Before noon of that day the Master was on his way to the mountains with the Mistress of the Kennels.



CHAPTER XIII

AN ADVENTURE BY NIGHT

For some thirty-six hours after his parting with the Master, Finn mourned silently in the big house, which overlooked the harbour and was filled with brand-new luxuries, including the brightly polished suits of mail and the carefully matured family portraits in the hall. If Finn had been a year younger the Sandbrook family would have learned from him the exact nature of the Irish Wolfhound howl, and they would not have liked it at all. But, though Finn would be capable of the howl as long as he lived, he had no mind to indulge in it now. His grief was too deep for that and too understanding; so understanding, indeed, that he was perfectly well aware that no howls of his would bring the Master back to him. It was true he had not understood the nature of the transaction which made him the property of the Australian merchant; but he had clearly understood that some grievous necessity had forced the Master to hand him over to Mr. Sandbrook, and that his, Finn's, duty to the Master involved remaining there in the house by the harbour.

But, as he saw it, his duty did not make it incumbent upon him to enter into communication with a whole pack of people who had nothing to do with the Master. In some dim way he comprehended that he owed deference and obedience to Mr. Sandbrook; that the Master had undertaken so much on his behalf; but he had no wish to become familiar with the Sandbrook household; and the consequence was that the daughters, and the servants—there were no sons at home—and the lady of the house, while they admitted the magnificence of the new acquisition's appearance, agreed in pronouncing him a rather sulky animal. They showered caresses and foolish remarks upon him, and he lay with his grey-black muzzle resting on outstretched fore-legs, staring through them all at the door by which the Master had disappeared. The only sign he would give of consciousness of the presence of these other people, was in turning his head away from them when they touched his muzzle. Once, when the younger daughter of the house went so far as to sit down beside Finn, and bend her head close down to his, he submitted courteously, though his nose wrinkled with annoyance, until the young lady raised her head; and then, very gently, lie rose, walked away from her to the mat beside the door, and lay down there, with his nose close to the spot on which the Master's feet had last rested in that house.

Finn was taken out in the garden two or three times on a leash; but he had no thought of escape. The Master had left him, and bade him stay there; and his heart was empty and desolate within him. Now and again his dark eyes filled with moisture, and the sadness of his face was so wonderfully striking as to impress the Misses Sandbrook, who, truth to tell, were not over and above intelligent, nor even very kind-hearted. They had not half the kindly good-nature of their vulgar parents, though they had much better taste, and a great variety of accomplishments.

Through the night Finn did not sleep, though he dozed occasionally for a few minutes at a time, dreaming fitfully, waking and dozing, of the Master and the Mistress, and the lodging they had shared of late. The whole of the next day he passed in the same employment, except that, in the afternoon, he had to go through the wearisome ceremony of being introduced to a number of strange ladies, not one among whom seemed from the smell of her clothes to have anything to do with the Master. He comported himself through this ordeal with dignity and patience, but, as one of the ladies said—"The dear darling, he does look so dreadfully sad and tired of everything, doesn't he?" To which Mrs. Sandbrook replied that this was just his "strangeness," and that he would soon get over it. She added that she did not object to this look of Finn's herself, he being such a regular a-ristocrat. It seemed to her in keeping with his general appearance, she said, and quite suggestive of the sort of ancient, ivy-covered mansion he had come from in the Old Country. The good lady drew upon her imagination, of course, in the matter of Finn's home in England. But she meant well, and Finn suffered her head-pattings more gladly than those of the rest of the household, recognizing clearly in her just about what there was to recognize, and rightly appreciating that simple character, as being of greater worth than the frothily pretentious nature of her daughters.

That night the master of the house announced that he thought Finn had quite settled in his new home, and that he would now take the Wolfhound for a stroll in the grounds without the leash. He did so, and when they had walked twice round a lawn and down an avenue, they came to the green gate by which Finn had first entered that place. Finn had been walking dejectedly, his head carried low and close to Mr. Sandbrook's legs, his mind still too full of mournful thoughts of his lost Master to permit of his inquiring closely into those smells and other details of his immediate surroundings, which would have interested him in ordinary circumstances.

Now, as his eyes fell upon the green gate, an overpowering desire to see the Master swept through his mind. He had no intention of running away from his new owner. His one thought was just to run down to the old lodging and see the Master again. His hind-quarters bent under him, and the next instant saw him neatly clearing the top of the five-foot gate, with never a thought of the consternation he left behind him in poor Mr. Sandbrook's mind.

Before the portly merchant had the gate fairly open, Finn had trotted thirty or forty yards down the moonlit road in the direction from which he had approached the house with the Master on the morning of the previous day. He paused once, and looked back at Mr. Sandbrook, in response to agitated cries and whistles; but, not being able to explain his precise object in going out in a manner that would have been comprehensible to the merchant, he decided that it would be better to get on with the matter in hand without delay. So he went forward again, and this time at an easy canter which took him out of earshot of Mr. Sandbrook in less than one minute.

When Finn arrived in the streets of the city he was more than a little confused, and once or twice took a wrong turning. But he always retraced his steps and found the right turning before going far, and in due course he arrived at the house in which he had lodged with his friends. Rising on his hind-feet, he pawed the front door vigorously. A few moments later the door was opened by the landlady, to whose utter astonishment Finn brushed hurriedly into the little passage and up the stairs to the door of the room the Master had used, where he paused, with one foot pressed against the closed door.

"Here, Sam!" cried the startled landlady, "you talk about your blessed menagerie, come an' look 'ere. My word, this'll surprise yer!"

The landlady's son, who had paid her a flying visit that day, appeared in the passage in his shirt sleeves, holding a small lamp. The landlady closed the front door, and together the two walked upstairs to where Finn sat, whining softly, and pawing at the closed door of what had been the Master's sitting-room.

"My bloomin' oath, what a dog!" exclaimed Sam, as his mother reached forward and opened the sitting-room door, leaving Finn free to plunge forward into the dark interior, which he did on the instant. In the next instant he was out again, and pawing at the opposite door, leading to the bedroom. This, too, was opened for him, and in another moment he had satisfied himself that neither room had been occupied by the Master or the Mistress for a considerable time. This was a grievous blow to Finn, and as he returned to the little landing between the two rooms, he sniffed despairingly at the landlady's skirt, and even nuzzled her rough hand, with a vague feeling that she might be able to produce his friends. Not that he had any serious purpose in this, however, for it was strongly borne in upon Finn now that he had lost his friends for good and all.

"Well, what jer think of 'im?" the landlady asked of her son.

Sam was a tall, loosely built, rather slouching fellow; a typical young Australian of a certain class; not unintelligent, rather lazy, given to drawl in his speech, and extremely self-centred. He had been eyeing Finn all this while with growing interest, and now he said—

"Is he savage?"

"Wouldn't hurt a sheep," replied the mother. "Wouldn't yer like to know where I got such a beauty?"

"No kid. He's not yours," said Sam.

"Well, I reckon he could be, if I wanted sech a great elephant. 'Is Master lodged 'ere these two months an' more, but 'e went off to the mountins yesterday with his sick Missis. Why, come to think of it, er course, that's what it is. 'Is Master's sole him, that's what 'e's done; and that's why 'e was able to pay me, an' the doctor, an' go off to the mountins yesterday. An' now the bloomin' dog's run away an' come back to look for 'im; that's what that is, you can take yer oath."

Sam spat reflectively on the little coloured door-mat. "Well, the dog's no use to you, mother," he said. "You can't do nothin' with him."

"I'm not so sure about that, Sam," replied the landlady thoughtfully. As a matter of fact, the idea of keeping Finn had not occurred to her for a moment, up till then. But hers was not an easy life; she was always short of money, and found it extremely difficult to worm anything out of this big son of hers during his rare visits to her. In fact, of late she had given up the attempt, so that his visits represented only an additional expense for her. "I don' know about that, Sam. I might keep 'im, an' watch out fer the reward. A dawg like that's worth money."

"Too bloomin' big an' clumsy to be worth much," said Sam disparagingly. "Clumsy" was no more applicable to Finn than it would be to a panther, and Sam was well aware of it. "Tell you what," he said, "I've got to be makin' for the station in half an hour, anyway. I'll take the dog out o' yer way, an' give you half a quid for him, if yer like. I shall lose on it, fer it's not likely the boss could make any use of 'im, anyway. But I'll chance the ducks this time, if yer like. You can't keep a bloomin' camel like that here."

But the landlady knew her son tolerably well, and he could not deceive her very much. When he left the house half an hour later he was leading Finn at the end of a rusty chain, and the poorer by twenty-five shillings than he had been an hour before. So Finn changed hands for the second time in forty-eight hours, once for seventy-five guineas, and once for twenty-five shillings; and upon this second occasion the transaction was a matter of complete indifference to him. He thought vaguely of returning to Mr. Sandbrook's house later on. In the meantime this young man seemed to want him to take a walk in another direction, and all ways were alike to Finn in his bitter disappointment over not finding the Master. He did not know that he was treading exactly the path the Master and the Mistress had trod on the previous clay, when leaving their lodging for the mountains. He only felt that he had now completely lost his friends, and that he was rather well-disposed than otherwise toward long-legged Sam, for the reason that Sam came from the house in which the Master had lodged.



CHAPTER XIV

THE SOUTHERN CROSS CIRCUS

The night which followed Finn's departure from his old lodging with Sam was the most peculiar that he had ever spent in his life, and, not even excepting the night in Matey's back-yard in Sussex, the most unrestful. It was the second consecutive night during which he went practically without sleep; but on this occasion it was not so much grief over his loss of the Master that kept him awake as the peculiar nature of the immediate surroundings.

