in his jugular, and his warm blood streamed upon the ground.

That was Finn's first big kill, and it marked an epoch in his development, leaving active in him a newly-wakened instinct of fierceness which had been foreign to his family for several generations. If the big fox could have kept clear of Finn for but two more days he would have saved his life; and, in any case, such killings as Finn's had been during the past month or so could hardly have continued much longer in that country-side without attracting human attention, the result of which might have been awkward for the Wolfhound. As it was, the superficial wounds the fox had inflicted upon him were never noticed by the Master or the Mistress of the Kennels, by reason of other happenings in which Finn also was concerned. His wounds were not deep, his coat was dense, and Finn doctored himself effectively with his own tongue.

Early on the morning after his successful hunting of the fox, Finn found several strange men about the house and grounds. The Master had arrived home late on the previous evening, unconscious, not alone of Finn's fox-hunting, but of his foraging habits generally; ignorant even of the fact that his one remaining Wolfhound ever left the premises, unless with the Mistress of the Kennels. It was a very large slice of Finn's life during the last few months that was unknown to his human friends. All through this day Finn pottered about the house and garden and the outside den, observing with curiosity the behaviour of the strange men who wore green aprons. It seemed to Finn that these men were bent upon turning the whole place upside down. The game they played seemed to consist of laboriously lifting heavy articles of furniture, carrying them about, and putting them down again, in what seemed to Finn a confused and pointless manner. Evening found the Wolfhound scarcely more comfortable than his human friends, who were evidently in very poor spirits. They were moved by conscious regret, and by conscious anxiety regarding the future. Finn was moved by conscious discomfort, and vague mental stirrings of impending trouble of some sort. When he slept, he dreamed of Matey; this time in the form of a huge fox, whose jaws slashed the air in the most fearsome manner. (Up till the previous day, Finn had hunted and killed innumerable wild creatures, but never fought with one.)

The next day was one of even less comfort and more bewilderment. In addition to the men with green aprons and strongly vocal boots, there was quite a large assemblage of other people, who strode about through the rooms of the little house, and in its garden, stable, and outside den, as though the place belonged to them, and they were rather disgusted with it. Later on, however, these noisy men-folk (there were women among them, too) drew together in one of the front rooms of the house, and made all sorts of—to Finn—meaningless noises, while one among them stood upon a kitchen-chair and occasionally smote the top of a salt-box with a small white hammer, before proceeding to call forth more meaningless noises from the other people. Finn prowled about in a most unhappy mood, and once, the Mistress of the Kennels led him into an empty bedroom, and knelt down on the floor and cried over him, while he endeavoured to lick her face, whimpering the while, to show his sympathy. Later on, the people flocked out into the den, and made more vain noises there; and then to the stable. Finally, they streamed out into the orchard, and made stupid remarks about the kennels there; and at long last they went away, leaving the green-aproned men in undisputed possession, and free to throw furniture about, and pile it on carts in the road, as they chose.

Then the Master and the Mistress and Finn went away together to the station, saying nothing, and looking very unhappy. Finn carried his tail so low that it dragged, and its black tip picked up mud from the wet road, upon which a fine autumnal drizzle had begun to fall. That night, and for two subsequent nights, Finn lived unhappily in a poky London lodging with his friends; and on the third day, he walked with the Master to a railway station, while the Mistress of the Kennels drove in a cab with a mountain of baggage. Finn was not allowed in the carriage with his friends, but had to travel in a van full of boxes and bags, with a rough but amiable man whose coat had shiny buttons, and whose attitude toward Finn was one of respectful and distant deference.

Some time before this, Finn had come to the conclusion that they were all going to a Dog Show; and, remembering vividly a Great Dane who had snarled viciously at him in the last show he had visited during the middle of the summer (when, as on each other occasion of his being exhibited, he had been awarded first prize in each class for which he was eligible), he decided that he would adopt a killing demeanour and stand no nonsense at all. Four or five months ago, at the time of this last show, the Dane's fang-bearing snarl had made him shudder. To-day he would have rather welcomed it than otherwise, and returned it with interest.

