Finn the wolfhound

by A. J. Dawson

But the landlady knew her son tolerably well, and he could not deceive her very much. When he left the house half an hour later he was leading Finn at the end of a rusty chain, and the poorer by twenty-five shillings than he had been an hour before. So Finn changed hands for the second time in forty-eight hours, once for seventy-five guineas, and once for twenty-five shillings; and upon this second occasion the transaction was a matter of complete indifference to him. He thought vaguely of returning to Mr. Sandbrook's house later on. In the meantime this young man seemed to want him to take a walk in another direction, and all ways were alike to Finn in his bitter disappointment over not finding the Master. He did not know that he was treading exactly the path the Master and the Mistress had trod on the previous clay, when leaving their lodging for the mountains. He only felt that he had now completely lost his friends, and that he was rather well-disposed than otherwise toward long-legged Sam, for the reason that Sam came from the house in which the Master had lodged.

[CHAPTER XIV]

THE SOUTHERN CROSS CIRCUS

The night which followed Finn's departure from his old lodging with Sam was the most peculiar that he had ever spent in his life, and, not even excepting the night in Matey's back-yard in Sussex, the most unrestful. It was the second consecutive night during which he went practically without sleep; but on this occasion it was not so much grief over his loss of the Master that kept him awake as the peculiar nature of the immediate surroundings.

In the first place, the greater part of the night was spent on a moving railway train; and, secondly, Finn's particular resting-place was a sort of wooden cage, sheathed in iron, and having another similar cage upon either side of it. In the compartment upon Finn's right were two native bears. These philosophical animals slept solidly all the time, and made no noise beyond a husky sort of snoring. But they had a pronounced odour which penetrated Finn's compartment through a grating near its roof; and this odour was peculiarly disturbing to the Wolfhound. In the cage on Finn's left was a full-grown, elderly, and sour-tempered Bengal tiger, who had sore places under his elbows, and other troubles which made him excessively irritable, and a bad sleeper. The tiger also had a pronounced odour; and it was much more disturbing to Finn than that of the philosophical little native bears. In fact, it kept the wiry hair over Finn's shoulders in a state of continual agitation and his silky ears in a restlessly upright position, with only their soft tips drooping. Sometimes, when the train jolted, the tiger would roll heavily against the iron-sheathed partition between his abode and Finn's, and then Finn would spring to his feet, against the far side of the compartment, every hair on his body erect, his lips drawn right back from the pearl-white fangs they usually sheltered, his sensitive nostrils deeply serrated, and all the forgotten fierceness of bygone generations of Wolfhound warriors and killers concentrated in his long-drawn snarl of resentment and of warning threat.

It may be imagined, then, that for Finn the night was even less restful than the one he spent in Mr. Sandbrook's house. The smells and sounds about him strained every nerve in the Wolfhound's body to singing point, even as a prolonged gale strains the cordage of a ship that flies before it through a heavy sea. They penetrated farther into the pulsing entity that was Finn than even his experience with Matey, or his hunting and killing of the fox beside the Sussex Downs. They stirred latent instincts which came to him from farther back in the long line of his ancestry; from just how far back one could not say, but it may well be that they came from a dim period, beyond all the generations of wolf-hunting and, earlier, of man-fighting in Ireland, when forbears of Finn's had been pitted against lions and tigers and bears, as well as Saxons, in Roman arenas. Again, it might be that that reputed Thibetan ancestor played his part in endowing Finn with the hitherto unsuspected instincts which stirred within him now, changing his aspect from its usual courtly dignity and grace to lip-dropping ferocity, and fierce, forbidding wrath. It was curious, the manner in which the play of these instincts affected Finn's very shape, giving to his massive depth of chest a suggestion of the hyæna, to his head a marked suggestion of the wolf, and to his drooping hind-quarters more than a hint of the lion. The facts that the hair along his spine stood erect like wire, and that his exposed fangs and updrawn lips changed his whole facial aspect, had a good deal to do with the alterations wrought in his shape by the curious position in which he found himself this night. A wiser man than Sam would have refrained from putting Finn in this predicament, and that more especially while he was still a stranger to the great hound. But Sam had been invited to join a party of his companions who were supplied with euchre cards and a bottle of whisky, and, as he told himself, he "couldn't be bothered with the bloomin' dawg!"

Sam rather regretted his carelessness when he came to release Finn next morning. Since the small hours, the part of the train in which Sam had travelled had been lying in a siding, close to a little mountain station. And now the different wagons, including that containing Finn and the tiger and the bears, with a lot of paraphernalia, were being swung out upon the ground, preparatory to being drawn by road to the neighbouring town. At this stage Sam had intended to take Finn out to be inspected by his employer, and, if fortune willed it, sold to that gentleman for what Sam considered a handsome figure, say, fifteen or twenty pounds.

Sam was one of the underlings employed by Rutherford's famous Southern Cross travelling circus; and his idea was that Finn would be found a suitable and welcome addition to the menagerie of performing animals attached to that popular institution. But when Sam came to look at Finn by daylight, and to note the extreme fierceness of the Wolfhound's mien--brought about entirely by his own stupidity in locking the hound up beside a tiger and two bears--his heart failed him in the matter of releasing his prize, and he decided to wait until the camp had been formed, and things had settled down a little. That cowardly decision of Sam's affected the whole of Finn's future life.

The process of transferring his cage to the road, and travelling along that road, which was in reality no better than a very rough mountain track and exceedingly bumpy, worked old Killer, as the tiger was ominously called, into a frenzy of wrath, the which was by no means softened by the removal of the outer side of his cage, in order that the casual passer-by might observe his ferocity through the inner iron bars. Now the tiger's frenzy meant something very like frenzy for Finn. When the tiger snarled, and thrashed the inner side of his cage with his great tail, Finn's snarl became a fierce, growling bark; his fore-legs stiffened, like the erect hair along his backbone, his white fangs were all exposed, and his aspect became truly terrifying. Saliva began to collect at the corners of his long mouth; his great wrath and unreasoning, instinctive fierceness and resentment made him look twice his actual size; and altogether it may be admitted that when Sam came to investigate, after the camp had been formed, Finn truly was, to all appearances, a fearsome and terrifying creature. His snarls and growls waked fury in the breast of the irritable old tiger, who was not accustomed to hear threats or warnings from any of his neighbours, he being the only large carnivorous animal in the show, and, in consequence, he threw himself against the partition between Finn's cage and his own, snarling ferociously. This put the strength of centuries of hunting and fighting courage and fierceness into Finn's replies, and left the Wolfhound, to all outward seeming, a more formidable wild beast than the tiger himself.