In the first place, the greater part of the night was spent on a moving railway train; and, secondly, Finn's particular resting-place was a sort of wooden cage, sheathed in iron, and having another similar cage upon either side of it. In the compartment upon Finn's right were two native bears. These philosophical animals slept solidly all the time, and made no noise beyond a husky sort of snoring. But they had a pronounced odour which penetrated Finn's compartment through a grating near its roof; and this odour was peculiarly disturbing to the Wolfhound. In the cage on Finn's left was a full-grown, elderly, and sour-tempered Bengal tiger, who had sore places under his elbows, and other troubles which made him excessively irritable, and a bad sleeper. The tiger also had a pronounced odour; and it was much more disturbing to Finn than that of the philosophical little native bears. In fact, it kept the wiry hair over Finn's shoulders in a state of continual agitation and his silky ears in a restlessly upright position, with only their soft tips drooping. Sometimes, when the train jolted, the tiger would roll heavily against the iron-sheathed partition between his abode and Finn's, and then Finn would spring to his feet, against the far side of the compartment, every hair on his body erect, his lips drawn right back from the pearl-white fangs they usually sheltered, his sensitive nostrils deeply serrated, and all the forgotten fierceness of bygone generations of Wolfhound warriors and killers concentrated in his long-drawn snarl of resentment and of warning threat.

It may be imagined, then, that for Finn the night was even less restful than the one he spent in Mr. Sandbrook's house. The smells and sounds about him strained every nerve in the Wolfhound's body to singing point, even as a prolonged gale strains the cordage of a ship that flies before it through a heavy sea. They penetrated farther into the pulsing entity that was Finn than even his experience with Matey, or his hunting and killing of the fox beside the Sussex Downs. They stirred latent instincts which came to him from farther back in the long line of his ancestry; from just how far back one could not say, but it may well be that they came from a dim period, beyond all the generations of wolf-hunting and, earlier, of man-fighting in Ireland, when forbears of Finn's had been pitted against lions and tigers and bears, as well as Saxons, in Roman arenas. Again, it might be that that reputed Thibetan ancestor played his part in endowing Finn with the hitherto unsuspected instincts which stirred within him now, changing his aspect from its usual courtly dignity and grace to lip-dropping ferocity, and fierce, forbidding wrath. It was curious, the manner in which the play of these instincts affected Finn's very shape, giving to his massive depth of chest a suggestion of the hyaena, to his head a marked suggestion of the wolf, and to his drooping hind-quarters more than a hint of the lion. The facts that the hair along his spine stood erect like wire, and that his exposed fangs and updrawn lips changed his whole facial aspect, had a good deal to do with the alterations wrought in his shape by the curious position in which he found himself this night. A wiser man than Sam would have refrained from putting Finn in this predicament, and that more especially while he was still a stranger to the great hound. But Sam had been invited to join a party of his companions who were supplied with euchre cards and a bottle of whisky, and, as he told himself, he "couldn't be bothered with the bloomin' dawg!"

Sam rather regretted his carelessness when he came to release Finn next morning. Since the small hours, the part of the train in which Sam had travelled had been lying in a siding, close to a little mountain station. And now the different wagons, including that containing Finn and the tiger and the bears, with a lot of paraphernalia, were being swung out upon the ground, preparatory to being drawn by road to the neighbouring town. At this stage Sam had intended to take Finn out to be inspected by his employer, and, if fortune willed it, sold to that gentleman for what Sam considered a handsome figure, say, fifteen or twenty pounds.

Sam was one of the underlings employed by Rutherford's famous Southern Cross travelling circus; and his idea was that Finn would be found a suitable and welcome addition to the menagerie of performing animals attached to that popular institution. But when Sam came to look at Finn by daylight, and to note the extreme fierceness of the Wolfhound's mien—brought about entirely by his own stupidity in locking the hound up beside a tiger and two bears—his heart failed him in the matter of releasing his prize, and he decided to wait until the camp had been formed, and things had settled down a little. That cowardly decision of Sam's affected the whole of Finn's future life.

The process of transferring his cage to the road, and travelling along that road, which was in reality no better than a very rough mountain track and exceedingly bumpy, worked old Killer, as the tiger was ominously called, into a frenzy of wrath, the which was by no means softened by the removal of the outer side of his cage, in order that the casual passer-by might observe his ferocity through the inner iron bars. Now the tiger's frenzy meant something very like frenzy for Finn. When the tiger snarled, and thrashed the inner side of his cage with his great tail, Finn's snarl became a fierce, growling bark; his fore-legs stiffened, like the erect hair along his backbone, his white fangs were all exposed, and his aspect became truly terrifying. Saliva began to collect at the corners of his long mouth; his great wrath and unreasoning, instinctive fierceness and resentment made him look twice his actual size; and altogether it may be admitted that when Sam came to investigate, after the camp had been formed, Finn truly was, to all appearances, a fearsome and terrifying creature. His snarls and growls waked fury in the breast of the irritable old tiger, who was not accustomed to hear threats or warnings from any of his neighbours, he being the only large carnivorous animal in the show, and, in consequence, he threw himself against the partition between Finn's cage and his own, snarling ferociously. This put the strength of centuries of hunting and fighting courage and fierceness into Finn's replies, and left the Wolfhound, to all outward seeming, a more formidable wild beast than the tiger himself.

Sam marvelled at his own courage in having led this monster through the streets, and told himself that nothing would induce him to be such a fool as to take Finn out of the cage. His mother had given him both Finn's name and the name of the breed, but Sam had never before heard of an Irish Wolfhound, and, looking now at Finn's gleaming fangs and foamy lips, all that he recalled of the name was "Irish Wolf." It was thus that Finn was presented to the great John L. Rutherford himself, the proprietor of the circus.

"He's the Giant Irish Wolf, boss," said Sam, "and the only one in the world, as I'm told. I bought him cheap, an' I got him into that cage single-handed, I did; an' now I'll sell him to you cheap, boss, if you'll buy him. If you don't want him, he goes to Smart's manager, who offered me twenty-five quid for him, as he stood last night."

"Smart's" was the opposition circus; but the rest of Sam's remarks were imagination for the most part, based upon his desire to make a good sale of Finn, his cowardly fear of handling the now infuriated hound, his ignorance, and a natural wish to afford an explanation, a plausible and creditable explanation, of the liberty he had taken in appropriating the empty cage. As a matter of fact, the great John L. Rutherford experienced quite a thrill of satisfaction when his eyes lighted upon the raging Wolfhound. He had lost his one lion from disease some weeks previously, and felt that the menagerie lacked attractiveness in the way of fierce-looking and bloodthirsty creatures. Like Sam, he had never even heard of an Irish Wolfhound, or seen a dog of any breed who approached Finn in the matter of height and length and lissom strength.

From the point of view of one who regarded him as a wild beast, and was without knowledge of the tragic chance which had made so gallant and docile a creature appear in the guise of a wild beast, Finn did actually present both an awe-inspiring and a magnificent spectacle at this moment. His cage was seven feet high, yet at one moment Finn's fore-paws came within a few inches of touching its roof, as he plunged erect and snarling against the partition which separated him from the growling and spitting tiger. The next moment saw him crouched in the far corner of the cage, as though for a spring, his fore-legs extended, rigid as the iron bars that enclosed him, his black eyes blazing fire and fury, his huge, naked jaws parted to admit of a snarl of terrifying ferocity, his whole great bulk twitching and trembling from the mixture of rage, bewilderment, fear, and wild killing passion with which his neighbours and his amazing situation filled him. It was an amazing situation for such a creature, reared as Finn had been reared, and, withal, having behind him the lordly fighting blood of fifteen centuries of Irish Wolfhound history.

"Well, Sam, he sure is a dandy wolf," said the astonished Mr. John L. Rutherford, who hailed, men said, from San Francisco. "I'd just like to know who you got him from, and how you got him aboard the train last night."

Sam began to feel that he really was a very fine fellow, and one who had accomplished great things.

"Well, I'll tell ye, boss; I bought him from a wild Irishman named O'Flaherty, who landed yesterday from the steamer, Prince Rupert, yer know; and I brought him to the train in a zinc-lined packin'-case with iron bars to it, which I sold to a bummer in the goods-yard for a bob." Sam did not mention at the same time that he had flung away the brand-new collar Finn had worn, with Mr. Sandbrook's name upon it. "Yes, I got him into that cage single-handed, boss; but I reckon it'll take the Professor all he knows to handle the brute." "The Professor" was the world-renowned Professor Claude Damarel, lion-tamer and performer with wild beasts, known sometimes in private life as Clem Smith.

"Giant Irish Wolf, you say," mused John L. Rutherford, who knew the world tolerably well between Chicago and San Francisco, and in the continent of Australia, but nowhere else. He could both read and write, but his favourite literature was the Police Gazette, and for other writing than his signature he preferred where possible to employ some one else, because it was work which made him perspire copiously. It also made his lower lip droop, even when he signed his name, and altogether was a laborious business. "Well, he's certainly a giant right enough; big as any two wolves I ever see. My! He must stand a yard at the shoulder." Which he did, and at that moment his hackles were giving him another three inches, and his rage was giving him the effect of another foot all round. "What figure have you got the gall to ask for him, Sam?"

"Well, I'm only askin' a fiver for meself out've him, boss; so I'll take twenty down."

"You will, eh? Why, what a generous son of a gun you are, Sam! I should've thought twenty would've given you three fivers profit."

"What, an' him the only Irish Wolf in all the world, boss! Why he'll be the draw of the show inside of a week. See him jump, now! Look at the devil! Strike me! He is a dandy from way back, boss. How'll the Giant Wolf figure on the bills, boss? Why I believe Smart's man'd rise to thirty for him, sure."

"Well, Sam, we won't quarrel for a pound or two. It was smart of ye to get the beast, an' you shall have fifteen for him, though ten's his price; an' if the Professor makes a star of him, why you'll get a rise, my boy. Say, touch him up with that stick there, an' see how he takes it."