After walking some fifty or sixty yards from the train, among a great crowd of people and baggage, Finn, with the Master, entered what he supposed was the show building. The chief reason, by the way, of his conviction that he was bound for a show, lay in the fact that a long, bright steel chain was attached to his best green collar, with its brass name-plate bearing Finn's name and the Master's. The odd thing about this show building, however, was that there appeared to be only two other dogs in it, besides Finn; one a collie, and one an Irish terrier, whose head, so far as its shape went, was a tiny miniature of Finn's own head. In colour, however, the terrier reminded him rather of the big fox he had slain. Finn found these two dogs—both, of course, unimportant small fry, from his lofty standpoint—each chained to the front part of a barrel half filled with straw; and that seemed to the Wolfhound an extremely odd kind of show bench. But the bed to which Finn himself was chained was a good deal more like the kind he had seen before at shows, in that it was a flat bench, well strawed, and a good foot above the floor level; but it had solid wooden sides and roof, so that, while he lay on it, Finn could not see the other dogs, unless by craning his head round the corner. And before he left, the Master fixed up some wirework before the bench, so as to shut Finn in, while on the inside of that network a notice was hung, for the benefit of passers-by, most of whom read the notice aloud, until Finn was thoroughly tired of hearing it. It ran like this: "Warning! Do not touch!"

After arranging this matter of the network, the Master disappeared, with a hurried wave of his hand in Finn's direction, and a "Wait there, old man!" a rather unnecessary request Finn may have thought, seeing that he was securely chained.

Upon the whole, Finn decided that this was the most curious show he had visited. He heard no barking, beyond an occasional yap from the Irish terrier, and among the innumerable people who passed the front of his bench, the majority seemed to be carrying bags or bundles, and none seemed to have come there to see dogs. After a time Finn tired of the whole thing and, curling up on his bench, went to sleep. He slept and waked, and slept and waked again, for what seemed a very long time; and then the Master came to see him, with the Mistress of the Kennels. He was taken down from his bench and allowed to stroll to and fro for a few minutes, though not for any distance. The Master knew that cleanly habits had long since become second nature with all the Wolfhounds of his breeding, and that it would have been cruel to have left Finn on his bench for very long stretches of time. Supper was given Finn, on the floor near his bench, and fresh water was placed in his dish in the front corner of the bed. Then he was chained up again, and the Master told him to be a good Finn boy, and go to sleep till the next morning.

Days passed, all manner of odd things happened, and Finn saw many strange sights before he actually realized that he was not at a Dog Show at all, but a passenger aboard a great ocean liner. And even then, when a good part of the ship had become quite familiar to him, the Wolfhound did not know, of course, that they were all bound to the other side of the world, that their passages were booked for Australia, and that this great steamer, which had once belonged to the Atlantic service, was now given over entirely to passengers of one class, who were travelling at a uniform and cheap rate to the Antipodes.



CHAPTER XI

A SEA CHANGE

That long sea voyage was a strange, instructive experience for Finn. The preceding few months had made for rapid development upon his wilder side; they had taught him much as a hound and a hunter. This voyage developed his personality, his character, the central something that was Finn, and that differentiated him from other Irish Wolfhounds. Above all, the voyage brought great development in Finn in the matter of his relations with the Master and the Mistress of the Kennels.

The first three or four days of the passage did, as an experience, resemble a Dog Show, in that Finn spent almost the whole time on his bench, and was only taken down for a few minutes at a time. Later on, however, when things and people had settled down into their places on board the big liner, the Master obtained permission to give Finn a good deal more freedom, on the understanding that he held himself responsible for the Wolfhound's good behaviour. This meant that, by day and night, Finn was given his liberty for hours together; but during the whole of that time he was never out of the sight of one or other of his two friends, and, the Mistress not being a good sailor, it meant that Finn was nearly always with the Master. This, again, meant a marked change in Finn's ways of life, and a change which affected his character materially. Here was no orchard through which he could wander off to the open country, there to roam and hunt alone, and out of touch with humans. Now, whether moving about or at rest, Finn was continuously within hearing and sight of the Master, and practically always within touch of him.

