IN a ravine where men seldom placed their feet, a rod or more up a rocky, bushy hillside, in a hole almost concealed by an overhanging dewberry bush, lay a dog. A big dog. His head, huge, disfigured, terrible, rested upon the earth between his paws, and the lids had fallen over the fierce eyes, which glowed with changing lights when open. The big dog was asleep. His back-bone was a succession of knots, with small depressions between. It terminated in a tawny stump, perhaps six inches long, which stood for a tail. The bones above his hips jutted out like door-knobs; his flanks were sunk in cavernously, and palpitated with each sharply indrawn breath. There were scars on the ribbed body; old scars which had healed bare and blackly; others where the aggrieved flesh was beginning to join, and still others which showed raw and red—almost dripping, and about these tiny gnats had gathered and sat in rows at their feast, while their colorless bodies quickly took on a crimson shade. A large green fly boomed into the hole in the hill, zigzagged about over the recumbent form, and then plumped his spiked feet down in one of the rawest of the wounds. A convulsive shiver passed over the side of the dog and the green fly lost his foothold; but, not to be cheated out of his meal, he returned more cautiously, and, standing among the scant, scrubby hair at the edge of the moist fissure he stretched out his neck and thrust out his tongue. The muscles along the bruised side moved again, but more slightly, and the fly and the gnats ate and drank their fill.

The dog’s high shoulder-blades seemed ready to burst through their covering; there was a deep hollow between them. The neck was short, thick, bull-like. One ear was bleeding—the other was gone, and a tangled mass of gnarled flesh marked where it had been. About the grim muzzle were some patches of sheep wool, draggled and red.

The dog had been out nearly all night, and it was now early morning. He had travelled many miles since the sun had set the day before; ranging back and forth, skulking, hiding, waiting. Before he returned to his hiding-place he had battened on blood and fought a battle.

The dog had no name, no lineage, no friends, no home. He was simply the dog. He bore within him the strains of a badly mixed ancestry, and had been hated and cuffed since puppyhood. Hanging to the outskirts of a straying gypsy band, he had come to the neighborhood where he now abode. A farmer whose flocks were beginning to multiply swiftly saw the uncouth, bony frame and the defiant face, and thought that here was a fitting guardian for his ewes and lambs. He bought him for a fifty-cent piece and set him to watch over his sheep. But there came a night when the farmer’s allowance of food did not satisfy him; when the hard bread and cold stuff flung to him only whetted his appetite. That night he trotted to his post with guile in his heart. But hour after hour he held himself in check, though at times almost rubbing shoulders with his fleece-covered charges. It was past the turning of night, and his stomach was empty, and hurting him. The master was asleep; the night was so still; he was hungry, hungry, and had never known a law! All around him sleeping patches of white dotted the grass. He was lying down, too, but his red-green eyes were wide, for he was the guardian of the flock. There is a point that marks the limit of endurance. Directly the dog arose, swiftly, silently, stood rigid for the briefest space of time, then launched himself at the soft throat of a half-grown lamb. A stifled bleat; a struggle which ended with its inception, and the traitor lay upon his belly and lapped the warm blood and worried at the tender neck of his victim. That was the first. When the farmer came out before sunup the next morning, he found the mangled bodies of five of his lambs that had been born that spring, and he whom he had placed to watch over them gone.

In this way was the dog accursed and outlawed, and the heart of every person and thing was set against him.

He, for his part, fostered hate by day and wreaked it by night. Every step he took was fraught with danger. Men were against him, and men’s dogs were against him. He soon learned that the men carried long sticks that spat flame, and at one time when the fire jumped out, and the stick was pointed towards him, he felt a sharp pain in the fleshy part of his thigh, and blood ran down his leg. Then he grew more cautious, and ventured out only at night, when he had to smell and feel his way. He could baffle the men in the night, and his own blood-kind were a little slow in chasing him. But they had fallen upon him once unexpectedly, and he was a sorry sight when he at last broke from them and escaped to cover. His wounds upon that occasion were long in healing, for there is venom in a dog fang. He was sick for many days, and ate nothing but certain herbs which instinct told him would counteract the poison in his system. He grew well after a long period of pain and weakness, and upon his next raid he came too near the house and had one of his ears shot off by a farmer’s boy. That night he crept back without his spoil, staggering up the ravine with a red trail behind him. He scratched away the dirt on one side of his den, and laid his wounded head on the cool, black earth. This made the blood to clot, and to finally stop running, but the dog was so weak that he lay over on his side, catching his breath in jerks. Thereafter he fasted many days, because of his spent strength, but at last he essayed to crawl to the back of his hole and feebly excavate some provender which he had hidden against this very day a fortnight ago. When he had eaten, new energy began to diffuse itself through his worn body, and once more he grew well, but more ugly than ever, and in his heart was nothing but vindictive hate, and treachery, and craft. He was an outcast, hunted by every living thing that was big enough to harass and kill. He had skulked and run all his life. Now things would change. He would turn hunter, and harry and slay until they made an end of him.

