im so by turning out gun-shy, in
spite of all his efforts to prevent, had it not been for the fact that
the entry was booked as: "Comet; owner, Miss Marian Devant; handler,
Wade Swygert."

Next year he was still more astonished to see in the same paper that
Comet, handled by Swygert, had won first place in a Western trial, and
was prominently spoken of as a National Championship possibility. As
for him, he had no young entries to offer, but was staking everything
on the National Championship, where he was to enter Larsen's Peerless
II.

It was strange how things fell out--but things have a habit of turning
out strangely in field trials, as well as elsewhere. When Larsen
reached the town where the National Championship was to be run, there
on the street, straining at the leash held by old Swygert, whom he
used to know, was a seasoned young pointer, with a white body, a brown
head, and a brown saddle spot--the same pointer he had seen two years
before turn tail and run in that terror a dog never quite overcomes.

But the strangest thing of all happened that night at the drawing,
when, according to the slips taken at random from a hat, it was
declared that on the following Wednesday Comet, the pointer, was to
run with Peerless II.

It gave Larsen a strange thrill, this announcement. He left the
meeting and went straightway to his room. There for a long time he sat
pondering. Next day at a hardware store he bought some black powder
and some shells.

The race was to be run next day, and that night in his room he loaded
half-a-dozen shells. It would have been a study in faces to watch him
as he bent over his work, on his lips a smile. Into the shells he
packed all the powder they could stand, all the powder his trusted gun
could stand, without bursting. It was a load big enough to kill a
bear, to bring down a buffalo. It was a load that would echo and
reecho in the hills.

On the morning that Larsen walked out in front of the judges and the
field, Peerless II at the leash, old Swygert, with Comet at his side,
he glanced around at the "field," or spectators. Among them was a
handsome young woman, and with her, to his amazement, George Devant.
He could not help chuckling inside himself as he thought of what would
happen that day, for once a gun-shy dog, always a gun-shy dog--that
was _his_ experience.

As for Comet, he faced the straw fields eagerly, confidently, already
a veteran. Long ago fear of the gun had left hi