Old Frank, Irish setter, crawled out of his clean warm kennel underneath the back porch; stretched his long, keen muscles till they cracked; yawned with a fog of frosted breath at the misty winter sun risen over distant mountains; then trotted around the side of the big white house called Freedom Hill—the house that was his master's home and his own.

As if a happy thought had struck him, he broke into a sudden burst of speed. He ran up the front steps three at a bound. He scratched at the side front doors with the fan-shaped transom above. He waited with ears pricked and wagging tail, nose to the crack of the door.

For it was always interesting to speculate on who would open the doors on this particular morning. Maybe it would be the master, Steve Earle, maybe the mistress, Marian Earle, maybe the boy Tommy—maybe old Aunt Cindy the cook. If it were the old black woman she would grumble. She would declare she didn't have time to bother with a dog while her breakfast waited on the stove. She would remind him that he was only a dog. But she would let him in, for all that.

He scratched again. He didn't like to be kept expectant; he grew excited when he had to wait. He had worn a place on the door where he scratched. Suddenly he turned his head sideways, intently listening, for someone had opened the living-room door. He began to pant, and his eyes glowed with gratitude. That step coming down the hall—he would know it anywhere. He could hardly wait now.

The door opened and he looked up past broad shoulders into kindly gray eyes. His ears flattened with reverence, even while his eyes shone with comradeship.

"Come in, old man," said Steve Earle—he always said just that.

Frank stopped before the living-room door, and looked up at his master. He had to depend on human beings in matters like the opening of doors. And now he was in the living room, where a fire of oak logs roared up the chimney. Overwhelming joy seized him that he should be in here. He ran to Marian Earle and laid his head on her lap, looking up into her face; then to Tommy Earle, the boy, who caught hold of his heavy red mane. They were all smiling at him.

He grew embarrassed and poked his head against the shirt bosom of the boy. He sat down before his mistress and raised his paw to shake hands. He wanted to show them in some way that he was grateful for all this. Then he looked around the room and his long silken-red ears drooped.

For this morning was different from other mornings. People were looking down at him in a different way. Not only that, but Lancaster, his master's friend who lived in New York and who had driven out unexpectedly yesterday from Breton Junction, stood before the fire, overcoat over his arm, satchel at his feet. Then he saw on the table his collar and chain. And now old Frank knew—knew he was going on a journey.

But more than that he knew, for his was the wisdom of the seasoned bird dog. Steve Earle's overcoat hung on the hat rack in the hall. His favourite gun was over yonder in the corner, the hunting coat draped over it. Steve Earle was not going.

It was this that made him look with vaguely troubled eyes into the faces of master and mistress and boy. It was this which filled him with foreboding.

"I don't believe," Lancaster was smiling down at him, "I don't believe he's very keen about going, Steve."

"Oh, Frank'll be all right," laughed Earle. "He's a good scout. Just had a sort of exiled feeling for a moment. He's a countryman like the rest of us. He doesn't like to leave home. I'm glad for him to go. He'll see something of the world."

So spoke Steve Earle, the master. But out in the spacious kitchen, hung with pots and pans, where his mistress and Tommy put his pot of breakfast before him and watched while he ate—out in the kitchen old Aunt Cindy, the cook, raised her voice in protest.

"Ain't dey got no dogs up in New York whar dat man come from?" she demanded. "Why don't he have a dog of his own, den? He rich enough to buy a dozen. What he want to stop over here an' borry our dog for? What he gwine to take him to, Miss Marian? Fluridy, you say? Lordy, lordy, dat a long way to take our dog, a powerful long way!"

"But he's goin' to bring him back, though!" cried Tommy.

"Well, honey, I don't know about dat. You never can tell. Dis here's Friday, an' Friday a bad luck day. Sometimes folks, an' dogs, too, set out on Friday, an' never do come back. Lordy, lordy, ain't I see things like dat happen?"

Marian laughed.

"Don't scare the child, Aunt Cindy."

"I ain't skeerin' the chile, Miss Marian. I mean ev'y word I say, Miss. Friday a bad day to start anywhere—a powerful bad day!"

And she went on wiping dishes and shaking her turbaned head.

It was winter when Steve Earle and Lancaster lifted Frank, without protest on his part, into the baggage car at Breton Junction. It was summer in the strange flat country where after two days and a night of travel Lancaster lifted him, rejoicing in his freedom, out again. It was old Frank's staunchness that brought calamity upon him. But that is going ahead.

