ld have missed them.

Which, of course, was an absurd way for two reasonably sane people to
regard a mere dog. But, then, Lad was not a "mere" dog.

Thus it was that he took his place, by invitation, in the car's
tonneau, amid a ruck of hand-luggage; as the camp-ward pilgrimage
began. Ten miles farther on, the equipment truck halted to take aboard
a guide named Barret, and his boy; and their professionally reliable
old Irish setter.

This setter had a quality, not over-common with members of his grand
breed; a trait which linked his career pathetically with that of a
livery-plug. He would hunt for anybody. He went through his day's work,
in stubble or undergrowth, with the sad conscientiousness of an elderly
bookkeeper.

Away from the main road, and up a steadily rising byway that merged
into an axle-snapping mountain-track, toiled the cars; at last coming
to a wheezy and radiator-boiling halt at the foot of a rock-summit so
steep that no vehicle could breast it. In a cup, at the summit of this
mountain-top hillock, was the camp-site; its farther edge only a few
yards above a little bass-populated spring-lake.

The luggage was hauled, gruntily, up the steep; and camp was pitched.
Then car and truck departed for civilization. And the two weeks of
wilderness life set in.

It was a wonderful time for old Lad. The remoteness and wild stillness
of it all seemed to take him back, in a way, to the wolf-centuries of
his ancestors. It had been monstrous pleasant to roam the peaceful
forest back of the Place. But there was a genuine thrill in exploring
these all-but manless woods; with their queer scents of wild things
that seldom ventured close to the ordained haunts of men.

It was exciting, to wake at midnight, beside the smoldering campfire,
and to hear, above the industrious snoring, of the guide and his boy,
the stealthy forest noises; the pad-pad-pad of some wary prowler
circling at long range the twinkling embers; the crash of a far-off
buck; the lumbering of some bear down to the lake to drink. The almost
moveless sharp air carried a myriad fascinating scents which human
nostrils were too gross to register; but which were acutely plain and
understandable to the great dog.

Best of all, in this outing, Lad's two deities, the Mistress and the
Master, were never busy at desk or piano, or too much tangled up with
the society of silly outsiders, to be his comrades and playmates. True,
sometimes they hurt his superse