The big green fly, forgetting caution in his hungry zeal, probed his lance-like tongue a little too deep in the sensitive flesh. The dog awoke and snapped viciously at his tormentor, but the pop-eyes of the fly saw the movement, and he escaped the cavernous jaws projected towards him. The dog fell to licking his new wounds. Between the hours of twelve and four of the past night he had sallied forth, and found the flock in a pen near the barn, unguarded, as he thought. To bring one down was play. He gorged himself on the blood and was turning to another victim, when a form larger than his own leaped at his throat from the shadows. The dog wheeled, and the fangs of the attacker closed in his side. For a while they wrestled silently, save for deep-throated snarls. Then of a sudden the dog broke away, leaped from the pen, and ran. The wolf-hound attempted to follow, but his feet slipped on the blood-soaked ground as he made his jump, his breast struck the top rail of the pen and he fell back, and did not make the effort again. The dog sought his den, resentful, sore, desperate. That night he slept from weariness; in the early morning the green fly woke him. In his round, ugly, disfigured head was born the thought that he would turn hunter now, and wreak vengeance on his persecutors.

Throughout the day he lay still and rested, licking his sores at intervals, and dozing from time to time. When the black night came he arose, stretched himself and yawned hugely, shook his big body vigorously and stalked forth with the fell intent in his heart to kill—kill—kill!

With his keen nostrils set to catch every odor the breeze might bring; his one macerated ear cocked for the slightest sound, he trotted down the ravine and soon emerged into the open country. He had come to know the neighborhood well. Who sat up late; who kept close watch; who slumbered careless of his stock. Past houses where lights burned in the windows, making detours to avoid possible detection, crouching low on his haunches when he heard footsteps,—the dog pursued his way through the night. Mile after mile, over fences and ditches, through the corn, along the roadside when it ran parallel with his purpose. At last he passed the boundary which had marked all of his wanderings heretofore, and as he entered this unexplored territory he moved more freely and with less caution. His trained muzzle scented a familiar smell. Through a rail fence he dragged himself, scratching his torn side cruelly on a splinter as he did so, then started down a hill-slope briskly. Soon he found them, alone, sleeping, helpless. One by one he pulled them down. As each fell, the survivors would huddle closer together, dazed and afraid. First the lambs, then the ewes, then the bucks. The blood-lust grew in the dog’s savage heart with each fresh massacre. The first four had sated his appetite and filled his maw to repletion, but his mission was to kill without mercy. His strong jaws snapped out their lives one by one, and the bell-wether went last. He was old, and had seen killers at work before. He had always kept well in the background until the bloodthirsty invader had got his fill, and gone away. To-night he had stayed on the further side of the flock, expecting the killer to leave after each victim. But he did not leave, and kept drawing nearer to him instead. The end of it was that the bell-wether ran, but there was something that ran faster than his shadow—something that pounced heavily upon his back—and then it was all over; the butchery was done.

Back over the path which he had come went the murderer. His chops were gory, his shoulders and fore legs were bloody, his whole body was streaked and splashed with the telltale red. But he did not care. Everything was against him, he was against everything. There would be no backsliding nor capitulation until death closed the scene. Back over the path which he had come he went—a fearful figure, big, deformed with wounds, drunken with blood. He held to the highway now so long as it did not run out of his course, for he was possessed of a reckless bravery which took into account neither friend nor foe. It was the still hour of the night. The hour when life ebbs lowest in the hearts of those who sleep; the hour just before the roosters smell the coming day and awake to give the alarm. He met nothing, nothing opposed him. Just when the darkness began to quiver before the bare hint of encroaching light the dog felt, rather than saw, some object moving awkwardly in the road before him. It was not large, and lay close to earth. The pads of his feet bore him noiselessly forward. The terrible jaws opened, snapped, the head was flung contemptuously to one side, there was a thud, and a dead opossum lay in a patch of huckleberry bushes by the old rock fence. In a hollow tree in the woods, not far away, some little opossums lay piled upon each other, asleep. The mother’s supply of milk had run low, and she had started in quest of food. The youngsters would sleep until hunger wakened them, and then life’s tragedy would soon be over.