One result of all this was that Finn became greatly humanised. He grew to understand far more of the Master's speech than he had ever understood before; he came to depend greatly upon the Master's company and kindly intercourse with him. With this came the development of an enduring and conscious love of the Master, which filled Finn's mind and heart through all these warm and lazy days, and entirely dominated his environment. With regard to other people, he was a great deal more reserved than he had been in the old days before he met Matey, and before he took to hunting. He permitted their attentions courteously and, in the case of children, he would lend himself to their desires readily enough. But he never invited attention from any one, excepting the Master; and, whereas he would settle down comfortably to doze on the sun-bathed deck, with his muzzle resting on the Master's feet, he never volunteered to touch other people, though he accepted their caresses good-humouredly enough.

Hitherto, putting aside the exuberant demonstrativeness of early puppyhood, this had been Finn's attitude toward all humans, including even the Master. He had liked the Master and the Mistress; he had trusted them, and he had been deeply thankful to find them again after his escapade with Matey; but it could hardly have been said that he had loved them, in the sense, for example, that his mother had loved the Master, or that he himself loved the Master now; now that he would lie for hours on his bench, waiting, watching, and listening for the sound of the footfall which he easily distinguished from among the many that he heard. In short, what had been no more than friendly affection and confidence, grew now to personal attachment, to a feeling which could fairly be called love, seeing that it comprised intense and jealous devotion, and a contentedness which approached rapture, in the touch and presence and society of one person. When they sat on the deck together at night, the Master and Finn, under the gorgeous sky which so often favours Pacific travellers by sea, the Wolfhound's intercourse with the man stopped only just short of articulation, and went far beyond the normal companionship of man and dog.

For instance, the Master would sometimes growl out low remarks to Finn about the Old Country, about Tara, and the house beside the Sussex Downs; and Finn understood practically every word he said on those occasions. And then the Master might wind up by stroking his head in a heavy, lingering way that Finn loved, and saying—

"Ah, well, Finn boy; there's other good places in the world, too. The Australian bush is a mighty big hunting ground, I can tell you. We'll have some good times there, Finn boy; rabbits, and wallabies, and kangaroos, Finn; great sport for my big Wolfhound and me. And maybe we'll get a good home together out there before long, old man; might even strike it rich, somehow, and go back to the Downs again, and do the thing in real solid style, my Finn, with big kennels and half a score of hounds for you to lord it over!"

And at such times, Finn's inability to speak after the human fashion was no particular bar between them. Understanding was so clearly voiced in his dark, glistening eyes, in the eager thrust of his wet, cool muzzle, and sometimes, for emphasis, in the compelling weight of his great arm, as he laid it, with a pulling pressure, over the Master's shoulder. In addition to all this, he would occasionally whimper, or make low growling noises, while he pawed the Master's shoulder; and these sounds said as plainly as any words could, and perhaps more emphatically: "I love you. I understand; and I love you, Master. It's you and me, for always; and nothing else matters, wherever we may be!"

And then the Master would say something about the Mistress of the Kennels, and Finn would beat the deck with his thirty-inch tail, which was as thick and strong at its roots as a man's arm. Or perhaps, if the weather were calm as well as fine, the Mistress herself would come along and join them, seated in a low deck chair; and then, though Finn's eyes would take on a momentarily anxious look if her hand touched the Master, he would yet be very happy, stretched out between them, with the half of one dark eye to spare for one of them, and his whole big heart shining out upon the Master in the gaze which held his head always turned the one way.

Just as something always seems to strike a balance in the affairs of men-folk, so the gods who watch over the affairs of Finn's kind are wont to provide compensations. For months, before this sea voyage, Finn's whole being had been absorbed by the interests of the half-tame wild, in the country beside the Sussex Downs. Dreaming and waking, the hunt had held his thoughts, and solitary roaming had been his delight. Here aboard the great steamer he was suddenly and completely cut off from all these things; but something else had come to take possession of his active nature, his busy mind, his growing heart; and the great love of the Master which grew in him now effectually shut out anything like regret for the old life, by making the new life all-sufficing and more compact of interest, of satisfying fullness, than ever the home life had been at its best.

