The child’s parents were going to Europe for three months, that winter. The child himself was getting over a nervous ailment. The doctors had advised he be kept out of school for a term; and be sent to the country.

His mother was afraid the constant travel from place to place, in Europe, might be too much for him. So she asked leave of the Mistress and the Master,—one of whom was her distant relative—for the convalescent to stay at the Place during his parents’ absence.

That was how it all started.

The youngster was eleven years old; lank and gangling, and blest with a fretful voice and with far less discipline and manners than a three-month collie pup. His name was Cyril. Briefly, he was a pest,—an unspeakable pest.

For the first day or two at the Place, the newness of 96his surroundings kept Cyril more or less in bounds. Then, as homesickness and novelty alike wore off, his adventurous soul expanded.

He was very much at home;—far more so than were his hosts, and infinitely more pleased than they with the situation general. He had an infinite genius for getting into trouble. Not in the delightfully normal fashion of the average growing boy; but in furtively crafty ways that did not belong to healthy childhood.

Day by day, Cyril impressed his odd personality more and more on everything around him. The atmosphere of sweet peace which had brooded, like a blessing, over the whole Place, was dispersed.

The cook,—a marvel of culinary skill and of long service,—gave tearful warning, and departed. This when she found the insides of all her cooking utensils neatly soaped; and the sheaf of home-letters in her work-box replaced by cigar-coupons.

One of the workmen threw over his job with noisy blasphemy; when his room above the stables was invaded by stealth and a comic-paper picture of a goat’s head substituted for his dead mother’s photograph in the well-polished little bronze frame on his bureau.

And so on, all along the line.

The worst and most continuous sufferer from Cyril’s loathed presence on the Place was the massive collie, Lad.

The child learned, on the first day of his visit, that it would be well-nigh as safe to play with a handful of dynamite as with Lad’s gold-and-white mate, Lady. Lady did not care for liberties from any one. And she took no pains to mask her snappish first-sight aversion to the lanky Cyril. Her fiery little son, Wolf, was scarce less formidable 97than she, when it came to being teased by an outsider. But gallant old Lad was safe game.

He was safe game for Cyril, because Lad’s mighty heart and soul were miles above the possibility of resenting anything from so pitifully weak and defenceless a creature as this child. He seemed to realise, at a glance, that Cyril was an invalid and helpless and at a physical disadvantage. And, as ever toward the feeble, his big nature went out in friendly protection to this gangling wisp of impishness.

Which was all the good it did him.

In fact, it laid the huge collie open to an endless succession of torment. For the dog’s size and patience seemed to awaken every atom of bullying cruelty in the small visitor’s nature.

Cyril, from the hour of his arrival, found acute bliss in making Lad’s life a horror. His initial step was to respond effusively to the collie’s welcoming advances; so long as the Mistress and the Master chanced to be in the room. As they passed out, the Mistress chanced to look back.

She saw Cyril pull a bit of cake from his pocket and, with his left hand, proffer it to Lad. The tawny dog stepped courteously forward to accept the gift. As his teeth were about to close daintily on the cake, Cyril whipped it back out of reach; and with his other hand rapped Lad smartly across the nose.

Had any grown man ventured a humiliating and painful trick of that sort on Lad, the collie would have been at the tormentor’s throat, on the instant. But it was not in the great dog’s nature to attack a child. Shrinking back, in amaze, his abnormally sensitive feelings jarred, the collie retreated majestically to his beloved “cave” under the music-room piano.

To the Mistress’s remonstrance, Cyril denied most 98earnestly that he had done the thing. Nor was his vehemently tearful denial shaken by her assertion that she had seen it all.

Lad soon forgave the affront. And he forgave a dozen other and worse maltreatments which followed. But, at last, the dog took to shunning the neighbourhood of the pest. That availed him nothing; except to make Cyril seek him out in whatsoever refuge the dog had chosen.

Lad, trotting hungrily to his dinner dish, would find his food thick-strewn with cayenne pepper or else soaked in reeking gasoline.

Lad, seeking peace and solitude in his piano cave, would discover his rug, there, cleverly scattered with carpet tacks, points upward.

Lad, starting up from a snooze at the Mistress’s call, would be deftly tripped as he started to bound down the veranda steps, and would risk bruises and fractures by an ugly fall to the driveway below.

