lustily by old Aunt Cindy's strong wrist,
the supper bell rang. At the top of the kitchen steps the mother waited
with happy face. And up these steps, the sinking sun shining upon them,
went father and boy and dog together.

III

THE BOLTER

One January afternoon there got off the train at a straggling little
Southern town a massive man past middle age, with a craggy face and
deep-set eyes, and the looks and manner of one with power and wealth.
His name was William Burton, manufacturer of the famous Burton ploughs,
and he could have bought this town out, lock, stock, and barrel, and the
county in which the town sat, and a very considerable portion of the
state itself. What he had come to buy, though, was a dog.

During the trip down, in his stateroom, instead of examining financial
reports or reading the latest magazines, old Burton had studied, with
the aid of his spectacles and of Ferris, his professional dog handler,
the pedigree of a young pointer that lived in this town. He had noted
how at recurrent intervals in the family tree occurred the word
Champion. Already, in the years since he entered, as a hobby, the
field-trial game, he had bought, at the recommendation of handlers, some
hundreds of bird dogs. All of them had been disappointments. Now he had
taken the matter into his own hands. Usually when he took charge of a
thing, that thing succeeded.

A lazy Negro at the dreary railroad station showed him and Ferris the
way to Jim Arnold's place--a neat, modest cottage on the edge of the
town from whose back yard, as they approached, came a challenging bark.
A telegram had preceded them, and Jim Arnold himself, veteran bird-dog
trainer, owner of the young pointer, came out to meet them, hobbling
painfully on a stick.

Ferris could have explained the hobble and the stick. It's the kind of
thing you see now and then among field-trial men. Earlier in the season,
while running in a field trial the very dog who had brought the visitors
here, his horse had fallen, crushing Arnold's knee. Jim Arnold could
never ride a horse again. Consequently, Jim Arnold could never again run
a dog in a National Championship race.

With the crippled man came his daughter Jessie, a slim, dark-eyed girl,
pretty in a serious sort of way. Burton was hardly conscious of her, but
Ferris respectfully raised his hat. Dog men knew Jessie Arnold because
she sometimes rode with her father and helped him handle. She had been
with h