There had been three days of great shooting. The exiled feeling had left him, and he and Lancaster had become comrades. Lancaster was a good shot and that commanded his respect. Lancaster was a kind man and that commanded his affection. At the lodge in the pines where they lived were other men, hunters like Lancaster, and other dogs, bird dogs like himself, a congenial crowd, sportsmen all.

Sometimes as he lay in the lodge, where if the night was cool a fire was built, and while he listened to the talk and laughter of the men, he thought of home—gravely, without repining, as a mature and self-sufficient man does. Lancaster would take him back, that he knew. If any doubts assailed him, a look into Lancaster's face and into the faces of the other men dispelled them. These men were like his master—men on whom a dog can depend.

On the morning of the fourth day Lancaster took him out alone, with only a guide. Barking with joy, he leaped up into the face of his friend; then started out on his swift strong gallop through the level fields of broomstraw. In his eagerness to find birds he rounded a swamp. A wide, free ranger, he drew quickly out of sight. In a clearing engirt by pines he stopped abruptly—stopped just in time. Right before him, his nose told him, were birds.

He stiffened into an earnest, beautiful point. He would not stir until Lancaster came up behind him and ordered him on. And Lancaster with the guide was far behind and on the other side of the swamp.

A fine sight he made in that lonely country, standing, head erect, tail straight out, sun flashing on his silken red hair. So those two men, driving in a dilapidated wagon along a sandy road in the edge of the pines, must have thought. For the driver, a burly, sallow fellow, pointed him out, pulled on the reins, and the wagon stopped. The two talked for a while in guarded tones; next they stood up on the wagon seat and looked all around; then they climbed out and came stealthily across the field. The burly man held in his hand a rope.

Instinct alarmed the dog, warned him to turn. Professional pride held him rigid, lest he flush those birds and be disgraced. Pride betrayed him. A sudden grip cut his hind legs from under him, threw him flat on his back just as the birds rose with a roar. A thumb and forefinger, clamped in his mouth, pressed on his nose like a vise. He was squirming powerfully in the sand, but a knee was on his throat and the sky was growing black.

Writhing and twisting, he was lifted to the wagon and tied in the bottom with ropes. Then pine trees were passing swiftly overhead. One man was lashing the mule. The other was standing up, looking back.

"See anybody?"

"No."

"Reckon he's one of them thousand-dollar dogs, Jim?"

"Reckon so! Look at him!"

All day the wagon wheels ground the sand. All day old Frank, tied in the bottom of the wagon, sullenly watched those two men in the seat. Once or twice, at the sound of other wheels approaching along the unfrequented road, they pulled aside into the woods and waited. At dusk they turned into a dirty yard. On the porch of an unpainted shack stood a woman, beyond stretched level fields of broomstraw, then the flat blue line of forest, and above the forest a dark-red glow.

They unfastened all the ropes but the one about his neck, pulled him out of the wagon, dragged him off to the log corncrib, shoved him in, untied the rope, and bolted the door. Then the burly man shoved in a pone of cornbread and a pan of water.

"You go to town to-morrow, Sam," he said as he rebolted the door. "Just hang around and listen. See if there's any reward in the paper—big red Irish setter. His owner might telegraph the paper to-night. Sooner we make the deal, the better."

Inside the crib the captive stood listening with shrewdly pricked ears while the mumble of voices died away toward the shack, steps stamped up on the porch, and the door slammed. Then he went cautiously round his prison, whiffing the sides, rearing up on the log walls. Across the rear corner was a pile of boxes. He climbed up on them. They rattled and he jumped quickly down.

But later, after all sound had ceased in the shack and the lights he had been watching through a chink in the logs had gone out, he climbed carefully over behind these boxes. There was space to stand in back here; the floor was of broad boards. Through the cracks he could see that the crib was set up off the ground.

He began to scratch the corner board, then to gnaw. All night long at intervals he sounded like a big rat in a barn. Sometimes he rested, panting hard, then went back to work.

At the first sound of movement in the shack next morning he leaped back over the boxes, and when the burly man opened the door to shove in bread and water he lay in the middle of the floor and looked upon his captor with sullen dignity.

That night he gnawed, and the next. But the surface of the board offered little hold for claws or teeth. Industry, patience, a good cause, do not make boards less hard, nails less maddening. He saw the third day dawn, he heard steps stumping about in the shack, he saw the other man ride into the dirty yard, and he sank down panting on his prison floor, his head between his paws, dismay in his heart.

They brought him his breakfast and there was talk before his prison.