Wherever Lad went, whatever Lad did, there was a cruel trick awaiting him. And, in time, the dog’s dark eyes took on an expression of puzzled unhappiness that went straight to the hearts of the two humans who loved him.

All his life, Lad had been a privileged character on the Place. Never had he known nor needed whip or chain. Never had he,—or any of the Place’s other dogs,—been wantonly teased by any human. He had known, and had given, only love and square treatment and stanch friendliness. He had ruled as benevolent monarch of the Place’s Little People; had given leal service to his two deities, the Mistress and the Master; and had stood courteously aloof from the rest of mankind. And he had been very, very happy.

Now, in a breath, all this was changed. Ever at his 99heels, ever waiting to find some new way to pester him, was a human too small and too weak to attack;—a human who was forever setting the collie’s highstrung nerves on edge or else actively hurting him. Lad could not understand it. And as the child gained in health and strength, Lad’s lot grew increasingly miserable.

The Mistress and the Master were keenly aware of conditions. And they did their best,—a useless best,—to mitigate them for the dog. They laboured over Cyril, to make him leave Lad alone. They pointed out to him the mean cowardice of his course of torture. They even threatened to send him to nearer relatives until his parents’ return. All in vain. Faced with the most undeniable proofs, the child invariably would lie. He denied that he had ever ill-used Lad in any way; and would weep, in righteous indignation, at the charges. What was to be done?

“I thought it would brighten up the house so, to have a child in it again!” sighed the Mistress as she and her husband discussed the matter, uselessly, for the fiftieth time, after one of these scenes. “I looked forward so much to his coming here! But he’s—oh, he isn’t like any child I ever heard of before!”

“If I could devote five busy minutes a day to him,” grunted the Master, “with an axe-handle or perhaps a balestick—”

“You wouldn’t do it!” denied his wife. “You wouldn’t harm him; any more than Lad does. That’s the trouble. If Cyril belonged to us, we could punish him. Not with a—a balestick, of course. But he needs a good wholesome spanking, more than any one else I can think of. That or some other kind of punishment that would make an impression on him. But what can we do? He isn’t ours—”

100“Thank God!” interpolated the Master, piously.

“And we can’t punish other people’s children,” she finished. “I don’t know what we can do. I wouldn’t mind half so much about the other sneaky things he does; if it wasn’t for the way he treats Laddie. I—”

“Suppose we send Lad to the boarding kennels, at Ridgewood, till the brat is gone?” suggested the Master. “I hate to do it. And the good old chap will be blue with homesickness there. But at least he’ll get kind treatment. When he comes over to me and looks up into my eyes in that terribly appealing way, after Cyril has done some rotten thing to him,—well, I feel like a cur, not to be able to justify his faith that I can make things all right for him. Yes, I think I’ll send him to the boarding kennels. And, if it weren’t for leaving you alone to face things here, I’d be tempted to hire a stall at the kennels for myself, till the pest is gone.”

The next day, came a ray of light in the bothered gloom. And the question of the boarding kennels was dropped. The Mistress received a letter from Cyril’s mother. The European trip had been cut short, for business reasons; and the two travellers expected to land in New York on the following Friday.

“Who dares say Friday is an unlucky day?” chortled the Master in glee, as his wife reached this stage of the letter.

“And,” the Mistress read on, “we will come out to the Place, on the noon train; and take darling Cyril away with us. I wish we could stay longer with you; but Henry must be in Chicago on Saturday night. So we must catch a late afternoon train back to town, and take the night train West. Now, I—”

“Most letters are a bore,” interpolated the Master. “Or else they’re a bother. But this one is a pure rapture. 101Read it more slowly, won’t you, dear? I want to wallow in every blessèd word of hope it contains. Go ahead. I’m sorry I interrupted. Read on. You’ll never have such another enthusiastic audience.”

“And now,” the Mistress continued her reading, “I am going to ask both of you not to say a single word to precious Cyril about our coming home so soon. We want to surprise him. Oh, to think what his lovely face will be like, when he sees us walking in!”

“And to think what my lovely face will be like, when I see him walking out!” exulted the Master. “Laddie, come over here. We’ve got the gorgeousest news ever! Come over and be glad!”

Lad, at the summons, came trotting out of his cave, and across the room. Like every good dog who has been much talked to, he was as adept as any dead-beat in reading the varying shades of the human voice. The voices and faces alike of his two adored deities told him something wonderful had happened. And, as ever, he rejoiced in their gladness. Lifting his magnificent head, he broke into a salvo of trumpeting barks;—the oddly triumphant form of racket he reserved for great moments.

