wakened birds out of the window.

"F'ank?" he said.

Steve Earle had to hold the dog now--had to drag him away from the bed.
They brought him a pan of water. They made him lie down. They came
softly in, nurses and internes, and looked at him. He lay beside the
bed, relaxed now, but panting slightly, his eyes still aglow. They said
it was a wonderful thing he had done. And one of them, she was young and
radiant, gazed long and steadily, as if fascinated, into his gentle,
brave eyes, upraised to hers.

"He knows what he's done!" she said.

VIII

THE TRIAL IN TOM BELCHER'S STORE

It was a plain case of affinity between Davy Allen and Old Man
Thornycroft's hound dog Buck. Davy, hurrying home along the country road
one cold winter afternoon, his mind intent on finishing his chores
before dark, looked back after passing Old Man Thornycroft's house to
find Buck trying to follow him--_trying_ to, because the old man, who
hated to see anybody or anything but himself have his way, had chained a
heavy block to him to keep him from doing what nature had intended him
to do--roam the woods and poke his long nose in every briar patch after
rabbits.

At the sight Davy stopped, and the dog came on, dragging behind him in
the road the block of wood fastened by a chain to his collar and trying
at the same time to wag his tail. He was tan-coloured, lean as a rail,
long-eared, a hound every inch; and Davy was a ragged country boy who
lived alone with his mother, and who had an old single-barrel shotgun at
home, and who had in his grave boy's eyes a look, clear and
unmistakable, of woods and fields.

To say it was love at first sight when that hound, dragging his prison
around with him, looked up into the boy's face, and when that ragged boy
who loved the woods and had a gun at home looked down into the hound's
eyes, would hardly be putting it strong enough. It was more than
love--it was perfect understanding, perfect comprehension. "I'm your
dog," said the hound's upraised, melancholy eyes. "I'll jump rabbits and
bring them around for you to shoot. I'll make the frosty hills echo with
music for you. I'll follow you everywhere you go. I'm your dog if you
want me--yours to the end of my days."

And Davy, looking down into those upraised, beseeching eyes, and at that
heavy block of wood, and at the raw place the collar had worn on the
neck, then at Old Man Thornycroft's bleak, unpainted house on the hill,
with the unhomelik