Part 19

Eyes sullen and fierce, he rose and followed. Down the hill, where a creek gurgled, the man with the gun turned. He was hard-jawed, pale-eyed. The boy and woman stopped.

"Shut up!" he said.

The crying stopped; the convulsive sobs went on.

"Shut up!"

A few steps the dog rushed forward, hair risen all the way down his back. Then he sank down on the ground. For the woman had dropped the bundles and was on her knees before the boy, her arm about his heaving shoulders. Frank saw the whiteness of her face as she looked up at the man above her. Her voice rang through the woods, husky and shrill, but suppressed.

"He can't help it, Joe!"

The crying had stopped now. But the sturdy little chest was still rising and falling as the boy stood looking up with quivering face at the man. The woman picked up her bundles, rose, and took his hand once more. Still holding to his hat he went with her, in silence now, taking two little trotting steps to one of hers.

They spent the night in the woods, out of hearing of any chance passer-by along the road. Carefully hidden in the underbrush old Frank watched them. Only once did he leave them. Then he went to the car, found a big chunk of side-meat wrapped in a paper under the back seat, made his meal off his enemies, and came guardedly back, licking his chops. They were gone again before day. The rising sun found the car toiling upward into the echoing depths of the mountains. Just around the last bend in the road followed old Frank.

Sometimes he trotted, sometimes he broke into a gallop. Sometimes he stopped to drink at streams that came slipping down green walls of rock, crossed the road like snakes, and dived into the foliage below. His tongue hung out; he was gaunt, dust-covered, weary-eyed. The few mountaineers he passed looked at him with narrow suspicion, then back up the winding road where that curtained car had disappeared. With just a glance up into their faces, he galloped by.

But when another car, long, black, shining, like the one at home, swung suddenly around the bed just ahead, he stopped short. The weariness left his eyes, the stiffness went out of his muscles, his heart gave a great bound. Four sportsmen, such as he and his master associated with, bobbed comfortably up and down in the capacious seats of that approaching car. Their fishing rods were strapped to the side. He saw the shine of the sun on their ruddy faces, the twinkle in their eyes as they stopped.

"What's up, old man?" they asked.

Maybe he got a bit rattled. Anyway, he failed. He ran up the road in the direction of that other car, wheeled, and ran back. He jumped up on the step with his front paws, he looked up with pleading eyes from one face to another.

"Those folks left him behind," they said.

They assured him that it was a shame to treat a good old scout that way, but he could catch up if he kept plugging. They said if the road were not too narrow they would turn round, give him a lift and his people a piece of their minds. They threw him something to eat, they wished him good luck, and left him standing in the road, looking after them with disconsolate eyes.

After he had eaten the food and taken up his solitary pursuit, he heard in the road far below the sound of their car. Even their voices floated up to him between the narrow walls of the echoing gorge.

"I tell you," said one, "it was an S O S! We ought to have followed him. Something queer about that car."

But they were gone for all that, like the friends who, whether we be man or woman or dog, daily pass us by, willing to help if they only understood.

It was dusk when he caught up. The car had reached the flattened top of the lofty range it had been climbing all day. From behind a bush he watched it turn out of the road. Like some mammoth beast astray it bumped and swayed across a desolate field of broomstraw with borders that plunged abruptly off into space. In the middle of the field grew a black thicket of stunted pines, huddled densely together up here under the sky. On the side of the thicket away from the road the car stopped, and Frank crept into the pines and lay down. The men got out, then the woman, then the boy.

He saw Tommy looking all about in bewilderment at this roof of the world on which, a lonely little figure, he stood close to the woman. Again the longing seized the dog to rush forward, to let the boy know he, too, was here. But there were the men close by; and in the car was the gun. Again he bowed his head between his paws; and his eyes in the faint glow from the light that still lingered in the sky were deep with loneliness and trouble.

Suddenly the man who had driven the car turned. He glanced at the woman and the boy, then toward the road. He took his pipe out of his mouth.

"Here, you get back in that car, kid!" he said.

This time Tommy stood his ground sturdily, but his upturned face was white in the dusk, and he held tight to the skirt of the woman.

"Did you hear me?"

"He's dead tired, Joe!" snapped the woman.

The man took a sudden threatening step forward. In the thicket Frank rose quivering to his feet. But with a quick movement the woman had pushed the boy behind her. "Don't you touch him, Joe!" she flashed. A moment she stood facing him, slim, defiant in the dusk. Then she took the boy's hand and they went back to the car.

Suddenly Frank rose on his front legs, ears thrown back, eyes glowing wildly. It seemed to him that the boy had looked straight into the bushes where he lay. Certainly for a moment he had pulled back on the woman's hand. Then he went on with her and they got into the car. But Frank still sat on his haunches, panting and choking and panting again.

At last he crept along the edge of the thicket and lay there close to the car. He was still panting. That glimpse full into the boy's face had almost undone him. He was hungry for food, and hungry for human companionship. He wanted to go to the car, to rear up on the side to scratch at the curtains. But yonder, a hundred feet away, back and forth before a fire they had built, moved the men. And against the box they had taken from the car leaned the gun.

Within the car he heard the voice of the woman, low, confidential, assuring, and his ears flattened with gratitude and trust. The man wouldn't hurt him, she was telling the boy. Sometimes he talked to everybody that way. He was an old grouch, that's what he was. She whispered something.