"Two hundred dollars, hell!" said the burly man. "Is that all they're offering? They'll give a thousand but what they'll git that dog!"

"Well," said the other, "I told Fred to watch the papers, and if the reward went up to send us one. You goin' to keep him stopped up in thar?"

"No. I'm goin' to hunt him—over 'bout the swamps where nobody's apt to see him. Then s'pose questions is asked? We don't read no papers. We just found a lost dog and took care of him—see?"

"S'pose he sneaks off on a hunt?"

"Don't let him. If he tries to git out of sight, fill him full of shot."

"The whole thing's risky, Jim."

"Well, what is it ain't risky?"

Old Frank had always associated with gentlemen, hunted with sportsmen. Now he was to find what it means to be threatened, browbeaten, harassed in his work by inferiors.

On the first hunt, as soon as he got out in the field, he was yelled at. He turned in bewilderment. The men hunted on mules, their guns across the pommels of their saddles, and now they were gesticulating angrily for him to come in. He ran to them, looking up into their faces with apologetic eyes, for, however scornful he might be of them in his prison, in the field his professional reputation, his bird-dog honour, were at stake.

"You hunt close!" ordered the burly man.

After that he tried shrewdly to get away, to manoeuvre out of sight under pretext of smelling birds. But the burly man called him in, got down off his mule, cut a big stick, and threatened him. Again, an enraged yell full of danger made him turn to find both guns pointed straight at him and the face of the burly man crimson. He came in, tail tucked, ears thrown back, eyes wild.

"You look here, Jim," said the man called Sam, "you better be satisfied. They're offering four hundred dollars now, and that looks good to me. It's been more'n a week. They ain't goin' to raise it any higher."

"They'll give a thousand!" yelled the burly man.

"All right, Jim—I've warned you!"

Day after day they hunted over the same ground, along the border of a great swamp, where there were no houses, no roads, no cultivated fields. Day after day they grew watchful, until he was almost afraid to get out of the shadows cast by the mule. His tail that he had always carried so proudly began to droop, the gallop that used to carry him swiftly over fields and hills and woodland gave way to a spiritless trot. Fields and woods stretched all about him, the sky was overhead; but he was tied to these ragged men on mules as if by an invisible rope, which to break meant death.

At intervals during the silent nights he still gnawed at his board behind the boxes, but he could not hunt all day and stay awake at night. Sheer weariness of body and spirit made him welcome any rest, even that of his hard prison floor. And there were times when it seemed that he had never known any life but the one he was living now.

At first he had expected Lancaster to find 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-railed rear platform, where a woman rose quickly from a chair, snatched up a boy smaller than Tommy, and held him high in her arms. The boy waved at him, the woman smiled brilliantly, and he ran after them, leaping into the air, barking his hungry soul out.

But the waving woman and the smiling boy whirled away, and in that desolate country a big Irish setter stood between the rails, and looked with straining eyes after the vanishing rear of the northbound Florida Limited, overhung by coils of smoke.

That was what had brought him down here. Those long, flashing rails led home! He stood oblivious of everything else. He did not hear the shouts, he did not see the burly man jump off his mule, cut a stick, and hurry toward him, gun in hand.

He had endured much during those evil days. But what followed was that which neither man nor dog can ever forgive or forget. At the first blow he sprang about, mad with rage, but the man held the gun—to spring was to spring to death. He dropped down at the man's feet and laid his head over the rail. He did not cry out. But the blows sounded hollow on his gaunt ribs, they ached sickeningly into his very vitals.

It could have had but one ending. Another blow, and he would have leaped at the man's throat and to death. But the other man was rushing at them. "Great God, Jim," he cried, "let up! You want to kill him?" White of face, he had grabbed the stick, and the two stood facing one another. From the pines still rose the great shouting roar.

They came home through the dusk, a silent procession: the burly man rode in front, then the other man, and behind, with drooped head and tail, trotted old Frank. Now and then in the gathering gloom the men looked back at him, but not once did he raise his eyes to them.

"I guess I learned him his lesson, Sam."

Sam did not reply.

"I'm gettin' tired of waitin', anyhow."

Still Sam did not reply.

And his silence must have had its effect; for when they reached home the burly man made the dog come into the shack. The wind had ceased, the night turned chilly, and they let him lie down before the fire of pine knots. The woman brought him a pot of hominy; the men felt his ribs as gently as they could. He shrank from the touch more than from the pain. Kindness had come too late, even for a dog.

