o necessary in the highest
relations of man and man and man and dog.

"Sob stuff," laughed the man, "rattles him."

"Do you think we can keep him, Steve?" the woman pleaded.

"Of course."

"But suppose his owners come after him!"

"I tell you, Marian, he dropped from Mars. I know every bird dog fifty
miles around. There's no such breed in _this_ country. One minute."

He crossed the floor to a closet. When he turned he held in his hand a
gun.

At the sight the dog leaped up into the man's laughing face. He ran
round and round the room, his eyes brilliant, his nose quivering. The
man put the gun away.

"To-morrow," he said significantly.

They named him Frank. In a week his old life was a memory, a disturbed
memory, though, such as sometimes lingers after a grotesque dream. He
had awakened, as it were, into a new world, a new and glorious life.
From the porch of the old homestead--it sat on a hill that commanded an
extensive view--he saw in maplike demarcations fields and woods and
bottoms, like those that had rushed past in the dream, lying still and
silent beneath him in sunlit reality.

His bondage was over. He came and went at will. He had his place by the
fire when the night was cold. The strained, restless look left his eyes,
and there was peace in his heart. Earle saw and understood.

"You haven't always been this way, have you, old man?" he asked. "I
guess this is Freedom Hill for you, all right."

Frank did not know--being only a dog--the story that lay back of the
name: the story that Earle's great-grandfather on the morning the old
columned house was completed had summoned the slaves to the porch and
given each his freedom.

"There will be no bondage here," he had said.

Dog and master took long hunts through the fair country that stretched
away in blue undulations to the mountains. They returned at dusk, Earle
with bulging game pockets, gun stuck under his arm, the setter trotting
at his heels. They learned to know each other intimately, to respect
each other's ability.

"One in a million, that dog," was Earle's verdict.

A sense of power, of superabundant life, of fulfilment tingled in his
nerves and bones during these hunts. What joy came with the knowledge
that his nose was growing keener, his judgment more profound! What added
joy that his master knew--his master, stern and unrelenting when he was
careless, generous with praise when he did well.

He developed fine scorn for visiting