large in appearance, somehow, by the darkness. He was
both astonished and exceedingly indignant that a dingo should have
the brazen impudence to stand and stare at him, within thirty yards
of camp, too. In his hand he carried a stock-whip, with its
fifteen-foot fall neatly coiled about its taper end. Swinging this
by the head of its fall, he flung it with all his might at Finn, at
the same time rising erect in the saddle and spurring his horse
forward at the gallop to ride the supposed dingo down.

"G-r-r-r, you thieving swine! I'll teach ye!"

The voice was strange to Finn, and very hoarse and harsh. The
Wolfhound cantered lightly off, and the rider followed him right
into the scrub before wheeling his horse and turning back toward
the camp. Before he moved Finn gave one snarling growl; and the
reason of that was that the heavy butt-end of the stock-whip handle
had caught him fairly in the ribs and almost taken his breath away.

From the shelter of the bush, Finn peered for a long while at the
camp from which he had been driven; and as he peered his mind held
a tumult of conflicting emotions. He saw the man gather twigs and
light a fire, just as Bill had been wont to do. But he knew now
that the man was not Bill. He heard the man growling and swearing
to himself, just as a creature of the wild does sometimes over its
meals. As a matter of fact, this particular man had been removed
from a post that he liked and sent to this place, because Bill had
left the district; and he was irritable and annoyed about it.
Otherwise he probably would not have been so savage in driving Finn
off. But the Wolfhound had no means of knowing these things.

All his life long, up till the time of his separation from the
Master, Finn had been treated with uniform kindness and
consideration, save during one very brief interval in Sussex. Then,
for months, he had been treated with what seemed to him utterly
purposeless and reasonless cruelty and ferocity. From that
long-drawn-out martyrdom had sprung his deep-rooted mistrust of man.
But it had been reserved for Wallaby Bill's successor to implant in
Finn's mind the true spirit of the wild creature, by the simple
process of driving him forth from the neighbourhood of
civilization--such as it was--into the bush. Finn had been cruelly
beaten; he had been tortured in the past. He had never until this
evening been driven away from the haunts of men.

The writer of these lines remembers having o