If it had not been for this remarkable development of Finn's character which was brought about by his confinement on board a ship with the Master, he would never have played the part he did in what was really the most important event of his life up till this time; and one, too, which taught the Master a good deal, regarding his own relationship to the great Wolfhound he had bred. It all happened on a Sunday morning when, the weather being very hot, the captain held service on the upper deck, under awnings, of course. Half a dozen children were allowed, during the latter part of the service, to withdraw, and play quietly by themselves, twenty yards away from the last row of chairs occupied by the congregation. At one end of this last row the Master sat, with Finn beside him on the deck. Among the children, one, a curly-headed rascal of a boy named Tim, aged eight, was everybody's favourite, and the leader of the rest in most kinds of mischief. Exactly how he managed it was never rightly understood, but when the piercing sound of a childish scream smote upon the Master's ears, through the droning periods of the captain's read sermon, Tim was in mid-air, half-way between the ship's rail and the sea, and the other children were staring, horror-stricken, at the place he had occupied a moment before, with his chubby arms about the stem of a boat's davit, and his brown legs astride the rail.

The Master was a man given to acting swiftly upon impulse. Finn had leaped to his feet at sound of the scream. The Master followed on the instant, and reached the ship's side within a second or two of Finn's arrival there. Finn's muzzle was thrust out between the white rails, and he saw the tiny figure of Tim in the smoothly eddying water a little abaft of the ship's beam. The Master saw it, too, and, turning, with one urgent hand on Finn's neck, he shouted—

"Over and fetch him, Finn! Over boy! Over!"

There was no mistaking his meaning. Finn had instant understanding of that. But Finn was no water dog. The sea was very far below. He let out two short nasal whimpers. The Master swung one arm excitedly.

"Over, boy! Fetch Tim! Over, then!"

Then the growing love of the past few weeks spoke strongly in Finn, overriding instinct in him, and, with a whining sort of bark of protest against the order his new love forced him to obey, he leaped over the white rail, and down, down, down through five-and-thirty feet of space into the smooth, blue sea, where it swirled and rippled past the high steel walls of the ship.

This exhausted the Master's first impulse. Instantly then there flashed through his mind knowledge of the fact that Finn was no water dog; that he had never been trained to fetch from the water, or to handle human beings gently with his teeth. The Master had never even seen Finn swim. That was a great love, a wonderful trust which had shone out from Finn's eyes, when, instinct protesting in his whining bark, he had leaped the rail in obedience to orders given on the impulse, and without thought. Would Finn be able to help the child who had often played with him about the deck? And how if that whining bark were a last good-bye?

In the next moment the Master acted on his second impulse, regardless of the shouts he heard behind him. His shoes and coat were shed from him in a moment, and he, too, leaped the rail, reaching the warm, blue water feet first, and striking out at once towards Finn and the child. As a swimmer his powers were not at all above the average.

For all his inexperience of the water Finn was a quicker swimmer than the Master, and he reached little Tim within a very few seconds, and seized the youngster firmly between his great jaws, while turning in the water towards the ship he had left. Finn was careful enough to prevent his teeth from injuring the child; there was no more fear of his doing that than of his biting the hand of a man who caressed him. But he was no trained life-saver, and it did not occur to him to notice which side up the child was held. Also, a few seconds later, he caught sight of the Master in the water, and that made him loose his hold of Tim, in his haste to reach one whose claim upon him he regarded as infinitely greater. This was only momentary, however. Some instinct told him he must not leave undone the task he had been set, and with a swift movement he plucked the child to him again, and exerted all his great strength to reach the Master. This time little Tim's face was uppermost; but his small arms hung limply and helplessly at right angles from his body.

It was only a matter of seconds now till Finn and the Master met in the water. The Master seized little Tim, and Finn seized the Master, by one arm.

"Down, boy! Get down, Finn!" shouted the Master; and Finn obediently loosed his hold, and swam anxiously round and round his friend in short circles, while the Master trod water, and held Tim high above him, head down, and body bent in the middle.