Sam thrust a stave in between the bars of Finn's cage, where they adjoined those of the tiger's place, and prodded the Wolfhound's side as he stood erect. The thing seemed to come from the tiger's cage, and Finn was upon it like a whirlwind, his fangs sinking far into the tough wood, till it cracked again.

"Well, say," said the boss, with warm admiration, "if he ain't two ends an' the middle of a jim-dandy rustler from 'way back, you can search me! Say, Sam, cut along an' find the Professor. Tell him I'd like to see him right here."

The great barred cage, with its three divisions, was now enclosed, with various other cages and properties of the circus, within a high canvas wall in the centre of the camp. The circus was to open that night, and much remained to be done in the way of preparing a ring in the big main tent, and so forth. A number of piebald horses stood in different parts of the enclosure, nosing idly at the dusty ground, and paying not the slightest heed either to the scent of the different wild creatures, or to the roaring snarls and growls that issued continuously from Killer's cage. Familiarity had bred indifference in them to things which would have sent a horse from outside half crazy with fear.

The Professor arrived with Sam, after a few minutes. He wore knee boots, a vivid red shirt, and a much soiled old leather coat which reached almost to his boots. From his right wrist there dangled a long quilt, or cutting whip, of rhinoceros-hide. Born in the neighbourhood of Pretoria, the Professor had been through most phases of the showman's business in South Africa and, during the past half-dozen years, in Australia. In one sense he was a cruel man; but in the worst possible sense of the word he was not cruel. That is to say, it gave him no particular gratification to inflict pain; but he would inflict it to any extent at all, in the pursuit of his ends. He was not afflicted with the loathsome disease of wanton cruelty, but there was no pity in his composition, and practically no sentiment. He was reckoned an able tamer of wild beasts. By stirring up the tiger, as the Professor approached, the boss provoked a striking exhibition of savage strength and ferocity in Finn.

"Say, Professor," he said, with a smile, "what d'ye think of the latest? How does the Giant Irish Wolf strike you, as an addition to the domestic fireside? Sweet thing, ain't he? Couldn't you make him do some sentimental stunts with the Java love-birds, now?"

The Professor inspected the furiously raging Finn with considerable interest.

"You'll not manage much taming with this fellow, Professor, will ye?" asked the boss, craftily aiming at putting the lion-tamer on his mettle. "You'll hardly manage the Professor among his pets act in this cage, eh?"

"I'd like to know what's goin' to stop me, boss," said the Professor doughtily. "I guess you've forgotten the fact that Professor Claude Damarel was the man who tamed the Tasmanian Wolf, Satan; and the Tasmanian Wolf is about the fiercest brute in the world to tackle, next to the Tasmanian Devil; an' I had one o' them pretty near beat in Auckland, till he went an' died on me. Tame this Giant Irishman—you bet your sweet life I will; an' have him cavortin' through a hoop inside of a month—or maybe a week—if I'm not kept busy wastin' my time over groom's work."

"Right-ho, Professor!" said the boss, good-humouredly. "You shall have a groom of your own, right here an' now. I'll promote Sam to the job, with half-a-dollar rise. I'll find a feller in the town here for your job, Sam. Enterprise goes with me every time, an' brings its own reward—sure thing. But I'd like to be on hand when you tackle the Giant Wolf, Professor. You might want help."

"Help! Me want help! You wait here two minutes, boss, an' I'll show you."

The boss grinned over the success of his tactics in rousing the Professor's pride, and strolled round among the horses for five minutes or so till the tamer returned with Sam, carrying a brazier full of live coals, and an iron rod with a rough leather handle at one end of it. The other end of the iron rod was buried among the live coals. At sight of it the Killer crouched down in the far corner of his cage with a snarling whine, half covering his face with his huge paws.

"Now I'll show you how much help I need in taming, boss," said the Professor.

Grasping the leather handle of his now red-hot rod, the Professor deftly opened the gate of Finn's cage, far enough to admit of his own swift entrance; the gate being instantly slammed to behind him by Sam, and bolted. Finn was lying crouched in the far corner of the cage, and if the light there had been good, the tamer would surely have seen by the expression on the Wolfhound's intelligent face that he was no wild beast. On the other hand, froth still clung to Finn's jaws, the hair on his shoulders was still more or less erect, and a few minutes before this time he had been raging like a whirlwind.

For a moment or two the Professor glared steadily at Finn. He undoubtedly had pluck, seeing that he believed the Wolfhound to be as ferocious and deadly a beast as any tiger. Then, slowly, Finn rose from his crouching position, prepared to come forward and to treat his visitor as a friend, even as a possible rescuer from that place of horrid durance. The Professor's plan was all mapped out in his mind, and he did not waver in its execution. Had he been given to wavering he would long ago have been killed by some wild creature. In the instant of Finn's move towards him the Professor took a quick step forward and, with a growling shout of "Down, Wolf!" smote Finn fairly across the head with the red-hot end of his iron bar, so that pungent smoke arose. One portion of the red-hot surface of the iron caught Finn's muzzle, causing him exquisite pain; pain of a sort he had never known before. At the moment of the blow, a terrific snarling roar came from the tiger's cage. Half blinded, wholly maddened, dimly connecting this strange new agony that bit into him with the tiger's roar, Finn sprang at the Professor with a snarl that was itself almost a roar. The red-hot bar met him in mid-air, biting deep into the soft skin of his lips, furrowing his beautiful neck, and stinging the tip of one silken ear. The pain was terrible; the smell of his own burnt flesh and hair was maddening; the deadly implacability of the attack, coming from a man, too, was baffling beyond description. Finn howled, and sank abruptly upon his haunches, giving the Professor time for a flying glance of pride in the direction of the admiring John L. Rutherford.

And now, had he been really a wild beast, Finn would probably have remained cowering as far as possible from that terrible bar of fire. Even as it was, he might have done this if the Professor had not made the mistake of raising the bar again, with a suddenly threatening motion. Finn had greater reasoning power, and greater strength of will, than a wild beast. He was robbed of all restraint by his surroundings and by the Professor's absolute and crushing reversal of all his preconceived notions of the relations between man and hound. The snarl of the tiger in his ears, the smell of his own burnt flesh in his nostrils, the pitilessness of the Professor's wholly unexpected attack, filled him with a tumultuous fury of warring instincts which generations of inherited docility were powerless to overcome. But, through it all, he was more capable of thought than a really wild beast, and, as the hot iron was lifted the third time, he leaped in under it like lightning, and with a roar of defiance brought its wielder to the ground, and planted both fore-feet upon his chest, while the iron bar fell clattering from the man's hand between the bars of the cage.

Be it remembered that Finn stood a foot higher at the shoulder than the average wolf, and weighed fully twice as much, being long and strong in proportion to his height and weight. The Professor was momentarily expecting to feel Finn's great jaws about his throat, and his two arms were crossed below his chin for protection of that most vulnerable spot. The tiger was now furiously clawing at the partition a few inches from Finn's nose, and emitting a series of the most blood-curdling snarls and roars.

"Draw him off with a stick!" shouted the Professor; who, even in his present sorry plight, was concerned most with the injury to his pride. Sam jabbed viciously at Finn's face with a long stake, through the bars, and as Finn withdrew slightly, the Professor wriggled cleverly to his feet, in a crouching posture, and reached the gate of the cage. Finn growled threateningly, but made no move forward, being thankful to see the retreat of his enemy. In another instant the Professor was outside the cage, and the gate securely bolted. He was bruised, but bore no mark of scratch or bite, and so far was able to boast; having no knowledge of the fact that Finn had not thought of biting him, but merely of overpowering him, as a means of evading his hot iron. This the Wolfhound had done easily. He could have killed the man with almost equal ease, had that been his intention.

"Well, he sure is a rustler from 'way back, Professor, every single time," remarked the boss.

"You'll see him hop through a hoop when I say so, inside of a week," replied the tamer, sourly, as he brushed the dust from his coat. "As it is, you'll notice that he didn't dare to bite or scratch. Don't you fear but what I'll tame the beauty all right, Giant Wolf or no Giant Wolf. I've handled worse'n him."

And a couple of days before this, the younger Miss Sandbrook had been resting her carefully dressed curls against Finn's head.



CHAPTER XV

THE MAKING OF A WILD BEAST

The transformation begun in Finn by the night he had spent in a rocking train, caged between a tiger and two bears, was enormously accentuated and confirmed by his encounter with the Professor. If zoologists had deliberately set themselves the task of converting an Irish Wolfhound into a wild beast, they could hardly have taken any more effective measures than those which had been adopted by pure chance with Finn, from the time at which he reached Sam's hands; and it is probable that no zoologist with any humanity in him would have made progress so extraordinarily rapid. The mere fact of being caged behind iron bars for the first time in his life, and that between a roaring, snarling tiger and two grunting little bears, strongly odoriferous of the wild, affected Finn in somewhat the same manner that a highly excitable and nervous man of quite untrained intellect might be affected by being flung into a cell, surrounded by raving maniacs. If such a man, after a dozen hours in his cell, were approached by some one whom he had every reason to regard as a friend and a rescuer, and beaten cruelly with a weapon possessed of strange and altogether horrible qualities—supernatural qualities, so far as he could tell—it is fair to suppose that he would be as much transformed by the ordeal as Finn was by his ordeal.

Shortly after the episode of the red-hot iron, Finn's cage was again visited by Sam and the Professor, the former being laden with a big, blood-stained basket. From this basket the Professor took a large chunk of raw flesh, and pushed it through the bars into Finn's cage. A bone was also thrust through the bars, and a fixed iron pan near the gate was filled from outside with water. The Professor eyed Finn curiously while he performed these operations, and was surprised that the Giant Wolf, as they called him, did not spring forward upon the food.

"I've put the fear of God into him all right, Sam," said the Professor. "He's not going to touch his grub while we're here. Like all wolves, he's mighty frightened of traps; and I guess he reckons there's a trap attaching to this meat. Watch how Killer tackles his."

