og in the place has a grudge
at him, and hell's loose as oft as he takes a walk. I'm loath to part
with him, but I'll be selling him gladly for fifty dollars to any man
that wants a good sledge-dog, eh?--and a bit collie-shangie every week."

Pichou had heard his name, and came trotting up to the corner of the
store where MacIntosh was talking with old Grant the chief factor, who
was on a tour of inspection along the North Shore, and Dan Scott,
the agent from Seven Islands, who had brought the chief down in his
chaloupe. Pichou did not understand what his master had been saying
about him: but he thought he was called, and he had a sense of duty;
and besides, he was wishful to show proper courtesy to well-dressed and
respectable strangers. He was a great dog, thirty inches high at the
shoulder; broad-chested, with straight, sinewy legs; and covered with
thick, wavy, cream-coloured hair from the tips of his short ears to the
end of his bushy tail--all except the left side of his face. That
was black from ear to nose--coal-black; and in the centre of this
storm-cloud his eye gleamed like fire.

What did Pichou know about that ominous sign? No one had ever told
him. He had no looking-glass. He ran up to the porch where the men
were sitting, as innocent as a Sunday-school scholar coming to the
superintendent's desk to receive a prize. But when old Grant, who had
grown pursy and nervous from long living on the fat of the land at
Ottawa, saw the black patch and the gleaming eye, he anticipated evil;
so he hitched one foot up on the porch, crying "Get out!" and with the
other foot he planted a kick on the side of the dog's head.

Pichou's nerve-centres had not been shaken by high living. They acted
with absolute precision and without a tremor. His sense of justice
was automatic, and his teeth were fixed through the leg of the chief
factor's boot, just below the calf.

For two minutes there was a small chaos in the post of the Honourable
Hudson's Bay Company at Mingan. Grant howled bloody murder; MacIntosh
swore in three languages and yelled for his dog-whip; three Indians and
two French-Canadians wielded sticks and fence-pickets. But order did not
arrive until Dan Scott knocked the burning embers from his big pipe on
the end of the dog's nose. Pichou gasped, let go his grip, shook
his head, and loped back to his quarters behind the barn, bruised,
blistered, and intolerably perplexed by the mystery of life.

As he lay on th