It was less than three minutes later that the second officer of the liner shouted, "Way enough!" and a big white lifeboat slid past the Master's shoulder. The second officer leaned far out, and snatched little curly-headed Tim from the Master's hands, passing him straight to the waiting arms of another officer, the ship's surgeon.

"Help the dog in!" shouted the Master, as two sailorly hands reached out toward himself. But Finn was watchfully circling behind him. It was rather an undertaking getting the great Wolfhound into the lifeboat; but it was presently accomplished, the Master thrusting behind, and two men in the boat tugging in front. Tim was lying on his face on the doctor's knees, and gasping his way back to life under a vigorous kneading treatment. Whatever it may have been for the man and the Wolfhound, it had undoubtedly been a close call for the child. There were great rejoicings on the big Australian liner during the rest of that sunshiny Sunday, and you may imagine that Finn came in for a good deal of flattering attention. But he paid small heed to this. What did make his heart swell within him, till his great chest seemed scarcely big enough to hold it, was the little talk he had with the Master before they boarded the ship from the lifeboat. The Master had one dripping arm about Finn's wet shoulder, and held it there with a warm pressure, while he muttered certain matters in Finn's right ear which sent hot blood pumping into the Wolfhound's heart. The Master knew that Finn had done a big thing for love of him that day, and he would never forget it. Finn would have leaped overboard fifty times to earn again that pressure about his shoulder, and that low murmur of loving commendation in his ear. The half-hysterical caresses of Tim's mother, and the admiring attention of the whole ship's company were trifles indeed after this.

The voyage to Australia took Finn into a new world in more senses than one. Nature and the Master had endowed him richly before. This voyage endowed him with the gift of true love, which he had not known before; and whereas he had come aboard that ship a very magnificent Wolfhound, he would leave it, the richer by something which would almost be called a soul, a personality developed by these long weeks of close intercourse with a man, and the final mental triumph which had ended in his successfully rebelling against the dominion of instinct, by reason of the completeness of his devotion to the Master.



CHAPTER XII

THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

If Finn had been transported on a magic carpet and in an instant of time, from England to that part of Australia in which he did eventually land, the first few months he spent in the land of the Southern Cross would have been a desperately unhappy time. As it was, he landed under the influence of six weeks of steady character development, his whole being dominated by the warm personal devotion to the Master which had taken the place with Finn of mere friendly affection. And that made all the difference in the world, in the matter of the great Wolfhound's first experience of the new land.

But it is a fact that it was not a very happy period for Finn. The intimate understanding he had acquired regarding the Master's moods and states of mind and spirits, gave him more than a dog's fair share of the burdens of that curious period. It was a bad time for the Master, and for that reason, quite apart from anything else, it was not a good time for Finn. Some of the evil happenings of that period Finn understood completely, and with regard to others again, all that he could understand was their unhappy effect upon his friends and himself. The first of them saluted Finn's friends before they left the ship, in the shape of news of the death, one week before this date, of the one man upon whom the Master had been relying for help in establishing himself in Australia. So that, instead of meeting with a warm welcome, Finn and his friends had to find quarters for themselves, and to spend days in the country without a friendly word from any one.

The man who had died, suddenly, was a bachelor, and a squatter on a large scale. His spacious country home was now in the hands of the representatives of the Crown, pending its disposal for the benefit of relatives in remote parts of the world who had never seen the man who made it. This meant that, instead of going up country on their arrival in Australia, the Master and the Mistress and Finn were obliged to find economical quarters for themselves in the city. It was a pleasant, sunny city enough, but no city would ever commend itself much to an Irish Wolfhound, and cheap town lodgings formed a poor substitute for the Sussex Downs for one of Finn's kind. And then, before the situation had ceased to be strange and unfamiliar, the Master was smitten with an illness which confined him to one room for several weeks, and kept the Mistress of the Kennels pretty constantly employed in tending him. If it had not been for his consciousness of the Master's trouble and weakness, Finn would have had no great fault to find with this period, for he was allowed to spend the greater part of his days and nights beside the bed, and within sight of the man he loved.