Killer was already ravening furiously at the bars of his cage, his yellow eyes ablaze as he watched the meat his soul desired being thrust into Finn's cage. The tiger's roars kept Finn's hackles up, and his fangs bared in a fierce snarl; so that the Professor was struck afresh with the savageness of the latest addition to the menagerie under his care. Killer's meat barely reached the floor of his cage before he had snatched and carried it to the rear, where he tore it savagely, while maintaining an incessant growling snarl. But he dropped the meat as though it burned, and crouched fearfully in the opposite corner of his den, when—by way of display for Sam's benefit—the Professor picked up his iron bar and threatened the tiger with it. Now Finn, on the other hand, when he saw the cruel bar raised, sprang forward with a growling roar of defiance, fore-feet outstretched, bristling back curved for the leap, and white fangs flashing.

"Too sulky to eat it, but mighty concerned when he thought I was goin' to take his meat from him," commented the Professor, in explanation to Sam. As a matter of fact, Finn had not thought of the meat. His present feeling was that he had fallen among a lot of mad wild beasts, some of whom, by curious chance, had the appearance of men folk. If one among them should lift an iron bar, and more especially if the maddest and most hated among them, the Professor, should lift the bar, why then, as Finn saw it, his one chance for life was to fight; to strike hard and swiftly.

"We'll have to keep these two always caged together," said the Professor, with a careless glance at Finn and the tiger. "Old Killer works him up in great style. I guess he'll fetch the public all the time, while he can hear old Killer at his antics. He certainly is the finest-lookin' beast I ever saw in the wolf line, and he's as strong and heavy as a horse. I guess your number would 'ave been up for sure, Sam, if you'd been in my shoes a while back, when he got me down. What I don't like about the beggar is you can't reckon on him; he don't seem to have the same ways as most of 'em. He don't fly at ye right away; he doesn't even jump for his grub, you see. He seems to lie back an' consider. It's a bad thing that, for he's hefty enough, anyway, without stopping to think out his wickedness like a man. He's goin' to be a rough, hard case to tame, Sam, that Giant Wolf of yours; but he's come to a hard-case tamer, too, and don't you forget it. He's got to bend or break, and you can gamble clear down to the butt of your sack on that, my son. Come on now, and I'll show you how the others are fed. Just fill old Killer's water-dish first."

It was now thirty hours since Finn had tasted food, and three days since he had eaten a proper meal. If his experiences of the past four-and-twenty hours had been in every other respect distressing, they had at least robbed him of grief about the Master. His outraged physical senses, and the tremendous strain placed upon his nervous system, effectually shut grief out from his mind. Finn was accustomed to have meals served to him in spotless enamelled dishes, and it had always been food of which a man might have partaken: well-cooked meats, bread, vegetables, and gravy, nicely cut and mixed. Now for a long time the condition of passionate protest and irritability produced in him by all that he had gone through, and by Killer's continuous growling, prevented his touching the meat which lay near the bars of his cage. But hunger triumphed after a while, and with a quick, rather furtive movement, but with lips drawn back and every sign exposed of readiness to defend his action, Finn lifted the big chunk of meat from its place by the bars, and carried it into a corner at the back of the cage, where he tore it into fragments, and ate it, of necessity, very much as a wolf eats, the blood of the raw meat trickling meanwhile about his jaws. To drink, Finn had to place his head close to those bars which most nearly adjoined the front of the tiger's cage. But drink was necessary to him now, and so, with his nose all furrowed, his fangs bared, and a formidable low snarl issuing from his throat, he slowly approached the water-pan, and lapped his fill, pausing to snarl aloud at the tiger between each three or four laps of his tongue. But Killer had fed full, and crunched his bone to splinters and eaten that; so now he was preparing himself to sleep.

If Finn could have followed Killer's example and slept it would have helped him immensely, for his overwrought system needed rest more badly than anything else just then. But this was impossible as yet for the sensitive Wolfhound. The two bears in the next cage were playing together fubsily, and the tiger's breathing while he slept was a maddening kind of cross between a purr and a snore; maddening, that is, to one who found the creature's mere proximity incredibly distasteful. This hatred of the Killer's neighbourhood was no whim, no personal fastidiousness on Finn's part. It went much deeper than that. For example, so far, the hair on Finn's back would not assume its natural position; it still stood half erect, and harsh and stiff as fine wire; by which the tension of his nerves may be imagined. No, Finn could not sleep.

The hours of the day dragged slowly by, and Finn began to suffer in new ways. He had never been confined for any length of time before, and strict cleanliness was an instinct with him.

At length, as the hot afternoon drew to its close, a number of men came to the cages, and horses were hitched on to the heavy wagon which supported them, at a level of less than three feet from the ground. Killer woke with a start and, with his tail, angrily flogged the partition which divided him from Finn, while delivering himself of a snarling yawn. Finn leapt to his feet, answering the tiger's snarl viciously, himself looking to the full as savage as any of the wild kindred. The wagon moved with a jerk, Killer rolled against his side of the partition and growled ferociously; Finn sprang at the partition as though he thought his great weight would carry him through it, and his jaws snapped at the air as he sprang. The men roared with laughter at him, and this accentuated his feeling that they were all mad wild beasts together. Presently, Finn's cage, with others, was ranged along the side of a canvas-covered passage way by which the public were to approach the main tent, where that night's performance was to be given. This double row of cages was arranged here with a view to impressing the public; a kind of foretaste of the glories they were to behold within. The Southern Cross circus had patent turnstiles fixed at both ends of the main tent, those at one end admitting only of ingress, those at the other end admitting only of egress.

It was shortly after this that Finn became conscious of a curious grinding small sound at the back of his cage. Presently a sharp, bright point of steel entered the cage from behind, just above the level of Finn's head, as he sat on his haunches. The steel wormed its way into the cage to a length of fully six inches, and then it reached the side of Killer's cage, pointing diagonally, and bored slowly through that. The auger was well greased, and made only a very slight sound, so slight indeed that Killer was not aware of it. He was not so highly strung as Finn at this time.

This auger-hole was an idea of Sam's, for which he hoped to derive credit from the boss. He had noted carefully the remark of the Professor about keeping the Giant Wolf close to the tiger, in order to lend additional fierceness to his demeanour. And so, with the thoughtlessly cruel cunning of a schoolboy, he had devised a means of improving upon this. He took a thin iron rod, and covered the end of it with soft, porous sacking, which he moistened with the blood of raw meat. Then, by thrusting this between the bars of Finn's cage, and jabbing violently at the Wolfhound with it for several minutes, he endeavoured to impregnate the sacking on the rod with a smell of Finn. Then he invited John L. Rutherford to take up a stand in front of the cages, as though he were a member of the general public, and to whistle, by way of signalling that he was ready. Directly Sam heard the whistle, he being now behind the cages, he thrust his sacking-covered rod through the auger-hole he had made from Finn's cage into the tiger's, and there rattled it to and fro to attract the Killer's attention. Killer not only heard and saw the intruding object, but smelt it, and sprang at it violently, with a rasping, savage snarl which challenged the Giant Wolf to come forward or be for ever accursed for a coward. The rod was withdrawn on the instant, and Finn's whole great bulk crashed against the partition, as he answered Killer with a roar of defiance. The great Wolfhound stood erect on his hind-feet, snapping at the air with foaming jaws, and tearing impotently at the iron-sheathed partition with his powerful claws. The boss applauded vigorously, and gave Sam a shilling for beer.

"You keep that up while the people are coming in, Sam, an' by gosh we'll have 'em in fits. The Giant's a sure star performer, every time. He's worth two or three of the Killer, when he prances round on his tail that way. It was quite a bright notion o' yours, Sam, that auger-hole."

It must have been nearly two hours later, when the public was being admitted in a regular stream to the big tent, and Sam had succeeded in working the tiger and the Wolfhound into a perfect frenzy of impotent rage, of snarling, foaming, roaring fury, that a faint odour crossed Finn's nostrils, and a faint sound fell upon his ears, through all the din and tumult of the conflict with his unseen enemy. In that moment, and as though he had been shot, Finn dropped from his erect position, and bounded to the front bars of his cage, with a sudden, appealing whine, very unlike the formidable cries with which he had been rending the pent air of his prison for the last quarter of an hour. He had heard a few words spoken in a woman's voice, and those words were:—

"I cannot bear to look at them; I never do. Let us hurry straight in."

In a passion of anxiety, and grief, and love, and remorse for not having been on the look out, Finn poured out his very soul in a succession of long-drawn whines, plaintive and insistent as a 'cello's wailings, while his powerful fore-paws tugged and scratched ineffectually at the solid iron bars of his cage. The woman whose voice he heard was the Mistress of the Kennels, and the man to whom she spoke, who walked beside her, looking obstinately at her and not at the cages, was the Master. Something seemed to crack in poor Finn's breast, as the two humans whom he loved disappeared from his view within the great tent. He did not know that they would not pass that way again, because the audience left the place by the opposite end of the tent. But he gave no thought to the future. Here, in the midst of his uttermost misery and humiliation, the Master, the light of his life, had passed within a few feet of him, and passed without a glance, without a word. For long, Finn gazed miserably out between the bars, sniffing hopelessly at the air through which his friends had passed. Then, slowly, he retired to the furthermost corner of his cage, and curled down there, with his muzzle between his paws, and big drops of bitter sadness trickling out from beneath his overhanging brows. And not all the ferocity of Killer, nor all the ingenuity of Sam with his sacking-covered rod, availed to draw Finn from his corner again that night. It seemed as though his heart had cracked, and every other emotion than grief trickled out from it in the form of tears. It was the saddest moment of Finn's life till then; and it was a bitter kind of sadness, too. Not one little look; not one glance for Finn in the midst of his torment!



