audy colours here and there in the woods, a haze as of
burning brush in the air--all these pointed to one conclusion: another
hunting season was rolling majestically around. On the very night
previous Earle had oiled the gun, Marian had patched the old hunting
coat, Tommy had smeared the hunting boots with grease, and Frank had
been let in to the fire to witness the performance.

He had never been allowed to follow the buggy to Breton. "It corrupts
the morals of a dog to loaf around a railroad station," Earle had always
said. But this morning he stole secretly after the buggy, and trotted
under the rear axle unobserved by Earle and Tommy. A mile down the road
he thought it safe to show himself. He ran eagerly around the buggy, as
if he had suddenly conceived the idea of going with them, had just
overtaken them, and had no doubt whatever of his welcome.

"Go back!" ordered Earle.

He stopped, ears thrown back, with that banal expression on his face of
a dog pretending not to understand. The histrionic excellence of the
performance was not lost on Tommy, who laughed out loud.

"Let him go, Popper."

"All right--you rascal!"

Frank ran ahead, barking up into the blazed face of the sorrel. Five
miles farther from the crest of a hill they looked down on the village
of Breton Junction, with the squat, sunlit roof of the station in the
middle--box cars grouped about, semaphore above, and long lines of
telegraph poles that came from out the south and disappeared into the
north--one of those small centres in a vast nerve system that controls
the activities of a continent.

At sight of station and box cars, at the sound of a freight engine
hissing lazily, Frank came back to the buggy and looked up inquiringly
into the faces of man and boy. When at a store awning Earle tied the
horse, he followed close at their heels, confidence suddenly gone out of
him. Association and instinct stirred vague recollections of a former
life. Whence came that hissing engine? Where led those long flashing
rails that disappeared into the blue of distant hills?

In a littered room, heated by a pot-bellied stove, with an instrument
on a table that rattled monotonously like a mechanical species of
cricket, a man handed Earle a crate of shotgun shells. Then twinkling,
he looked down at the wide-eyed boy and the big red dog who stuck close
to the boy.

"Steve, which do you think most of? Dog or boy?"

Earle laughed. "Hard to tell, Bill. On the