But after the Master's recovery came many weeks of anxiety and increasing depression, during which every sort of misfortune seemed to pursue Finn's friends, and they were obliged at length to move into a cheaper, smaller lodging, into which Finn was only admitted by those in authority upon sufferance; in which he had hardly room to turn and twist his great bulk. The Master's walks abroad at this time took him principally into offices and places of that sort, where Finn could not accompany him, and, if it had not been for the Mistress's good care, the Wolfhound's life would have been dreary indeed, and without any outdoor exercise. All these matters, however, Finn could have endured cheerfully enough, by reason of the content that filled his mind when the Master was by, and the anticipations that possessed him while he waited for the Master's return. But the thing that sapped Finn's spirits and vitality was his consciousness of the growing weight of unhappiness and anxiety and distress which possessed the Master. Finn knew by the manner in which his friend sat down when he entered the poor little lodging at night, that things had gone evilly during the day. The touch of his friend's hand on his head, languid and inert, told the Wolfhound much; and the nightly messages which reached his understanding were increasingly depressing. He did not understand the Master's explanations to the Mistress of how he had been swindled here, turned away in the other place, and misled by such and such a person. But he did realize very keenly the effects of these things, and the distress they produced.

But this little party of strangers in a strange land had not reached the end of the long train of misfortunes with which the new world tested them before making them free of its bounty. The climax of several long-drawn months of unhappiness came to them in the form of serious illness for the Mistress of the Kennels, which, for weeks, prevented the Master from seeking any further to better his fortunes. At the end of a month, in which the Master and Finn plumbed unsuspected deeps of misery, the Mistress, white and wan, and desperately shaky, left her bedroom for the tiny sitting-room which Finn could almost span when he stretched his mighty frame. (He measured seven feet six and a quarter inches now, from nose-tip to tail-tip; and when he stood absolutely erect he could just reach the top of a door six feet six inches high with his fore-paws.) And there the Mistress sat, and smiled weakly, as she bade the Master go out to take the air and walk with Finn. By her way of it, she was to be quite herself again within a few days, but a fortnight found her practically no stronger; and the doctor spoke plainly, almost angrily, of the necessity of change of air and scene. When the Master hinted at his inability to provide this, the doctor shrugged his well-clad shoulders.

"I can only tell you, my dear sir, that if the patient is to recover she must leave this place. A month up in the mountains would put her right, with a liberal diet, and comfortable quarters. The expense need not be great. I should say that, with care, twenty pounds might cover the whole thing."

It was then that, with a certain gruff abruptness, the Master informed the doctor, outside the door of the sitting-room, that his resources were reduced to less than half the amount mentioned, and that there were bills owing. The doctor looked grave for a moment, and then shrugged his shoulders again. As he was leaving he said—

"Why, you have a dog there that must eat as much as a man. I imagine you could sell him for twenty pounds. Indeed, there is a patient of my own who I am sure would pay that for so fine a hound."

"I dare say," said the Master sadly, "seeing that I refused a hundred guineas for him before he was fully grown. That is the finest Irish Wolfhound living, a full champion, and the most valuable dog of his breed in the world. But we could not part with Finn. He—— No, we could not sell Finn."

Again the young doctor shrugged his shoulders.

"Ah, well, that's your business, of course; but I have told you the patient will not recover in this place. If the dog is such a fine one as all that, perhaps you could get more for him; enough to set the patient on her feet, and establish yourself in some way. In fact, I think my friend would give more, if I were to ask him; he is one of the richest men in the city, and a great lover of animals."

The rest of that day proved the most miserable time that the Master and Finn had spent in Australia. But a pretence at cheerfulness had to be maintained until the Mistress had retired for the night; and then, for many hours, the Master sat before an empty fire-place, with Finn's great head resting on his knees, and one of his hands mechanically rubbing and stroking the Wolfhound's ears, while he thought, and thought, and found only greater sadness in his thinking. Finn felt plainly that a crisis had arrived, and he tried to show his agreement and understanding, when at long last, the Master rose from his comfortless wooden chair, saying sadly—

"I don't see what else a man can do, my Finn, boy; but—but it's hard."