CHAPTER XVI

MARTYRDOM

It may be that a good deal of the wisdom and philosophy of mankind is born of grief and suffering. It is certain that a good deal of philosophy came to Finn as the aftermath of that evening upon which he retired, heart-broken, to the farthest corner of his cage, after seeing the Master and the Mistress of the Kennels pass him without a word or a glance. His mind did not deal in niceties. He did not tell himself that if the Master had only guessed at his presence there, all would have been different. He was conscious only of the apparently brutal fact that the Master had walked past his cage and ignored him; left him there in his horrible confinement. He bore no malice, for there was not any malice in his nature; which is not at all the same thing as saying that he was incapable of wreaking vengeance or administering punishment. He simply was smitten to the very heart with grief and sorrow. And so he lay, all through that night, silent, sorrowful, and blind to his surroundings.

The natural result was that sleep came to him after a while, when all was dark and silent, and the folk who had visited the circus, like those who had entertained them, were in their beds. And this sleep he badly needed. While he slept the burns on his muzzle and ear were healing, the searing heat of his grief was subsiding, and his body and nervous system were adapting themselves to his situation, and recharging themselves after the great drain which had been made upon them during the past couple of days.

When Killer's long, snarling yawn woke Finn in the morning he did not fling himself against the partition which hid the tiger from him. He did not even bark or snarl a defiant reply. He only bared his white fangs in silence, and breathed somewhat harshly through his nostrils, while the hair over his shoulders rose a little in token of instinctive resentment. This comparatively mild demonstration cost Finn a great deal less in the way of expenditure of vitality than his previous day's reception of the tiger's snarls; and left him by just so much the better fitted to cope with other ordeals that lay before him.

If Finn had been a wild beast, his experience in the Southern Cross Circus would have been a far less trying one for him than it was. He would have learned early that the Professor was a practically all-powerful tyrant, who had to be obeyed because he had the power and the will to inflict great suffering upon those of the wild kindred who refused him obedience. That he was a tyrant and an enemy the wild creature would have accepted from the outset, as a natural and an inevitable fact. In Finn's case the matter was far otherwise. His instinct and inclination bade him regard a man as a probable friend. Naturally, if the Professor had been aware of this, he would never have approached Finn with a hot iron, and their relations would have been quite different from the beginning. As it was, or as Finn saw it, anyhow, the Professor had proved himself a creature absolutely beyond the pale; a mad wild beast, disguised as a man; a devil who met friendly advances with repeated blows of a magic weapon, a stick made of fire, against which no living thing might stand. Matey had seemed to Finn a mad man, and one to be avoided. But Matey had not been a wild beast as well, neither had he carried fire in his hand. The Professor was a far more formidable and deadly creature. However he might disguise his intentions, his purpose clearly was Finn's destruction. That was how Finn saw it, and he acted accordingly; consistently, and not from malice, but upon the dictates of common sense and self-preservation, as he understood them.

Having said so much, it is hardly necessary to add that Finn suffered greatly during the next few weeks of his life; for had not the Professor sworn to make the Giant Wolf his obedient creature, and a docile performer in the circus? That he never did. His boast was never made good, though with a real wolf it might have been; and again it almost certainly would have been, had he ever guessed that Finn was not a wolf at all, but one of the most aristocratic hounds and friends of man ever bred. But his failure cost Finn dear, in pain, humiliation, fear, and suffering of diverse kinds.

The boss jeered at the Professor when the failure to tame Finn had extended over a week; and that added greatly to the severity of Finn's ordeal. The Professor was on his mettle; and now, while he made no further spoken boasts, he swore to himself that he would break the Giant Wolf's spirit or kill him. He never guessed that his whole failure rested upon one initial mistake. To the wild beast the red-hot iron bar was merely the terrible insignia of the Professor's indubitable might and mastery; a very compelling invitation to docility and respectful obedience. To Finn it was not that at all; but merely terrible and unmistakable evidence of basest treachery and malevolent madness. And it was largely with the red-hot iron that the Professor sought to tame Finn, believing, as he did, that this was necessary to his own, the Professor's, preservation.

Upon one occasion—one brilliantly sunny morning of Finn's martyrdom—it did dimly occur to the Professor that it might be the hot iron which somehow stood between himself and the mastery of Finn. Accordingly, he twisted some wire round the end of his quilt, or cutting whip, and entered the cage without the iron, while Sam stood outside with the brazier, ready to pass in the iron if that should prove necessary. Finn absolutely mistrusted the man, of course—he had suffered what he believed to be the man's insane lust of cruelty for a fortnight now—but yet he saw that the iron was not in the cage, and so he made no hostile demonstration; and that was a notable concession on his part, for, of late, the Professor's tactics, so far from taming him, had taught the naturally gracious and kindly Wolfhound to fly at the man with snapping jaws the instant he came within reach. Now the man moved slowly, very slowly, nearer and nearer to Finn's corner, using ingratiating words. When it seemed that he meant to come near enough for touch, Finn decided that he would slip across the cage to its opposite far corner in order to avoid the hated contact. He did not snarl; he did not even uncover his fangs, for the fiery instrument of torture was not there. He rose from his crouching position, and of necessity that brought him a few inches nearer to the Professor, before he could move toward the far side of the cage.

"Would yer? Down, ye brute!" snarled the man, in his best awe-inspiring tone. And in that instant the wire-bound rhinoceros-hide whistled down across Finn's face, cutting him almost as painfully as the hot iron was wont to sear him. He snarled ferociously. Down came the lash again, and this time a loose end of wire stabbed the corner of one of his eyes. The next instant saw the Professor flung back at length against the bars of the cage; and in his face he felt Finn's breath, and heard and saw the flashing, clashing gleam of Finn's white fangs. Sam thrust the white-hot bar in, stabbing Finn's neck with its hissing end. The Professor seized the bar and beat Finn off with it; not for protection now, but in sheer, savage anger. Then he withdrew from the cage, and seizing a long pole beat Finn crushingly with that, through the bars, till his arms ached. Meantime, Finn fought the pole like a mad thing; and the Professor, unable to think of any other way of inflicting punishment upon the untameable Giant Wolf, took his food from the basket and gave it to Killer before Finn's eyes, leaving the Wolfhound to go empty for the day.



That was the result of the Professor's one attempt, according to his lights, at humouring the Giant Wolf, by approaching him without the iron. That also was a specimen of the kind of daily interviews he had with Finn.

By this time the Wolfhound actually was a very fierce and savage creature. But he was not at all like the magnificently raging whirlwind of wrath which had aroused the boss's admiring wonder on the day he first saw Finn. Killer might growl and snarl himself hoarse now for all the notice Finn took of the great beast. Scarred from nose to flank with burns, bruised and battered and aching in every limb, Finn remained always curled in the darkest, farthest corner of his cage now, roused only by the daily fight, the daily torture, of his interviews with the Professor. At other times, as the boss said bitterly, he might have been dead or a lap-dog, for all the spectacle he offered to the curious who visited his cage. All they saw was a coiled, iron-grey mass, and two burning black eyes, with a glint of red in them, and a blood-coloured triangle in their upper corners.

Now and again, in the midst of the night, Finn would rise and go down to the bars of his cage and stand there, motionless, for an hour at a stretch, his scarred muzzle protruding between two bars, his aching nostrils, hot and dry, drinking in the night air, his eyes robbed of their resentful fire, and pitiably softened by the great tears that stood in them. At the end of such an hour he would sometimes begin to walk softly to and fro, inside the bars, the four paces that his cage allowed him. Thus he would pad back and forth silently for another hour, with tail curled toward his belly and nose on a level with his knees, almost brushing the bars as he passed them. He made no sound at all, even when the moon's silvery light flooded his cage, or when Killer snarled in his sleep. But always, before returning to his corner, he would systematically test every bar at its base with teeth and paws; and then sigh, like a very weary man, as he slouched despairingly back to his corner.

But, for all the glowering misery that possessed him by day and the despair to which he would give rein by night, it was always with dauntless ferocity that the tortured Wolfhound faced his enemy, the Professor. Short of starving him to death, or killing him outright with the iron bar, the Professor could see no way of making the Giant Wolf cringe to him; he could devise no method of breaking that fierce spirit, though he exhausted every kind of severity and every sort of cruelty that his wide experience in the handling of fierce animals could furnish. For any one who could have comprehended the true inwardness of that situation, its tragedy would have lain in the reflection that, had he but known it, Finn could without difficulty have earned not alone ease and good treatment, but high honours in the Southern Cross Circus. But Finn had no means of guessing that the Professor merely desired to master him, and to teach him to stand erect, or leap through a hoop at the word of command. No sign of any such desire, that Finn could possibly read, had been furnished. But, on the contrary, the one thing made evident to the Wolfhound's understanding was that here was a bloodthirsty man in a leather coat who desired to burn him to death, when not engaged in beating him with a pole, or thrusting at him viciously through the bars of his cage with a stick, or slashing at him with a whip that cut through hair and skin. And, be it remembered, that the hound who was faced with these, to him, utterly gratuitous and senseless atrocities, was one who, if we except the single occasion of his night with the dog-thief in Sussex, had never known what it meant to face an angry man, or to receive a blow from a man, angry or otherwise. It was small wonder that Finn had only snarls and snapping jaws for the Professor. The pity of it was that he could have avoided as much suffering if he had only known what it was desired of him. The wonder of it was that he faced the Professor day after day with such unfailing courage, with a spirit which remained absolutely uncowed, though the body which sheltered it could not present a single patch of the bigness of a man's hand which was neither burned, nor bruised, nor cut.