“What’s Laddie doing?” asked Cyril, from the threshold. “He sounds as if he was going mad or something.”

“He’s happy,” answered the Mistress.

“Why’s he happy?” queried the child.

“Because his Master and I are happy,” patiently returned the Mistress.

“Why are you happy?” insisted Cyril.

“Because to-day is Thursday,” put in the Master. “And that means to-morrow will be Friday.”

“And on Friday,” added the Mistress, “there’s going to be a beautiful surprise for you, Cyril. We can’t tell you what it is, but—”

102“Why can’t you tell me?” urged the child. “Aw, go ahead and tell me! I think you might.”

The Master had gone over to the nearest window; and was staring out into the grey-black dusk. Midwinter gripped the dead world; and the twilight air was deathly chill. The tall naked treetops stood gaunt and wraithlike against a leaden sky.

To the north, the darkness was deepest. Evil little puffs of gale stirred the powdery snow into myriads of tiny dancing white devils. It had been a fearful winter, thus far; colder than for a score of years; so cold that many a wild woodland creature, which usually kept far back in the mountains, had ventured down nearer to civilisation for forage and warmth.

Deer tracks a-plenty had been seen, close up to the gates of the Place. And, two days ago, in the forest, half a mile away, the Master had come upon the half-human footprints of a young bear. Starvation stalked abroad, yonder in the white hills. And need for provender had begun to wax stronger among the folk of the wilderness than their inborn dread of humans.

“There’s a big snowstorm coming up,” ruminated the Master, as he scanned the grim weather-signs. “A blizzard, perhaps. I—I hope it won’t delay any incoming steamers. I hope at least one of them will dock on schedule. It—”

He turned back from his musings, aware for the first time that a right sprightly dialogue was going on. Cyril was demanding for the eighth time:

“Why won’t you tell me? Aw, I think you might! What’s going to happen that’s so nice, Friday?”

“Wait till Friday and see,” laughed the Mistress.

“Shucks!” he snorted. “You might tell me, now. I 103don’t want to wait and get s’prised. I want to know now. Tell me!”

Under her tolerant smile, the youngster’s voice scaled to an impatient whine. He was beginning to grow red.

“Let it go at that!” ordained the Master. “Don’t spoil your own fun, by trying to find out, beforehand. Be a good sportsman.”

“Fun!” snarled Cyril. “What’s the fun of secrets? I want to know—”

"It’s snowing," observed the Mistress, as a handful of flakes began to drift past the windows, tossed along on a puff of wind.

“I want to know!” half-wept the child; angry at the change of subject, and noting that the Mistress was moving toward the next room, with Lad at her heels. “Come back and tell me!”

He stamped after her to bar her way. Lad was between the irate Cyril and the Mistress. In babyish rage at the dog’s placid presence in his path, he drew back one ungainly foot and kicked the astonished collie in the ribs.

At the outrage, Lad spun about, a growl in his throat. But he forbore to bite or even to show his teeth. The growl had been of indignant protest at such unheard-of treatment; not a menace. Then the dog stalked haughtily to his cave, and lay down there.

But the human witnesses to the scene were less forbearing;—being only humans. The Mistress cried out, in sharp protest at the little brute’s action. And the Master leaned forward, swinging Cyril clear of the ground. Holding the child firmly, but with no roughness, the Master steadied his own voice as best he could; and said:

“This time you’ve not even bothered to wait till our backs were turned. So don’t waste breath by crying and 104saying you didn’t do it. You’re not my child; so I have no right to punish you. And I’m not going to. But I want you to know you’ve just kicked something that’s worth fifty of you.”

“You let me down!” Cyril snarled.

