y brute, ain't 'e! Strong as a mule, too.
_I'd_ want to be paid pretty 'andsome fer the keepin' o' such a
brute; but the American gent's red 'ot ter get 'im, I can tell yer.
Biggest ever bred, they tell me. I think I shall 'ave to stick on
another tenner, eh, Bill? Come on!"

Their very voices were a misery to the shrinking, aching, choking
Finn, who stood shuddering in his fetid den, his sensitive nose
wrinkling with horror and disgust. His need of water was the thing
which hurt him the most cruelly; but the nature of his prison was a
good deal of a torture, too. Remember that his life so far had been
as cleanly and decent in detail as yours or mine. Certainly this
was a sad plight for the hero of the Kennel Club Show, and the
finest living descendant of a fifteen hundred year old line of
princes among dogs.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER VIII

FINN WALKS ALONE

For a long while after the men had left the scene of Finn's
miserable captivity, he remained standing, and occupying as small a
space as possible in his prison. The fastidiousness bred in him by
careful rearing told severely against Finn just now. He had never,
until this night, been without water to slake his thirst; and
never, never had he smelt anything so horrible as the earth of the
little den in which he was now confined. Also, the place was
actually filthy, as well as apparently so. Finn could not bring
himself to move in it. He stood shrinking by the door, with his
nose near a crack beside its hinges. For long he reflected upon the
events of that night, without moving. Then, gradually, thoughts of
Kathleen and Tara, and the sweet cleanliness and freedom of his home
beside the Downs, came swimming into Finn's mind, and these
thoughts seemed to add intolerably to the aching of his bruised
bones and muscles, to the soreness of those spots in which his skin
had been broken, and to the misery of the thirst which kept his
tongue protruding at one side of his jaws.

Unable to bear these things any longer, Finn turned cautiously
toward the middle of his loathsome prison, and, though his feet
shrank from the task, scraped a hollow place in its midst of about
the bigness of a wash-hand basin. Then, treading as though upon hot
bricks, he squirmed his great body round to avoid touching the
walls of his prison, and sat on his haunches in the hollow he had
made. He was now filled with a desire to inform Tara and the
Master, and, it may be, the rest of the