There came a day when, other matters occupying his attention, the Professor did not trouble to pay one of his futile visits to Finn's cage. Sam fed him as usual, when Killer was fed. (One of the features of Finn's captivity, which, while in his confinement it helped to injure his physical condition, also helped to make him the more fierce, was the fact that his diet consisted exclusively of raw meat.) Finn waited through the long day for the Professor, steeling himself for the daily struggle and the daily suffering. His body free of new pains he rested that night more thoroughly than he had rested for a long time; and there were faint stirrings of hope in his mind. Next morning the boss happened to walk past the cages with the Professor, and when they came to Finn's place the Professor said—

"I reckon I'll give that brute best, unless you'd like him killed. I'll tackle that job for you with pleasure; but your Giant Wolf's no good for the show."

"No, the joke's on me about the Giant Wolf," admitted the boss, crossly. "Sam had me for fair, over him. Fifteen quid for a useless pig like that! Why, he won't even stand up to make a show. The brute's not worth his tucker, is he?"

"He is not. And, if you ask me, you'd better let me feed him to the others, while there's any meat left on his bones. He's no good for aught else, as I can see. The Tasmanian Devil was a lap-dog to him, and he died before I could get him trained, you remember."

"H'm! Well, we'll see. We might get some fool to buy him. Anyway, you'd better tell Sam to pry him round a bit somehow when the show's opening. He looks all right when he gets a move on him, but he ain't worth a hill o' beans lyin' curled up there in a corner. How'd it do to get a dingo, and put it in there with him!"

"You might as well give him a mouse. He'd swaller it whole. He's twice the size of a dingo."

"He sure is twice as sulky as any beast I ever saw. An' that blame book-writin' chap from the city the other night said he reckoned the Giant was a dog, an' not a wolf at all! Nice sociable sort of a dog for a family gathering, I don't think!"

"You should have asked the gent to go in his cage an' try 'im with a bit of sugar. My bloomin' Colonial! He wouldn't have written any more books."

And now, whenever the boss met Sam, he would "jolly" the young man a bit, as he said, regarding the Giant Wolf as a bargain, and ask what Sam had done with the fifteen pounds, and whether he had any other cheap freaks to sell. Also, Sam's half-crown was docked from his wages; and Sam, after all, had never laid claim to any bigness of heart or philosophy of mind. He had long since spent the fifteen pounds. The twenty-five shillings he had paid for Finn loomed larger in his recollection now than the fifteen pounds he had received; particularly after a dose of the boss's chaff.

"Why the blazes can't yer learn, an' work fer yer livin', ye ugly great brute?" Sam would growl, as he threw Finn his daily portion of flesh. And, more often than not, he would pick up a stake, and thrust viciously at the Wolfhound, or strike at him as he crept forward to snatch his meat. Thus, as poor Finn saw it, another of the strange man-like beasts had gone mad, and was to be treated as a dangerous enemy.

If the Professor had continued his daily attempts to cow Finn, as a preliminary to training, he would have been likely to succeed at about this time; for the Wolfhound was losing strength daily, and though the fire of wrath and fierceness burned strongly when he saw the leather-coated man, it had little to feed on now, and must soon have died down under the hot bar and the wired whip. But the Professor could not be expected to know this. He had had as many as sixty futile struggles with Finn, and, as he thought, had only stopped short of killing the Giant outright. But idleness, or some other cause, did lead him to make one other attempt, on a hot afternoon, just before the hour of tea and of dressing for the evening show. Finn's fighting blood, inherited through long centuries of unsmirched descent, made him put his best foot foremost, and meet the Professor with a mien of most formidable ferocity as soon as the red iron appeared. The Professor did not know how near to breaking-point Finn's despair had reached. There was little sign of it in the roaring fierceness with which he faced the iron and whip. A wolf in such a case, with the cunning of the wild, and without the life's experience of humans which made the Professor's part so incredibly base, so gratuitously cruel and treacherous to Finn, would have given in long before. Finn fought with the courage of a brave man who has reached the last ditch, and with the ferocity that came to him out of the ancient days in which his warrior ancestors were never known either to give or to receive quarter.

The Professor felt that this was a last attempt, and he did not greatly care whether the great hound lived or died. The Giant Wolf had defeated him as a trainer; but the Giant Wolf should never forget the price paid for the defeat. It was a cruel onslaught. The iron bit deep, and—it had been better for the Professor's character development, better for his record as man, if he had left Finn alone when he decided to make no further attempt at taming. But men, too, have fierce, brutal passions, with less than the simplicity of brutes, and more, far more, of the knowledge which makes cruelty leave a permanent stain upon them. The Professor himself was aching and sore when he flung passionately out from Finn's cage and slammed the iron gate to; and as for Finn, I have no words in which to explain how his poor body ached and was sore. If the iron had been stone cold, Finn would still have been a terribly badly beaten hound, when he staggered to his corner, after this last visit from the mad beast-man in the leathern coat—so he thought of the Professor, in that tumult of sinking flames which we may call his mind. He lay in his corner, quivering and shuddering, and did not even find the heart to lick his wounds till long hours afterwards, when silence ruled in the field where the circus was encamped that night.

This field was on the outskirts of a considerable township; the twenty-second that Finn had visited with the Southern Cross Circus. The authorities had refused to allow the boss to come closer in, and so one side of his camping-place was walled by virgin bush; a dense tract of blue-gum and iron-bark stretching, almost as far as the eye could reach, to the foot-hills of a gaunt mountain range. For a mile or so from the circus camp the trees had all been ring-barked a couple of seasons or more before this time, with the result that they were now the very haggard skeletons of mighty trees, naked for the most part, their white bones open to all the winds of heaven, but here and there sporting a ghastly kind of drapery, remnants of their grave-clothes as it might be, in the shape of long hanging streamers of dead bark, which moaned and rustled eerily in the night breezes. High above the tattered grave-clothes of their lifeless trunks, the knotted, tortured-looking arms and fingers of the trees groped painfully after the life that had fled their neighbourhood.

Finn could just see the ghostly extremities of these spectral trees over the top of the main tent as he lay crouched in his corner, after devoting an hour to the licking of his sores. Presently, an almost full moon rose among the trees' fleshless limbs, and painted their nakedness in more than ever ghostly guise. It was then that Finn rose, painfully and slowly, to his feet, and moved, like an old, old man, across the floor of his cage to the bars, the bars that were of an inky blackness in that silvery light. For almost an hour this great hound, this tortured prince of a kingly race, stood sadly there, staring out at the moonlight between the bars of his prison; and for almost an hour, big clear drops kept forming in his black eyes and trickling along his scarred muzzle, till they pattered down upon the floor of the cage. If he had ever heard of such a thing as suicide, it may be that his soul would have known the final humiliation of self-destruction that night. But there is something that strikes a balance, as well in a Wolfhound's life as a man's life.

Near as Finn was to the limit of his endurance, his brave spirit lived within him yet, and he did not forego the nightly habit he had formed long since of trying the bars that made him a prisoner. It is possible that there never was a much more pathetically forlorn hope than that which animated this sorely racked prisoner when he felt his bars. But if the iron of them had entered into his soul, then it had made for endurance. The process was not made easier by the existence of Finn's latest wounds. Both his fore-legs and his muzzle had suffered severely under the iron that day; and it was with these that he now tested his bars, slowly, conscientiously, and with painful thoroughness, from the bar nearest Killer's cage to that at the end of the gate of his own, which closed on to the partition of the native bears' division. It was the bottom of the bars that Finn always tried, where they entered the floor of the cage. He took each between his teeth and pushed and pulled; sometimes pushing or pulling with his paws as well. And the result, on this night of bright moonlight and great pain, was as it had always been. The iron did not change.



Having reached the end of his task, Finn sat erect on his haunches for it may have been a quarter of an hour, gazing out at the risen moon, which sailed serenely now, high above the praying hands of the skeleton trees. Certainly, Finn's spirit was near to breaking-point. He rose, meaning to seek his corner again, as after so many other futile testings of his bars; but something moved him first to look out as far as he could, over the tent-top, to the great world beyond. Sore though his body was, he rose erect upon his hind-feet, placed his fore-feet against the upper half of the gate, and only narrowly escaped falling forward through the gate to the ground beneath. In his passion the Professor had slammed the barred gate to as usual and, in flinging himself angrily off from the place, had omitted to slip the two thick bolts which normally held it secure. The gate fitted closely, and was rusty, besides; so that Finn's jaws, tugging at its extreme foot, and upon this particular occasion less strongly no doubt than usual, had not shifted it. But his weight pressing against the upper half was quite another matter; and now the gate stood wide open before him.

For an instant, Finn's heart swelled within him, so sharply, and so greatly, that a little whine burst from him, and it seemed he was unable to move. So the sight of the open gate, giving upon the silent open night, affected the Wolfhound. In the next instant he dropped quietly to the earth, and was lost in the inky shadow of the main tent.



CHAPTER XVII

FREEDOM

Very wonderful and wolf-like, cat-like, too, in some respects, was Finn's progress through the circus encampment on that bright moonlight night. The field was full of silvery moonlight you would have said; but never a glint of all that liquid silver touched Finn's outline for a moment. Just so, beside the northern mountains of another continent, one has watched a leopard—mountain lions we call them there—braving the strange terrible smells and dangers of a man's camp, to stalk a sleeping fox-terrier; in absolute ignorance of the rifle barrel that covered it, yet miraculously successful in never giving the man behind the rifle the chance of a moonlight shot. Finn was sore and aching from many wounds, and stiff from long confinement. He knew that every one connected with the circus was sleeping; but on this occasion he gave no hostages to fortune, he took no risks. The stakes at issue, as he saw it, were, upon the one side, life and freedom, freedom which was almost unbearably sweet to think of, after the long-drawn agony of the past couple of months; and upon the other side, slow death under the torture of confinement, the iron, the lash, and the mad man-beast in the leathern coat.

It is the greatest mistake in the world to suppose that an animal like Finn has no imagination. Indeed, the animals which have no imagination are comparatively few; while such an Irish Wolfhound as Finn has, at the least, as much of it as some men the writer has known.