“Lad is too white and clean and square to hurt anything that can’t hit back,” continued the Master. “And you are not. That’s the difference between you. One of the several million differences,—all of them in Lad’s favour. When a child begins life by being cruel to dumb animals, it’s a pretty bad sign for the way he’s due to treat his fellow-humans in later years,—if ever any of them are at his mercy. For your own sake, learn to behave at least as decently as a dog. If—”

“You let me down, you big bully!” squalled Cyril, bellowing with impotent fury. “You let me down! I—”

“Certainly,” assented the Master, lowering him to the floor. “I didn’t hurt you. I only held you so you couldn’t run out of the room, before I’d finish speaking; as you did, the time I caught you putting red pepper on Lad’s food. He—”

"You wouldn’t dare touch me, if my folks were here, you big bully!" screeched the child, in a veritable mania of rage; jumping up and down and actually foaming at the mouth. “But I’ll tell ’em on you! See if I don’t! I’ll tell ’em how you slung me around and said I was worse’n a dirty dog like Lad. And Daddy’ll lick you for it. See if he don’t! He—”

The Master could not choke back a laugh; though the poor Mistress looked horribly distressed at the maniac outburst, and strove soothingly to check it. She, like the Master, remembered now that Cyril’s doting mother had spoken of the child’s occasional fits of red wrath. But this was the first glimpse either of them had had of these. 105Hitherto, craft had served Cyril’s turn better than fury.

At sound of the Master’s unintentional laugh the unfortunate child went quite beside himself in his transport of rage.

“I won’t stay in your nasty old house!” he shrieked. “I’m going to the very first house I can find. And I’m going to tell ’em how you hammered a little feller that hasn’t any folks here to stick up for him. And I’ll get ’em to take me in and send a tel’gram to Daddy and Mother to come save me. I—”

To the astonishment of both his hearers, Cyril broke off chokingly in his yelled tirade; caught up a bibelot from the table, hurled it with all his puny force at Lad, the innocent cause of the fracas, and then rushed from the room and from the house.

The Mistress stared after him, dumbfounded; his howls and the jarring slam of the house door echoing direfully in her ears. It was the Master who ended the instant’s hush of amaze.

“Whenever I’ve heard a grown man say he wished he was a boy again,” he mused, “I always set him down for a liar. But, for once in my life, I honestly wish I was a boy, once more. A boy one day younger and one inch shorter and one pound lighter than Cyril. I’d follow him out of doors, yonder, and give him the thrashing of his sweet young life. I’d—”

“Oh, do call him back!” begged the Mistress. “He’ll catch his death of cold, and—”

“Why will he?” challenged the Master, without stirring. “For all his noble rage, I noticed he took thought to grab up his cap and his overcoat from the hall, as he wafted himself away. And he still had his arctics on, from this afternoon. He won’t—”

“But suppose he should really go over to one of the 106neighbours,” urged the Mistress, “and tell such an awful story as he threatened to? Or suppose—”

“Not a chance!” the master reassured her. “Now that the summer people are away, there isn’t an occupied house within half a mile of here. And he’s not going to trudge a half-mile through the snow, in this bitter cold, for the joy of telling lies. No, he’s down at the stables or else he’s sneaked in through the kitchen; the way he did that other time when he made a grandstand exit after I’d ventured to lecture him on his general rottenness. Remember how worried about him you were, that time; till we found him sitting in the kitchen and pestering the maids? He—”

“But that time, he was only sulky,” said the Mistress. “Not insanely angry, as he is now. I do hope—”

“Stop worrying!” adjured the Master. “He’s all right.”

Which proved, for perhaps the trillionth time in history, that a woman’s intuitions are better worth following than a man’s saner logic. For Cyril was not all right. And, at every passing minute he was less and less all right; until presently he was all wrong.

For the best part of an hour, in pursuance of her husband’s counsel, the Mistress sat and waited for the prodigal’s return. Then, surreptitiously, she made a round of the house; sent a man to ransack the stables, telephoned to the gate lodge, and finally came into the Master’s study, big-eyed and pale.

“He isn’t anywhere around,” she reported, frightened. “It’s dinner time. He’s been gone an hour. Nobody’s seen him. He isn’t on the Place. Oh, I wonder if—”

"H’m!" grumbled her husband. “He’s engineering an endurance contest, eh? Well, if he can stand it, we can.”

But at sight of the deepening trouble in his wife’s face, 107he got up from his desk. Going out into the hall, he summoned Lad.

“We might shout our heads off,” he said, “and he’d never answer; if he’s really trying to scare us. That’s part of his lovable nature. There’s just one way to track him, in double time. Lad!”

The Master had been drawing on his mackinaw and hip-boots as he spoke. Now he opened the front door.

“Laddie!” he said, very slowly and incisively to the expectantly eager collie. “Cyril! Find Cyril! Find him!”

To the super-wise collie, there was nothing confusing in the command. Like many another good dog, he knew the human............