He lay before the hearth, indifferent to all that happened in this shabby room, for the sight of this fire had made him see another and kindlier fire, in another and kindlier world. These people did not notice his growing restlessness, his furtive glances, his panting breaths, the burning light in his eyes. For steps had come up on the porch; somebody had knocked at the door; the night of their fortune was here!

The burly man hurried to answer, shaking the floor. The open door showed a Negro who handed in a paper. Somebody had sent it from town, he explained, and was gone. The woman snatched the paper. Heads close together, the three stood about a smoking kerosene lamp. The woman was reading in a whiny, excited drawl: "'One thousand dollars reward for——'"

"I told you so!" burst from the burly man.

"Shut up! Listen!" cried the other.

"'Irish setter,'" she read. "'Answers to name Frank. Notify R. A. Lancaster'—Oh, here's a lot of streets and numbers—'New York City.'"

"I told you!" the burly man was shouting. "I told you I knew a dog when I saw one! Look at him, Sam! Look at that head! Look at that dome above the ears! Look at that hair—like silk! The mould that dog was made in is broke!"

"One thousand dollars!" gasped the woman. "One thousand dollars!"

When the two men came out with him to his prison the excitement was still rising. The woman had already gone into another room, and the men had got out a bottle. Their voices as they bolted his door and propped a pole against it sounded loud and thick. They stamped up the steps, and he could hear them laughing and shouting in the shack. Surely they could not hear him gnawing—gnawing frantically at his board behind the boxes. They could not hear him jerking at the end of the board, freed at last from the sleeper below. They could not hear the board give way, throwing him on his haunches. Surely they could not hear the little bark that escaped him when the floor opened.

But out in the yard, free at last, he sank suddenly down flat, head between his paws, very still. The back door of the shack had opened and the light shone out across the littered yard, up the walls of his prison, into his very eyes. The burly man had stepped out on the porch.

It was one of those hollow nights when sounds carry far, when a spoken word is a shout.

"I don't hear nothin', Sam."

The other man staggered out.

"Maybe it was a rat," he said.

He could almost hear them breathing.

"Guess I imagined," said Sam.

"Sure," said the other.

Their figures darkened the doorway. The burly man clapped the other on the back.

"What I tell you, Sam! One thousand——"

The door closed. The merriment would go on till morning. And old Frank, muscles limbering as he ran, soreness passing out of his side, was galloping through the night, toward the railroad—and home.

Morning found him loping easily along the railroad, nose pointed north like a compass. Now and then he left the track to let a train pass, looking at it, if it went north, with wistful eyes, then keeping in sight of it as far as he could. He passed a few small stations with big water tanks, he crossed long, low trestles over boundless marshes, he came at dusk to a village.

Hungry, lonely, he approached an unpainted cottage on its outskirts. Two dogs rushed at him; he faced them and they turned back. He trotted on, hair risen in an angry tuft down his back. He slept curled up in an abandoned shed, but not for long. The morning stars lingering low over the flat horizon kept pace with him, then a sea of mottled pink clouds, then the huge red face of the rising sun.

At midday he pounced on an animal like a muskrat that tried to cross the track—a tough thing to kill, a tougher to eat. At dusk he drew near a farmhouse, where a man was chopping wood. The man picked up a stick, ordered him away, then went on chopping.

He made no more overtures after this, but many a farmer thought a fox had been among his chickens. Habits of civilization had given way perforce to habits of outlawry. Only as he galloped north day after day his eyes still shone with the eager light of the bird dog's craving for human companionship and love.

The number of tracks that branched out from the city whose environs he skirted bewildered him for a minute; then he took the one that pointed due north. All the days he travelled, part of the nights. Sometimes at first he had wondered why he did not reach home, at last to travel always north had become a habit, and he wondered no more.

But the time came when he could not keep on going as fast and as long as formerly. There were days when he found hardly anything at all to eat. The endless ties passing under him began to make him dizzy and faint. His long hair was matted; his ribs showed; his eyes grew haggard. It was a wonder the young man knew him for what he was.

He had come into the freight yards of a town at nightfall, in a cold, driving rain, a bedraggled, forlorn figure, a stray dog. A passenger train had just passed him, stopped at the station ahead, then pulled out. A light glistened down wet rails into his hungry eyes and blinded him. Rows of silent dripping box cars hid the man crossing the track at the street. Frank almost ran into him. Both stopped. The man was buttoned up to his neck in an overcoat and carried a satchel.

"Hello!" he said.

Frank started to slink back under a box car.

"Come here!" He stooped down and looked into the dog's eyes. "Where did you drop from?" he said. "You come with me! Let's talk it over."

