red flame and for a most thrilling racket.
Lad was more impressed than ever by the man's wondrous possibilities as
a midnight entertainer. He waited, gayly expectant, for more. He got it.

There was a second rackety explosion and a second puff of lightning
from the man's out-flung hand. But, this time, something like a red-hot
whip-lash smote Lad with horribly agonizing force athwart the right hip.

The man had done this,--the man whom Laddie had thought so friendly and
playful!

He had not done it by accident. For his hand had been out-flung
directly at the pup, just as once had been the arm of the kennelman,
back at Lad's birthplace, in beating a disobedient mongrel. It was the
only beating Lad had ever seen. And it had stuck, shudderingly, in his
uncannily sensitive memory. Yet now, he himself had just had a like
experience.

In an instant, the pup's trustful friendliness was gone. The man had
come on the Place, at dead of night, and had struck him. That must be
paid for! Never would the pup forget,--his agonizing lesson that night
intruders are not to be trusted or even to be tolerated. Within a
single second, he had graduated from a little friend of all the world,
into a vigilant watchdog.

With a snarl, he dropped the bag and whizzed forward at his assailant.
Needle-sharp milk-teeth bared, head low, ruff abristle, friendly soft
eyes as ferocious as a wolf's, he charged.

There had been scarce a breathing-space between the second report of
the pistol and the collie's counterattack. But there had been time
enough for the onward-plunging thief to step into the narrow lip of the
water-pipe ditch. The momentum of his own rush hurled the upper part of
his body forward. But his left leg, caught between the ditch-sides, did
not keep pace with the rest of him. There was a hideous snapping sound,
a screech of mortal anguish; and the man crashed to earth, in a dead
faint of pain and shock,--his broken left leg still thrust at an
impossible angle in the ditch.

Lad checked himself midway in his own fierce charge. Teeth bare, throat
agrowl, he hesitated. It had seemed to him right and natural to assail
the man who had struck him so painfully. But now this same man was
lying still and helpless under him. And the sporting instincts of a
hundred generations of thoroughbreds cried out to him not to mangle the
defenseless.

Wherefore, he stood, irresolute; alert for sign of movement on the part
of his foe. But there was