Early next morning, before the Mistress appeared, the Master took a leash in his hand, and set out with Finn from the poor house that sheltered them, in the dingy quarter of the town where they lived. They walked for two miles through sunlit spacious streets, and then they came to the house of the doctor. The Master waited in the hall, and the doctor came to see him there, a finger napkin in his hands.

"Doctor," said the Master; "I want the address of that rich patient of yours who is fond of animals."

"Ah! Yes, I thought you would," answered the doctor. "Just step in here a moment, and I will give you a note for Mr. Sandbrook. If you are going there right away, you will certainly be sure of catching him in."

It was nearly an hour later that the Master and Finn reached the entrance to a beautiful garden, in the centre of which stood a big, picturesque house, with windows overlooking the sparkling waters of a great harbour. The house had only one storey above the ground floor, and its walls rambled over a large expanse of ground. All round the house, with its deep, shady verandahs, spread a host of ever-diminishing satellites, in the form of outbuildings of one kind and another; extensive stabling, coach-houses, wood and coal lodges, laundry, tool-sheds, workmen's living-rooms, and so forth.

The Master and Finn were kept waiting for some time, and were seated on the verandah when Mr. Sandbrook, the portly broker, merchant, and shipping agent, came to them. Finn was lying stretched at his full great length on the cedar-wood planks of the verandah, fore-legs far out before him, head carried high, his big, dark eyes fixed lovingly on the Master's face. Mr. Sandbrook was a good-natured, kindly soul, very prosperous and very vain, and little accustomed to deny himself anything which his quickly roaming little grey eyes desired. As these eyes of his fell upon Finn, they told him that this was the most magnificent dog he had ever seen; the handsomest dog in Australia; as indeed Finn was, easily, and without a doubt.

And then the merchant shook hands with the Master, and read the note from the doctor.

"I don't know, I'm sure, what made the doctor think I wanted another dog," he said; "but this is certainly a noble animal of yours, Mr.——er."

And then the Master showed him Finn's printed pedigree, with one or two newspaper descriptions of the Wolfhound, and a list of his championship honours, and other papers showing the Master's own connection with the Irish Wolfhound Club, and so forth. Mr. Sandbrook had already made up his mind that this dog must belong to him, however; he almost resented, in a good-humoured way, the fact that Finn had not belonged to him before. It seemed to him only right that the best should be his. But he was a business man, and he said—

"Of course, in this country no dogs have the sort of market value that you speak of this hound having in England. That would be regarded as absurd here. You understand that, I am sure."

"No price you could name, sir, would tempt me into parting with Finn; only dire necessity makes that possible. But, in this country or any other, Finn's value, not to me, but to the dog-buyer, would be a hundred guineas; and he would be very cheap at that. He would bring double that in England. But I will sell Finn to you, sir, for fifty guineas, because I am assured that he would have a good home with you—on one condition; and that is that you will let me have him again for, say, eighty guineas, if I can offer you that sum within a couple of years."

Mr. Sandbrook stuck out his chin, pulled down his white waistcoat, and said that he was afraid he could not make such an offer as that.

"You see, I am not a dealer in animals," he said. And the Master answered him rather sharply with: "Neither am I. You know why I am here, sir." "Yes, yes," said Mr. Sandbrook, stroking his whiskers with one plump white hand; "but you see, I don't want to feel that I have to give up a—er—a possession of my own whenever I may happen to be called upon to do so. No; I could never do that. But, I'll tell you what; I'll give you seventy guineas for the dog outright, if you like; but I assure you there's not another man in the country but would laugh at such a figure for a dog, for any dog. But I can see he's a fine fellow, and—er—I'll do that, if you like."

The Master shook his head.

Suddenly then, the Master turned upon the merchant, with a little upward movement of both hands.