In a warm, firelit cottage room a young woman ran to meet the man—then for the first time she saw the dog.

"Why, John!" she cried. "Where did you get him?"

"He got me," laughed the man, "on the way home from the station. He's starving. Get him something to eat. Then I'll tell you about it."

She glanced at a cradle, whose covers were being suddenly and violently agitated.

"I'll answer for this old fellow," assured the man. "He's seen better days. I think I've seen him before."

Out in the bright little kitchen, where they scraped together all the scraps they could find, he went on:

"Of course I may be mistaken. But at a little station where I sell goods sometimes, I used to see a big red Irish setter following a tall man and a little boy. I think they lived out in the country from there. The kind of folks and the kind of dog you don't forget. If it wasn't so far—hang it, I believe it's the dog, anyhow! Well, we'll take good care of him, and next week when I go through I'll find out."

The young woman in a raincoat came out in the back yard and held the streaming lantern while the man arranged some sacks underneath the porch and closed and bolted the back gate. He heard them go up the back steps, heard them moving about in the house. Like a decent old fellow he licked the rain from his silken coat, smoothed out the matted strands, then curled up comfortably in his dry bed and slept deep and long.

He stayed with them a week, while strength returned to his muscles, fire to his eyes, courage to his heart. But as he lay before their hearth at night he saw always in his mind that other fire—the fire of home. The stars were still shining that morning when he scrambled over the high back fence and was gone.

But it was with new life and confidence that he continued his journey. He slunk no more on the outskirts of towns; he passed boldly through. Fortune favoured him now; on the second day after he left them he ran into snow, and rabbits are almost helpless before a swift pounce in the snow.

The drifts grew deeper as he travelled north. Fields of dead cotton stalks were varied by fields of withered corn stubble, yellow, broken rows on white hills. There was an occasional big farmhouse now, a house with white pillars like his master's, set in a grove of naked oaks. And at last, following fence rows and hedges, lines of cylindrical cedars climbed over and over high hills. The look of home was on the face of nature, the smell of home was in the air.

It was a bitter cold afternoon when the mountains first took shape in the distance. He could make them out, though the sky was heavily overcast. Those were the mountains he saw every morning from the back porch of his home. He barked at them as he ran. He would lie before his own fire this night.

At dusk sudden hunger assailed him. On a hill was a big farmhouse, the windows aglow, smoke veering wildly from the chimneys. And on the wind came the smell of cooking meat. He stopped on an embankment, pricked his ears, licked his chops. Then he scrambled down the embankment and like a big fox made his way along a fence row toward that house from whence came the smell of cooking meat. At the same time flakes of snow began to drive horizontally across the white fields.

Suddenly from out the yard two stocky cream-coloured dogs rushed at him. They came with incredible swiftness through the snow, considering their short bench legs. Frank waited, head up, ears pricked. One was a female; it was she who came first. He would not fight a female; he even wagged his tail haughtily. But in a twinkling she was under him and had caught his hind leg in a crushing, grinding grip. He lunged back, snarling, and the other dog sprang straight at his throat.

He was down in the snow, he was on his feet again, he was ripping the short back of the dog at his throat into shreds, his fangs flashing in the dusk. He was dragging them by sheer strength off toward the railroad; but he could not tear that grip from his hind leg, nor that other grip from his throat.

He did not cry out—he was no yelping cur. But it was growing dark, the air was full of snow, the grip was tightening on his throat, the other grip had pulled him down at last to his haunches. Then two men came running toward them, the one white, the other black. The white man grabbed the dog at his throat, the black man the dog under him. The white man was pounding the dog's nose with his fist, was cramming snow down his bloody mouth.

"They'll kill him, Will!" he panted. "Go get some water to throw in their faces."

The black man disappeared running—came back running, a bucket in each hand.

And now it was over, and off there the white man held both his dogs by their collars. They were panting, their wrinkled eyes half closed, their mouths dripping bloody foam. For many yards around the snow was churned into little hillocks. And there lay old Frank, panting hard, head up, eyes shining.

"Pick him up, Will!" said the white man. "His leg's broke."

"Cap'n," said the negro, "I'm afraid of him."

The white man swore, shaking his dogs angrily. That was some man's bird dog, a fine one, too.

"I believe that's Steve Earle's setter, from Freedom Hill across the river!" he cried above the wind. "By George, I believe that's just who it is! We'll go and get the sled!"

