toppled. Only by luck did she land on her
feet instead of her head, upon the greasy pavement of the street.

But she sprang forward again, with a little cry of indignant dismay,
and reached desperately into the moving car for Bruce, calling him
eagerly by name.

Dr. Halding was steering with his left hand, while his viselike right
arm still encircled the protesting collie. As the Mistress ran
alongside and grasped frantically for her doomed pet, he let go of
Bruce for an instant, to fend off her hand--or perhaps to thrust her
away from the peril of the fast-moving mud-guards. At the Mistress's
cry--and at the brief letup of pressure caused by the Doctor's menacing
gesture toward the unhappy woman--Bruce's long-sleeping soul awoke. He
answered the cry and the man's blow at his deity in the immemorial
fashion of all dogs whose human gods are threatened.

There was a snarling wild-beast growl, the first that ever had come
from the clownlike puppy's throat,--and Bruce flung his unwieldy young
body straight for the vivisector's throat.

Halding, with a vicious fist-lunge, sent the pup to the floor of the
car in a crumpled heap, but not before the curving white eyeteeth had
slashed the side of the man's throat in an ugly flesh-wound that drove
its way dangerously close to the jugular.

Half stunned by the blow, and with the breath knocked out of him, Bruce
none the less gathered himself together with lightning speed and
launched his bulk once more for Halding's throat.

This time he missed his mark--for several things happened all at once.

At the dog's first onslaught, Halding's foot had swung forward, along
with his fist, in an instinctive kick. The kick did not reach Bruce.
But it landed, full and effectively, on the accelerator.

The powerful car responded to the touch with a bound. And it did so at
the very moment that the flash of white teeth at his throat made
Halding snatch his own left hand instinctively from the steering-wheel,
in order to guard the threatened spot.

A second later the runabout crashed at full speed into the wall of a
house on the narrow street's opposite side.

The rest was chaos.

When a crowd of idlers and a policeman at last righted the wrecked car,
two bodies were found huddled inertly amid a junk-heap of splintered
glass and shivered wood and twisted metal. The local ambulance carried
away one of these limp bodies. The Place's car rushed the smash-up's
other senseless victim to t