A fiery picture of the issues at stake was floating in Finn's mind as he crept in and out among the tents and wagons of the enclosure: and he was conscious neither of wounds, or weakness, or stiffness; but only of his great resolve, based upon the wonderful chance that had come to him. Once he came to a place where ten feet of brilliant moonlight lay between the black shadow he occupied and the next. He paused for a moment or two, looking about him upon every side with all the cunning of the truly wild kindred; and then, with a very good imitation of the lightness and elasticity of other, happier days, he sprang clear from the one shadow to the other, landing as delicately and silently as a cat, though the impact jarred all his stiffened joints, and touched, as with living fire, every one of his almost innumerable wounds.

Then he came to the outer canvas wall of the big enclosure. It was too high to jump, a good twelve feet. An attempt to jump and scramble over it might have led to noise. Finn approached it in the deep shadow cast by a caravan wagon, and, thrusting his muzzle underneath the canvas, midway between two stakes, easily forced it up, and crawled under it into the open. When he was half-way out, the boss's fox-terrier gave one sleepy half-bark, too languid and indifferent a sound to be taken as a warning; and for the rest, complete silence paid tribute to the extreme deftness of Finn's passage through the sleeping camp. But that low, sleepy bark from the fox-terrier who slept beside the boss's own caravan, served to stop the beating of Finn's heart for one long moment. In the next moment, almost as silently as a passing cloud shadow, the great Wolfhound streaked across the thirty yards of moonlit paddock which divided the camp from the ring-barked bush, and melted away among that crowded assembly of tree ghosts. The barbed wire fence of the paddock was no more than four feet high, and this Finn took in his stride, without appreciable pause.

The ring-barking of trees admits sunlight and air to the earth, and this means rich "feed" and a sturdy undergrowth. On the other hand, the death of the trees introduces a kind of nakedness and publicity to the bush which naturally is not favoured by wild folk during daylight. But this does not detract from the merits of ring-barked country as a night feeding-ground; and Finn was amazed by the wealth and variety of wild life which he saw as he loped swiftly through the few miles of bush lying between the circus camp and the foothills of the mountains beyond. His immediate purpose, of putting a considerable distance between himself and the place of his captivity, was too urgent to admit of delays, no matter what the temptation; and, accordingly, Finn made no pauses. But it added greatly to the joy of his escape to find himself surrounded by so great an abundance of creatures which instinct made him regard as game for him. Upon every hand there were rustlings and whisperings, tiny footfalls and scufflings among dead leaves and twigs; and here and there, as the great grey, shadowy Wolfhound swept along between the white tree-trunks, he had glimpses of rabbits, bandicoots, kangaroo-rats, and many of the lesser marsupials, all busy about their different night affairs, all half-paralysed by amazement at his passage through their midst. Once he heard a venomous spitting overhead and, as he hurried on, caught a flying glimpse of a native cat, who had pinned an adventurous young 'possum on the lower limb of a giant black-butt. Once, too, he was startled into momentary horror of some human trap of the Professor's invention; and his speed approached that of flying, under the spur of a laughing jackass's raucous cachinnation.

The ring-barked country was soon left behind, and then Finn found himself among dense living bush, climbing a steep ascent. Here his speed was necessarily a great deal slower. There was a good deal of undergrowth upon the mountain side, besides much heavy timber; and hidden among this lush undergrowth were occasional boulders and innumerable fallen tree-trunks, over which Finn stumbled heavily again and again, he being without that curious bush-lore which enables men-folk born in the bush, no less than its own wild folk, to steer clear of these obstructions by means of a sort of sixth sense, which tells them when they must leap, and helps them to know when the leap must be an extra cautious one, because of the danger of disturbing the deadly people of the wild. The Australian bush has many varieties of snakes, and quite a good number of them are deadly; though some of those most formidable in appearance are not. Finn had never even seen a snake; so that, though his ignorance made him run many risks that night, he was at least spared all anxiety regarding the deadly folk, their quick tempers and swift methods of attack.

Dawn was not far off when Finn emerged, with heaving flank and lolling tongue, into the green but stony glade which formed the ridge and crest of the Tinnaburra range. The last hundred yards of his progress had been a good deal of a scramble, through thick scrub and over lichen-covered boulders, on a very steep rise. And now that he had reached the cool glade of topmost Tinnaburra, he found that his arrival had caused considerable perturbation among a small mob of brumbies, or wild horses, consisting of some seven or eight mares and foals, led by a flea-bitten old grey stallion, who snorted angrily as he saw Finn, and minced forward toward the Wolfhound, his long chisel teeth bared, his four-foot tail billowing out behind him like a flag, and his black hoofs (the feet of mountain-bred brumbies are prodigiously hard and punishing in the attack) rising and falling from the dewy earth like spring hammers.

Finn devoted the little breath he could spare to the rather whining note of explanation which means: "Don't fear me! I pursue my own affairs only, and they are harmless for you!" But the old stallion was taking no chances. Age made him fussy, and his family included two very recent additions. Also, Finn brought a baffling mixture of scents with him, including those of men and of wild creatures such as the stallion had never seen and did not wish to see. So he continued his threateningly mincing progress toward Finn, and whinnied out a declaration to the effect that this could be no resting-place for dingoes, however huge and diversified in their smells. Finn was not in the least like a dingo; but, on the other hand, he was not like a kangaroo-hound. He was twice the size of a dingo, very nearly, and a good seven inches taller than the biggest kangaroo-hound the stallion had seen. Also, his coat was shaggy and long, instead of close and short like that of a greyhound, or kangaroo-hound. As against that, he carried with him more suggestion of the fellowship of the wild kindred than of the tribe of renegades who are men-folk's adherents; and therefore, for the moment, dingo was a good enough name for him, so far as the old stallion was concerned, the dingo being the only creature of the wolf kind which he knew.

Finn was in no mood for disputes of any sort, and so, though exceedingly weary now, he made a wide detour to satisfy the nervousness of the flea-bitten grey stallion, and began a diagonal descent upon the south side of Tinnaburra. Just as the sun cleared the horizon over his right shoulder, Finn dropped wearily down from a clump of wattle upon a broad, flat ledge of many-coloured rock which caught the sun's first glinting rays upon its queer enamel of red and brown and yellow lichen. From this point Finn looked down a densely-wooded mountain side, and out across a tolerably well-timbered plain to hills which stood nearly forty miles away. It would have made an eyrie for a king eagle. Finn had already slaked his thirst hurriedly a mile back, in a chattering, rock-bedded mountain streamlet. And now he was weary beyond all further endurance. He had been sick, and sore, and stiff, and sadly out of condition when he started; and he had been travelling now for six hours. A feeling of security had stolen over him since he reached the topmost ridge of Tinnaburra. The very fragrance of the air told him, as he drew it in through his nostrils, that he was far from the works of men. Food he could not think of while every bone and muscle in his great body ached from weariness. By the edge of the rock was a sandy hollow, over which a feathery shrub drooped three or four of its graceful branches at a height of three feet from the ground. Finn eyed this inviting spot steadily for two or three minutes, while his aching sides continued to heave, and his long tongue to sway from one side of his jaws. Then he stepped cautiously into the sheltered nook, turned completely round in it three or four times, and finally sank to rest there in a compact coil, and with a little grunt of contentment and relief.

Finn opened his eyes, and half-opened them, many times during the day; once, to his utter amazement, when a huge wedge-tailed eagle swept gloriously past with a lamb in its talons no more than ten feet from his nose; but the day was practically done, and nightfall approaching, when the Wolfhound finally rose from his sandy bed and stretched his seven-foot length from nose to tail. The long stretch drew a sharp whine from him towards its end, when the stiffness and soreness of his limbs, and of some of his more recent burns and bruises, found him out. But even in the pain there was a sense of luxury and gladness for Finn. His sleep had not been devoid of sudden starts, of shudderings and twitches, born of fearful dreaming; but now that he was broad awake, and in the hushed grey twilight looked out across forty miles of wild open land, with never a sign of tent or house, or other work of man, his heart swelled within him with satisfaction and content, and he drew deep breaths of grateful pleasure and relief before setting out upon the descent of Tinnaburra, and, if it might be, the capture of a supper.

Before Finn had travelled half a mile along the hill-side, he made his first acquaintance with the snake people. In descending at a sharp angle from the side of a fallen tree, his fore-feet just scraped the end of the tail of a nine-foot carpet snake, whose colouring was vivid and fresh. Before Finn knew what had happened, one coil of the sinuous reptile's body was about his left hind-leg, and, as the startled Wolfhound wheeled in his tracks, the big snake's head rose at him with a forbidding, long-drawn "Ps-s-s-s-t!" of defiance. The rapidly tightening pressure about his muscular lower thigh produced something like panic in Finn's breast; but, luckily enough, his panic resulted in speeding him toward precisely the right course of action. He feinted in the direction of his hind-leg, and then, as the snake plunged for his neck, his jaws flashed back and caught the reptile just behind the head. A single bite was sufficient, for it smashed the snake's vertebrae and almost divided it. A moment later Finn's teeth were at the coil about his hind-leg, and in another instant he was free. But he was too greatly shocked to make a meal upon the remains of his enemy, which is what he should have done, and, after taking a good look at its long, brilliantly-coloured body, he was glad to make off down the hill, travelling now with a good deal more caution than he had shown before. It was a merciful thing for Finn that his first contact with the snake people should have brought him in touch only with the powerful and courageous carpet snake, and not with one of the many deadly venomous members of his tribe.

This experience rather shook Finn by reason of its utter strangeness to him. He recalled the spitting venom of the native cat, of whose kill he had caught a fleeting glimpse on the previous night. That again was rather strange and outside his experience. This great open wild world was certainly quite unlike the mild, half-domesticated and cared-for little patch of wild that Finn had claimed as his hunting-ground beside the Sussex Downs. Just then a laughing jackass started a hoarse chuckle above Finn's head, and a big white cockatoo, startled by the jackass, flew screaming out from the branches of a grey gum, with the agonized note in its cry which these birds seem to favour at all seasons, and quite irrespective of the nature of their occupations at the moment. The loose skin on Finn's shoulders moved uneasily, as he trotted along, using the most extreme care.