"Sir, I would ask you to reconsider that," he said. "I would ask you please to try and think what this means to me. It is not a business proposition to me at all. I have told you what the doctor said. I cannot neglect that—dare not. But Finn—Finn is like a child of my own to me; like a young brother. Take him from me for thirty guineas, and promise to let me buy him back for sixty, if I can do it, in two years, in one, then. It—it would be a great kindness."

The merchant measured the Master with his little grey eyes. He was good-natured and very vain. He wanted to own that magnificent hound. No one else in the colony (it was not a State then) owned such a hound as that. He pictured Finn lying on a rug in the fine hall of his fine house, which he was told was equal to that of one of the stately homes of England. It had cost enough, he thought, with its armour, and its dim old portraits of men and women whose names he had never heard, though he was wont to refer to them vaguely as "family portraits, you know—the old folk at Home." And it was true enough they had come from the Old Country; through the dealer who supplied the armour. But then to have some one come and take his fine hound away from him—no, his dignity forbade the thought of such a thing. He turned half round on his heels.

"No," he said decisively; "I'm sorry, but I couldn't think of it. I'll make it seventy-five guineas for an outright sale, and that's my last word."

While the Master pondered over this, he had a vision of the Mistress of the Kennels, sitting, white and shaky, in the dismal little room on the far side of the city, waiting for the change which was to give her health again. He did hesitate for another minute; but he knew all the time that there was no alternative for him, and, watching the expression on his careworn face, the merchant, good-natured creature though he was, told himself that he had been a fool to offer that extra five guineas. It really was a preposterous price for a dog, he thought.

Five minutes later the merchant was making out a cheque in his study, and the Master was engaged in writing down a long list of details regarding Finn's dietary, and the sort of methods and system which should be followed to secure health and happiness to an Irish Wolfhound. The Master used great care over the preparation of these instructions. At least, he thought, Finn would be sure of a luxuriously good home.

"You don't think he'll run away, do you?" asked the merchant.

"No; I don't think he'll run away," said the Master. "I'll tell him he mustn't do that." The merchant stared. "But, for a week or two, you should be careful with him, and not leave him quite at large." The Master had already made it clear to the merchant that Finn was an aristocrat in all his habits. And now the merchant was anxious to get to his much-deferred breakfast, always a rather late function in that house; and the Master had no wish to prolong a situation of unmitigated wretchedness to himself.

They parted in the big hall, the Master and Finn, among the dim portraits of somebody's ancestors and the armour which came from a street near Regent's Park. Finn had been eyeing the Master with desperate anxiety for some time past. At frequent intervals he had nervously wagged his tail, and even made a pretence of gaiety, with jaws parted, and red tongue lolling. Now he sat down on his haunches on a big rug, because the Master told him to sit down. For a moment the Master dropped on one knee beside him, one arm about his shoulders. Finn gave an anxious little whine. His heart was thudding against his ribs; the prescient anxiety stirring within him affected him with a physical nausea.

"Good-bye, my old Finn, son! Good-bye, you—you Irish Hound! Now mark me, Finn, you stay here; you stay here—stay here, Finn!"

Such episodes are always suspect when seen in print. I have no wish to exaggerate by a hair's-breadth about Finn. His whole nature bade the Wolfhound follow his friend. The Master said, "Stay there!" And there was no mistaking his meaning. Finn crouched down. His body did not touch the floor; his weight rested on his outstretched legs, though his position appeared to be that of lying. There he crouched; but, as though the thing were too much for him to see as well as feel, he buried his muzzle, well over the eyes, between his fore-legs, just as he might have done if a strong light had dazzled him. It was obedience such as a great soldier could appreciate. Finn stayed there, hiding his face; but as the house-door closed behind the Master, a cry broke from Finn, a muffled cry, by reason of the position of his head; a cry that was part bark, part whine, and part groan; a cry that smote upon the Master's ears as he stepped out upon the gravel drive in the sunlight, with the biting, stinging pain, not of the parting, but of an accusation. There was a twinge of shame as well as grief in the Master's heart that day, though he knew well that what he had done was unavoidable. Still, there was the sense of shame, of treachery. Finn had been wonderfully human and close to him since they left England together.