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nd him. He had thought of the men about the fireplace of the lodge. They would not desert him. Then as time passed he forgot them. Only a small part of his life had they ever filled. His master and mistress and the boy, his home far away in another world--more and more these filled his thoughts and his desires. Thus sometimes after a hunt, as he lay on the few shucks he had scratched together into a meagre bed, there came to him from the shack the smell of cooking meat; and he saw a big warm kitchen with a cat dozing by the stove, and a fat old negro mammy bending over steaming kettles and sputtering skillets. Then hungry saliva dripped from his mouth to the floor and he choked and swallowed. Again, on chilly nights, when he glimpsed through the chinks a glow in the windows of the shack, there came into his mind a roaring fire of oak logs and a big living room, with a man and a woman and a little boy around the fire, and a gun standing in the corner with a hunting coat draped over it. Then he raised his big head and looked about his prison with eyes that glowed in the dark. It was at these times that he leaped over the boxes and began to gnaw fiercely at his board. But maybe even old Frank's stout spirit would have broken, for hope deferred makes the heart of a dog, as well as the heart of man, sick; maybe he would have ceased to gnaw at his board behind the boxes; maybe he would have yielded to the men at last, submissive in spirit as well as in act, if he had not seen the train and the woman and the little boy. They had taken an unusually long hunt, out of their accustomed course. He had managed to get some distance ahead, pretending not to hear the shouts above the wind; the bird shot they had sent after him had only stung his rump, bringing from him a little involuntary yelp, but not causing him to turn. The wildness of the day had infected him. A high wind blowing out of a sunny, cloudless sky ran in waves over the tawny level fields of broomstraw, and from a body of pines to his right rose a great shouting roar. Suddenly out of the south a whistle came screaming melodiously on the wind. He galloped at an angle to intercept it. Out of the body of pines a long train shot and rushed past, the sun flashing on its sides, its roar deadened by the roar in the pines. Just behind it, among leaves and trash stirred into life and careering madly, along he leaped on the track. A glimpse he caught of the brass-rai
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