But, with all his care, he was in strange surroundings, and his bush-lore was all to learn; and because of his strangeness his most careful gait seemed a noisy and clumsy one to the little wild folk of that mountain side, and Finn saw none of them. By chance he saw one of the larger kind, however, and the sight of it added to his sense of strangeness, for it was unlike any other beast he had ever seen. This was a large female rock wallaby, a big grey doe, with her young one. The youngster was at the awkward age, free of the teat, yet unable to travel alone. It was nibbling and playing some distance from its big mother when she had her first warning of Finn's approach, in the crackling of dead twigs under his powerful feet. The youngster showed awkwardness in getting to its snug retreat in the mother's pouch, and so, by these delays, Finn was given his glimpse of a big marsupial in the act of taking a fifteen-foot leap through the scrub. Finn almost sat down on his haunches from astonishment. But, unlike the snake, the wallaby inspired him with no sort of fear, possibly by reason of its evident fear of him. It was, however, another item in the strangeness, the complete unfamiliarity of Finn's present surroundings.

It seems absurd to suggest that the great Wolfhound may have been suffering from loneliness, seeing that he had never been so thankful for anything else in his whole life as he was for his escape from the circus, with its small army of men-folk and animals. But it is a fact that as Finn plodded along through the wild bush to the south of Tinnaburra, he began to be haunted by a sense of isolation and friendlessness. It was now thirty hours since he had tasted food, and it seemed that game shunned his trail, for he saw none of the many small animals he had passed on the previous night; and the sight he had had that day of the great wedge-tailed eagle, of the carpet snake, and of the grey rock wallaby, these only added to the uncanny strangeness of his surroundings. In one sense, persecution, witting and unwitting, had made a wild beast of him during his confinement in the circus; but, by reason of the close confinement which had accompanied these persecutions, increasing self-dependence and self-reliance had not come with the access of fierceness and wildness. Finn inherited fighting instincts and savage ferocity under persecution from a long and noble line of hunting and fighting ancestors. But he inherited few instincts which bore practically upon the matter of picking up his own living, of walking alone, of depending exclusively upon himself, and of leading the solitary life of the really wild carnivora. But this would have troubled him very little if the scene of his present wanderings had been, say, some part of Sussex. As it was, the big snake, the huge eagle, the screaming cockatoo, the nerve-shaking cachophony of the jackass, and the half-flying progress of the big wallaby, all combined with the huge wildness of the country and its vegetation to oppress Finn with the sense of being a lone outcast, an outlier in a foreign land which was full of sinister possibilities. The recollection of that hissing nine-foot worm, of a thickness as great and greater than that of his own legs, lingered unpleasantly with Finn. Also, he was getting very hungry.

While these impressions were sinking into the Wolfhound's mind, the country through which he was travelling was becoming more open, more like a long-neglected park, in which many of the trees were dead, and all had a gaunt and scraggy look, with their thin, pointed grey-green leaves, their curiously tortured-looking limbs, and their long, rustling streamers of decaying bark. But, however Finn might feel in the matter of loneliness, it was with a pang of something like horror that he came presently upon a barbed wire fence, exactly like the one he had leaped on the previous night, directly after leaving the circus. Could it be possible that the circus had been moved during the day to this place, and the barbed wire fence brought with it? Finn prowled cautiously up and down that fence for a couple of hundred yards in each direction, peering beyond it, and sniffing and listening with the extreme of suspiciousness, before he finally leaped the wire and continued his way in a south-easterly direction.

Five minutes later he saw a rabbit, and though he lost it, by reason of the fact that it was sitting within a foot of its burrow and disappeared with lightning-like rapidity at sight of Finn, yet he was cheered by this homely sight, and pursued his way with renewed hope in the matter of supper. A moment later and he stopped dead in his tracks as though shot, and then crawled softly aside to take cover behind a thicket of scrub.

In topping an abrupt little ridge, he had come suddenly into full view of a bark gunyah or shanty, in the triangular opening of which, beside a bright fire, sat a man and a big black hound. A billy-can swung over the fire on a tripod of stakes, and the man was engaged with his supper. Finn did not know, of course, that the man was a boundary-rider, and his dog a not very well-bred kangaroo-hound. The wind was north-west, or the kangaroo-hound would surely have scented Finn's approach and given tongue.

For a long time Finn lay under the cover of his thicket, peering through the darkness at the boundary-rider and his dog. And while Finn gazed his thoughts were very busy, both with matters of his own knowledge and experience, and with vague instinctive knowledge, dream knowledge and dream experiences, which came to him from his forbears of old, even as a setter's or a pointer's hunting knowledge comes to him in the vanguard of experience. The thing that most impressed Finn in the picture he saw was the figure of the black hound, stretched at ease beside the fire, steadily eyeing its master. Every once in a while the man would break a chunk from his damper, or cut a morsel from his meat and toss it to the kangaroo-hound, who opened and closed its jaws like a steel trap, and gulped the gift with portentous solemnity, and absolutely without visible sign of any emotion whatever. The hound showed only watchfulness. Finn heard its jaws snap, and could almost hear the gulp which disposed of each morsel. The sight and the sound gave an edge to the Wolfhound's already keen appetite, and, almost unconsciously, he drew nearer and yet nearer to the gunyah, crouching low to the ground as he moved, his hind-quarters gathered under him ready for springing, like a huge cat.

There was no suggestion of circuses, or cages, or cruelty about the picture Finn saw; but his recent experiences had been far too severe to admit of anything like the old simple trustfulness in his attitude. That could never be again. Even hunger would never make this Wolfhound trustful again. But for all that, there was something in the picture of the camp-fire and the pair who sat beside it which drew Finn strongly; tugging somehow at his heart-strings; pulling at him strongly, softly; drawing him, as by silken cords of instinct and immemorial association. So far as his own life in the world went, this was the first camp-fire Finn had ever seen. One could not say exactly how or why it should have been so, but it is a fact that, while crouching Finn gazed upon and crept closer to that camp-fire, his mind was full of affectionate thoughts and memories of the Master, and of the old days of their happy companionship. Up till this evening he had not thought of the Master for many days.



CHAPTER XVIII

TOO LATE

It was doubtless the camp-fire picture which filled the lone Wolfhound's mind with thoughts of the Master; but, while there is no suggestion of telepathy about it, it was none the less an odd coincidence that, at the very hour of Finn's approach to a camp-fire in the bush, a dozen miles and more to the south-east of Tinnaburra, the Master should have been approaching the big house by the harbour outside the capital city, three hundred miles away, with a mind full of Finn. Yet so it was. And at that moment the Master's reminiscent thoughts of the Wolfhound were to the full as affectionate as were Finn's thoughts of him.

The Mistress of the Kennels had more than justified the doctor's prophecies. Less than a month of life in the mountains had given her back her old energy and strength. The third week there had given her also the acquaintance, soon to ripen into friendship, of a certain squatter's wife, who was spending a few weeks in the hills with her husband and three children. Before the acquaintance was a week old the Mistress of the Kennels had been pressingly invited to make her home with the squatter and his wife at their station, for a time at all events, in order that she might supervise the education of the three youngsters, and, also, give the squatter's wife the benefit of some of her experience in the rearing of dogs. The Master could have found a minor opening on the same station, but decided that he could not afford to take up a life which offered no particular prospect of advancement, and was confirmed in his decision by an offer that was made to him at this time to join, in a working capacity, a small prospecting party which was setting out for a tract of back-block country said to be extremely rich in gold, copper, and silver. And so, for a time, the Master and the Mistress had parted company.

Now, while there are many prospectors in Australia who, during a lifetime of adventurous toil, have never made much more than a labourer's wage, there are others who have made and lost many fortunes, to whose credit may be placed a score or more of rich discoveries, and much wealth enjoyed by other people. The leader of the Master's party was of this latter class, and less than three weeks after the outsetting of this particular expedition, the party had pegged out a considerable number of rich claims. Some of these claims had been of a kind which admitted of good deal of highly profitable alluvial working but the majority called for the use of machinery and the outlay of capital. Accordingly, the party gathered to themselves such surface gold as was obtainable—the Master's share came to L260—and then, laden with samples of ore, returned townward, with a view to selling their claims to mining capitalists, before starting out upon a second and more protracted journey. The fascination of the prospector's calling had gripped the Master strongly, and he gladly agreed to remain a member of the party. But, in the meantime, having reached the city, he had determined to pay a visit to Mr. Sandbrook's house, first, that he might have the satisfaction of seeing Finn again and, secondly, in order that he might try the effect of a substantial money offer in the matter of regaining possession of his Wolfhound. And so now while Finn was thinking of him, in the heart of the wildest part of the Tinnaburra country, three hundred miles away, the Master strode up the hill overlooking the city and the harbour, strongly hopeful that he might soon have the great hound he had bred trotting by his side.

Mr. and Mrs. Sandbrook were both away from home, but one of the daughters of the house explained to the Master how, after "sulking desperately for two whole days," the Wolfhound had basely deserted his luxurious new home, and never been heard of since. She showed the Master an advertisement offering a reward of five-and-twenty pounds for Finn's recovery, and was at some pains to make clear the indubitable fact that her father had paid very dearly indeed for the doubtful privilege of possessing for two days a Wolfhound who had "treated everybody as if they were dirt under his feet." The Master expressed sympathy in sentences which were meant to be loyal excuses for Finn; and then he turned and walked back to the city, heavy at heart for the loss of the great Wolfhound whom he had loved, and feeling vaguely that the money he had made was not such a very precious thing after all. He placed the greater part of it at the disposal of the Mistress of the Kennels, and went back to his fellow-prospectors.