Finn the wolfhound

by A. J. Dawson

"I reckon I'll give that brute best, unless you'd like him killed. I'll tackle that job for you with pleasure; but your Giant Wolf's no good for the show."

"No, the joke's on me about the Giant Wolf," admitted the boss, crossly. "Sam had me for fair, over him. Fifteen quid for a useless pig like that! Why, he won't even stand up to make a show. The brute's not worth his tucker, is he?"

"He is not. And, if you ask me, you'd better let me feed him to the others, while there's any meat left on his bones. He's no good for aught else, as I can see. The Tasmanian Devil was a lap-dog to him, and he died before I could get him trained, you remember."

"H'm! Well, we'll see. We might get some fool to buy him. Anyway, you'd better tell Sam to pry him round a bit somehow when the show's opening. He looks all right when he gets a move on him, but he ain't worth a hill o' beans lyin' curled up there in a corner. How'd it do to get a dingo, and put it in there with him!"

"You might as well give him a mouse. He'd swaller it whole. He's twice the size of a dingo."

"He sure is twice as sulky as any beast I ever saw. An' that blame book-writin' chap from the city the other night said he reckoned the Giant was a dog, an' not a wolf at all! Nice sociable sort of a dog for a family gathering, I don't think!"

"You should have asked the gent to go in his cage an' try 'im with a bit of sugar. My bloomin' Colonial! He wouldn't have written any more books."

And now, whenever the boss met Sam, he would "jolly" the young man a bit, as he said, regarding the Giant Wolf as a bargain, and ask what Sam had done with the fifteen pounds, and whether he had any other cheap freaks to sell. Also, Sam's half-crown was docked from his wages; and Sam, after all, had never laid claim to any bigness of heart or philosophy of mind. He had long since spent the fifteen pounds. The twenty-five shillings he had paid for Finn loomed larger in his recollection now than the fifteen pounds he had received; particularly after a dose of the boss's chaff.

"Why the blazes can't yer learn, an' work fer yer livin', ye ugly great brute?" Sam would growl, as he threw Finn his daily portion of flesh. And, more often than not, he would pick up a stake, and thrust viciously at the Wolfhound, or strike at him as he crept forward to snatch his meat. Thus, as poor Finn saw it, another of the strange man-like beasts had gone mad, and was to be treated as a dangerous enemy.

If the Professor had continued his daily attempts to cow Finn, as a preliminary to training, he would have been likely to succeed at about this time; for the Wolfhound was losing strength daily, and though the fire of wrath and fierceness burned strongly when he saw the leather-coated man, it had little to feed on now, and must soon have died down under the hot bar and the wired whip. But the Professor could not be expected to know this. He had had as many as sixty futile struggles with Finn, and, as he thought, had only stopped short of killing the Giant outright. But idleness, or some other cause, did lead him to make one other attempt, on a hot afternoon, just before the hour of tea and of dressing for the evening show. Finn's fighting blood, inherited through long centuries of unsmirched descent, made him put his best foot foremost, and meet the Professor with a mien of most formidable ferocity as soon as the red iron appeared. The Professor did not know how near to breaking-point Finn's despair had reached. There was little sign of it in the roaring fierceness with which he faced the iron and whip. A wolf in such a case, with the cunning of the wild, and without the life's experience of humans which made the Professor's part so incredibly base, so gratuitously cruel and treacherous to Finn, would have given in long before. Finn fought with the courage of a brave man who has reached the last ditch, and with the ferocity that came to him out of the ancient days in which his warrior ancestors were never known either to give or to receive quarter.