nal or new in depositing the luckless
collie pup in one of these wheeled receptacles. He was but following an
old-established custom, familiar to many in his line of life. There was
no novelty to it,--except to Lass.

The car was dark and cold and smelly. Lass hated it. She ran to its
door. Here she found a gleam of hope for escape and for return to the
home where every one that day had been so kind to her. Hazen had shut
the door with such vehemence that it had rebounded. The hasp was down,
and so the catch had not done its duty. The door had slid open a few
inches from the impetus of Hazen's shove.

It was not wide enough open to let Lass jump out, but it was wide
enough for her to push her nose through. And by vigorous thrusting,
with her triangular head as a wedge, she was able to widen the
aperture, inch by inch. In less than three minutes she had broadened it
far enough for her to wriggle out of the car and leap to the side of
the track. There she stood bewildered.

A spring snow was drifting down from the sulky sky. The air was damp
and penetrating. By reason of the new snow the scent of Hazen's
departing footsteps was blotted out. Hazen himself was no longer in
sight. As Lass had made the journey from house to tracks with her head
tucked confidingly under her kidnaper's arm, she had not noted the
direction. She was lost.

A little way down the track the station lights were shining with misty
warmth through the snow. Toward these lights the puppy trotted.

Under the station eaves, and waiting to be taken aboard the almost-due
eleven-forty express, several crates and parcels were grouped. One
crate was the scene of much the same sort of escape-drama that Lass had
just enacted.

The crate was big and comfortable, bedded down with soft sacking and
with "insets" at either side containing food and water. But commodious
as was the box, the unwonted confinement did not at all please its
occupant--a temperamental and highly bred young collie in process of
shipment from the Rothsay Kennels to a purchaser forty miles up the
line.

This collie, wearying of the delay and the loneliness and the strange
quarters, had begun to plunge from one side of the crate to the other
in an effort to break out. A carelessly nailed slat gave away under the
impact. The dog scrambled through the gap and proceeded to gallop
homeward through the snow.

Ten seconds later, Lass, drawn by the lights and by the scent of the
other dog, ca