II
There are a thousand methods for the training of a bird dog, and each man prefers his own. There are some dogs which need much training; there are others which require little or none.
Reck was so nobly blooded that the instincts of his craft were deeply bedded in him. On his first day in the alder swamps with Proutt he proved himself to the full. Proutt was a dog beater, as all men know, but he did not beat dogs which obeyed him, and he did not beat Reck. This first day he was merely trying the dog.
Reck found a bird, and took stanch point, steady as a rock. It was not yet October, the season was not yet open; and so Proutt had no right to shoot. Nevertheless he did walk up this bird, and flushed it from where it lay six feet before Reck’s nose, and knocked it over before it topped the alders.
Reck stood at point till the bird rose; when its whistling wings lifted it, his nose followed it upward, followed its fall.... But he did not stir, did not break shot; and Proutt, watching, knew that this was indeed a dog.
When the bird had fallen, Proutt said softly: “Reck! Fetch dead bird.”
Now, this is in some measure the test of a setter. There are many setters which take a natural point and hold it; there are some few which are also natural retrievers, without training. Reck had been taught by Westley’s children to fetch sticks or rocks at command. He knew the word.
He went swiftly forward and brought the woodcock, scarce ruffled, and laid it in Proutt’s hand. And Proutt took the bird, and stood still, looking down at Reck with a darkly brooding face. Considering, weighing.... After a little he began to curse softly, under his breath; and he turned and stamped out of the alder run, and bade Reck to heel, and went home. And Reck trotted at his heels, tongue out, panting happily....
There are many ways by which the Devil may come at a man. One of them is through hatred, and another way is to put a helpless thing in that man’s hands. If the good in him outweighs the bad, well enough; but if the evil has ascendancy, then that man is utterly lost and damned.
Proutt hated Westley; Proutt had in his hands Reck, a dog by Westley well-beloved. And Reck was pliant in Proutt’s hands, both because Proutt knew dogs and because Reck was by nature tractable, eager to please, anxious to do that which he was asked to do. The combination presented itself to Proutt full clearly, as he walked his homeward way that day, and it is to be supposed that he fought out what fight there was within himself, during that long walk, and through the evening that followed.
That Proutt had some battle with himself cannot be denied. No man sets out to destroy a soul without first overcoming the scruples which bind him; and there were scruples in Proutt. There must have been. He loved dogs, loved fine dogs, and Reck was fine. Yet the destruction of Reck’s honor and reputation and life—these were the ends which Proutt set himself to bring about—at what pain to his own heart no man may fully guess. It can only be known that in the end his hatred outweighed all else—that he threw himself into the thing he meant to do.
Reck, as has been shown, needed no training for his appointed work. Yet Proutt kept him, labored with him daily, for close to four long weeks, as all Fraternity men knew. None saw that training. It was known that Proutt took Reck far over the Sheepscot Ridge, where farms were all deserted, and no man was like to come upon him. But he had done that with dogs before, for woodcock lay thick in Sheepscot Valley. Once or twice men heard the barking of a dog in that valley; and there was a measure of pain in the notes. And three times men met Proutt driving homeward, with Reck lying weary and subdued upon the floor of the buggy, scarce fit to lift his head. It was remarked that Proutt was more dour and morose than ever; and Lee Motley thought the man was aging....
One man only, and that man Jim Saladine, caught some inkling of that which was afoot. Jim was a deer hunter; and toward mid-October, with a shotgun under his arm for luck’s sake, but never a buckshot in his cartridge pocket, he went one day into the Sheepscot Valley to search out the land. Deer lay in the swamps there; and Jim sought to locate them against the coming season. He moved slowly and quietly, as his custom was; ears and eyes open. And he saw many things which another man would never have seen.
Two things he saw which had significance. Once, in a muddy patch along the Sheepscot’s brim, he came upon a deer’s track; and other tracks beside it. A man’s track, and a dog’s.
Jim studied these tracks. They were sadly muddled; and he could make little of them. But he was sure of this much—that man and dog had been attentive to the tracks of the deer. And this stayed in Jim’s mind, because no dog in Fraternity has any business with the track of a deer, and no man may justly set a dog upon such track.
Later that day Jim was to find some explanation for what he had seen. Where Fuller’s brook comes into the Sheepscot, there lies an open meadow half a mile long, and half as broad; and near the lower end of the meadow half a dozen alders group about a lone tree in the open. Deer and moose, coming up the Sheepscot Valley, are like to cross the stream below and then traverse this meadow; and Jim Saladine stopped under cover at the meadow’s head—it was near dusk—to see what he should see.
He saw what you may see any day along the Sheepscot, and what, by the same token, you may go a weary year without seeing. He saw a deer, a proud buck, come up from the stream and follow the meadow toward where he lay. It passed the isolated alder clump, and something there gave it alarm; for Jim saw its head lift—saw then the quick leap and rush which carried the creature to cover and away....
Saw something else. Out from the alder clump burst a man, driving before him a dog. Dusk was falling, Jim could see their figures only dimly. But this much he saw. The man urged the dog after the deer, with waving arms; and the dog, ever looking backward shame-facedly, trotted slowly off upon the trail, the man still urging from behind.
They slipped into the brush where the deer had gone, and Jim caught no further glimpse of them.
Now, Saladine was an honest man, who loved the deer he hunted; and he was angry. But he was also a just man; and he could not be sure whom he had seen. So it was that he kept a still tongue, and waited, and through the weeks that followed he watched, patiently enough, for what should come.
He meant, in that hour, to take a hand.