The dog quickened his pace, because daylight abroad meant death for him. Through the dim first-light of the coming day he ran, easily. It is true he had covered many miles that night, but his stomach was full of the rich, hot life-blood he had drained from palpitating throats, and new strength had been imparted to him. Misty cobwebs hung about his head like a veil, gathered from his passage through the bushes and underbrush. His tongue lolled, dripping, from his deadly jaws. In this way he came to the ravine just as the gray dawn was beginning to be silvered by the rising sun.

Across the hollow from his den, on the opposite slope, where some hickorynut trees were growing, a silent figure stood with a gun in its hands. A half-grown boy had come out after squirrels, knowing that the bushy-tailed, active little creatures sought their breakfast just before sunup, when the air was fresh and moist from the night dews. He had stood still for a long time, as one must who hunts squirrels, and presently his eyes were drawn by something moving on the opposite side of the hollow. He looked and saw a large, dark-brown shape disappear, as it were, into the earth. The boy rubbed his eyes and looked again, and then he discovered the orifice under the dewberry bush. He had found the hiding-place of the scourge! A squirrel barked in a tree not ten feet away, and scampered about on a limb in plain view. The boy did not shoot. He tucked the gun under his arm instead and walked on his toes for a quarter of a mile, then he broke into a run, and arrived at home breathless a few minutes later.

The dog, with a full stomach and a contented mind, was sleeping. He had lain down with his wounded side next to earth, so that the flies could not annoy him. But into his dreams of slaughter and feasting crept some disturbing force. Something insistent, alarming, if intangible and vague. So strong was it that the dog grudgingly opened his eyes a tiny slit, and almost at the same time his ear cocked up, the end of it hanging limply, because it had been bitten through at some former encounter. The eyes opened wider, and rolled craftily towards the mouth of the lair. A second more, and the big, round head was raised quickly. There was a sudden stiffening throughout the strong, rugged frame, and the dog arose to his feet and stole forward. He crouched low, and peered out expectantly. Directly beneath him was a mixed crowd of men and dogs. All of the men carried those sticks which he had learned to dread; they were all looking towards his refuge, and some were pointing. It had come at last. He had tarried too long at his killing, and somehow the daylight had betrayed him. But not a tremor of fear passed over the dog. He merely sank to the earth, and watched.

A succession of sharp clicks came to his ear; the men swung their sticks forward and started up the slope in a body, calling the dogs with them. About half way up the hill they halted. One picked up a stone and flung it towards the hole in the hill. One of the dogs detached himself from the others and sped after it. He was a coon-dog, small and venturesome. He poked his head under the dewberry bush inquisitively. The sunlight outside was still in his eyes, and he thrust part of his body in, too, catching a scent which warranted investigation. The move was fatal. Like a bolt of lightning some curved fangs tore his throat open, and without a sound and with scarcely a struggle the coon-dog rolled back down the slope, dead at the feet of his master. Above, the dog licked his chops, and waited. The men tried to urge the wolf-hound forward, but he slunk back, afraid. Among those of his own blood-kind who had come forth to take the outcast was a half-breed—part bull, part mastiff. He was a powerful fellow, and sullen looking. His owner took him by the collar and led him up the hill a few feet, then spoke to him and pointed towards the hole. The half-breed seemed to understand, for his hackles rose bristling, and he advanced slowly and warily. Just in front of the overhanging bush he stopped, thrust his head forward, and stood as a setter stands when he holds a flock of birds. The dog inside arose, and made ready for the attack. It came speedily. Without sound or warning the half-breed leaped, and they closed. The dog had sprung forward to meet his foe, and in the fearful struggle that ensued they both appeared on the hill-side, full in the open. Urged on by the voices of the men the other dogs closed in too, and the tawny shape of the outcast became the centre of a whirling vortex of animal fury. Down the slope they all rolled together, the men cheering on their allies, and trying to find an opportunity to use their weapons. Down, down to the little stream that ran through the ravine the battle went, the half-breed never losing the throat-hold which he took at the first leap. There, on the bank of the rivulet, the tragedy was played.

The men said they had never seen such a fight.