But when they hurried back with the sled the wounded dog was gone. They followed his bloodstained tracks across the field, up the embankment, and to the railroad. They looked at them between the rails, fast filling with snow. The white man put his hands to his ears.

"He'll freeze to-night," he said.

In the teeth of the wind, like a three-legged automaton, Frank was fighting his way doggedly through the night. The wind almost blew him off the embankments; the swirling waves of snow choked him. Maybe he would have lain down, maybe it would have happened as the man said, if it had not been for the spirit within him and for what he saw.

For just before him the superstructure of an iron trestle rose pencilled in snow against the night. Far below a black river wound serpentine into the mists. A mile to the left, he knew, was Squire Kirby's. In those dim bottoms on either side of the trestle he and his master and the squire had hunted a hundred times. The birds had scattered on those wooded hills now vibrant with the blast. Out on the trestle he picked his slow, hesitating way.

Suddenly he cried out sharply. A mighty gust of wind striking him in mid-air and almost hurling him into the blackness below had caused him to put down as a brace his wounded hind leg. Gasping, trembling, he lay down for a minute on the whitened ties, one leg hanging through. Then he rose and doggedly picked his way on.

On the high embankment at the other side of the trestle he stopped and, in spite of the blood stiffened under his throat and the water frozen on his shoulders, he raised his quivering nose. Beyond those misty bottoms, to the left, over those storm-swept ridges, lay Freedom Hill.

Halfway down the embankment he cried out again. He had slipped in the snow and fallen on his leg. Under shelter of the embankment he rested for a moment, panting as if the night were hot. Then lunging, tottering, falling, rising again, panting, gasping but with never another cry, old Frank fought his way up the river bottoms, past the farm of John Davis, across the field in front of Tom Belcher's store, now a dim smudge in the blackness—dragged himself over the last ridge, dragged himself home.

Belly deep in drifted snow he stood at the corner of the lot fence and surveyed the white distance that lay between him and his kennel—more unattainable to his weakness than a quarter of a continent had been to his strength. And while he stood there the roaring of the wind in the great oaks overhead, the cracking of their naked branches, the swirl of snow against his nose and in his eyes, bewildered him, and suddenly something deep within him whispered to him to lie down and rest.

But the sudden terror of death lurked in that whisper and, head dragging in the snow, he staggered across the yard toward his kennel. In here he would crawl and hide from that fearful thing that had told him to lie down in the snow and rest. He reached the kennel, he touched it with his eager nose, he tried to root his way in between the slats which he had not known were there. Then gasping and helpless he sat down before it. The door of his kennel was nailed up. The great hulk of the house loomed dark and silent above it. Maybe his people were gone!

With this new terror in his heart he fought his way around to the side of the house. Underneath his master's window he raised his head and tried to bark. But the wind snatched the muffled sound out of his throat and hurled it away into the darkness. Once more the still small voice that terrified even while it soothed pleaded with him to lie down and rest. Maybe he would have listened now, maybe he would have yielded, if he had not seen through the living-room curtains the sudden flicker of firelight on the ceiling. They were not gone—they were only asleep. Tail wagging strangely as if someone in there had spoken to him, he rose for the last time and struggled toward the front of the house. At the corner a gust of wind, waiting in ambush, rushed at him and stopped him where he was. A moment he waited for it to die down, then dragged himself to the steps, up the steps, his ruined hind leg hitting each one like a rag tied in a knot and frozen.

By the big front door he sat down and raised to it his suffering eyes. A hundred times it had opened to his whim; now in his need it barred his way. Gathering all his remaining strength, he raised his paw—the paw he shook hands with—and scratched. There was no sound from within.

Once more—it would be the last time, so heavy had his leg become—he raised his paw and scratched. Then careless of all things, of master and mistress, of life and death, he sank down before the door and laid his head on the sill.

He never knew how it happened. He only knew there was a burst of light in his eyes, and somebody had picked him up. Then faces were bent close to him; something hot and gagging was being poured down his throat; a voice—the most commanding voice in all the world—ordered him to swallow, swallow. And now he saw before him, as he lay on his side, a roaring fire whose flames licked and twisted among oak logs piled high into the chimney.

Strange that he had not known that fire all the time; that he had not known who these people were. But then he had been on a long journey, and he was tired, very tired. He must tell them he knew now, let them know he appreciated what they were doing. He always did that even with strangers, and these—they were his master, his mistress, his Tommy. He must——

It was Tommy's shrill voice that broke the silence.

"Look, Papa, look, look! He wagged his tail. He wagged his old tail!"

THE END