ove me!"

Courteously he would wag his tail. Futilely, out of upraised, gently
brave eyes he would plead for freedom--from a woman who did not know,
and could not understand.

Then Lancaster, a frequent caller at the apartment of Mrs. Devant, had
borrowed him. That morning Lancaster himself had put him aboard this
train. "The trip," Lancaster had said, "will be easier if we don't crate
him." All day he had known he was being hurled away. Was another grimy
wilderness of brick his destination? Had the baggageman closed the door
forever on all he loved in the world?

The train slowed up, stopped. The baggageman opened the door and
dropped to the ground. They were in the country and the sun had set.
Through the door the dog looked across a dusky field to a black horizon
of forest. Above this forest flamed a scarlet glow. Something far in its
depths called him, and he plunged against the chain.

He was jerked back, choking, the glow out yonder reflected in his
desperate eyes. He backed against the wall, took a running start, and
plunged again. The breaking of his collar hurled him against a trunk on
the other side of the car, dazed and confused.

A sharp approaching whistle, an ever-loudening roar in that brooding
silence out there aroused him to a sense of his surroundings. A
telegraph pole that had stood black athwart the glow began to move
backward. The silhouette of the baggageman rose in the doorway. The dog
gathered himself together and leaped. He landed on shining rails, in
front of a blinding headlight; the pilot just missed him as he sprang
out of the way. A northbound passenger train roared past. From the other
train two sharp whistles, the screeching of brakes, and a shout. For a
moment he stood on the slight embankment, his ears thrown defiantly
back. Then he turned, and with great lung-filling leaps bounded toward
the glow in the west.

It was dark in the woods when he stopped and lapped loud and long of
icy running water. An alarmed owl went flopping heavily away under the
low-growing branches. Underneath this embodied spirit of night galloped
the dog, filling the woods with barks, leaping high into the air, his
teeth snapping and clicking like castanets. In the edge of a straw field
looked down upon by stars he rushed a covey on the roost. One struck
against a tree and came chirping down. Dan leaped upon him. His hunger
satisfied, he tramped a pile of leaves into a bed, and slept.

At sunrise he chased