ponderable dog by me, as an emblem of something I had missed through
one too many shuffle of the cards before this big game began. Yet Miss
Lansdale had clearly resolved to deprive my dreaming of even this slight
support of realness. I tried always to remember, in her behalf, that she
did not know the circumstances, and she herself very soon discovered
that she did not know Jim. The assaults she made upon his fidelity
proved her to be past-mistress of tactics and strategy. No possible
approach to his heart did she leave untried. She flattered and petted,
lured, cajoled, entreated; she menaced, commanded, stormed, raged.
Drawing inspiration from a siege celebrated in antiquity, she sought to
secrete her forces--not in a horse of wood, but within the frames of
numerous fowl, picked to the bone but shredded over so temptingly with
fugitive succulence as to have made a dog of feelings less fine her
slave for life.

It was not until the desperate woman had, in the terminology of Billy
Durgin, been "baffled and beaten at every turn," that I could get into
communication with her on a basis at all acceptable to a free-necked
man. Having proved to the last resource of her ingenuity that Jim was
more than human in his loyalty, she seemed disposed to admit, though
grudgingly enough, that I myself might be not less than human to have
won him so utterly. And thereafter I found it often practicable to
associate with her on terms of apparent equality.

She surrendered, I believe, on a day when she had thought to lure Jim
into her boat,--fatuously, for was I not a distinguishable figure in the
landscape? Her hopes must have been high, for she had but lately
repleted him with chicken-bones divinely crunchable, and then bestowed
upon him a charlotte russe, an unnatural taste for which she had
succeeded in teaching him.

With something of a swagger,--she swaggered in a rather starchy white
dress that day, and under a garden hat of broad rim,--she had enticed
him to the water's edge, so that I must have been nervous but for
knowing the dog through and through.

Her failure was so crushing, so swift, so entire, that for an instant I
almost failed to rejoice in her open humiliation. Seated in the boat,
oars poised, she invited Jim with soft speech and a smile that might
have moved an iron dog without occasioning any remark from me; but Jim,
noting, with one paw already in the boat, that I was not to be of the
party, turned quickly from h