ir--"I have a
young dog to train--a spaniel Monsieur de Savignac has been good enough
to give me. He is too young to learn to follow a scent on dry ground."

Le Gros raised his bull-like head with a jerk.

"De Savignac gave you a _dog_, did he? and he has a dog to give away,
has he?"

The words came out of his coarse throat with a snarl.

I dropped the chair and faced him.

(He is the only man in Pont du Sable that I positively dislike.)

"Yes," I declared, "he gave me a dog. May I ask you what business it is
of yours?"

A flash of sullen rage illumined for a moment the face of the cattle
dealer. Then he muttered something in his peasant accent and sat
glowering into his empty coffee cup as I turned and left the room, my
mind reverting to Madame de Savignac's door which his coarse hand had
closed with a vicious snap.

* * * * *

We took the short cut across the fields often now--my yellow puppy and
I. Indeed I grew to see these good friends of mine almost daily, and as
frequently as I could persuade them, they came to my house abandoned by
the marsh.

The Peruvian gentleman's boarding house had been a failure, and I
learned from the cure that the de Savignacs were hard pressed to pay
their creditors.

It was Le Gros who held the mortgage, I further gleaned.

And yet those two dear people kept a brave heart. They were still giving
what they had, and she kept him in ignorance as best she could,
softening the helplessness of it all, with her gentleness and her
courage.

In his vague realization that the end was near, there were days when he
forced himself into a gay mood and would come chuckling down the lane to
open the gate for me, followed by Mirza, the tawny old mother of my
puppy, who kept her faithful brown eyes on his every movement. Often it
was she who sprang nimbly ahead and unlatched the gate for me with her
paw and muzzle, an old trick he had taught her, and he would laugh when
she did it, and tell me there were no dogs nowadays like her.

Thus now and then he forced himself to forget the swarm of little
miseries closing down upon him--forgot even his aches and pains, due
largely to the dampness of the vine-smothered garconniere whose
old-fashioned interior smelt of cellar damp, for there was hardly a room
in it whose wall paper had escaped the mould.

It was not until March that the long-gathering storm broke--as quick as
a crackling lizard of lightning strike