At meals Jeff stretched himself out on the floor beside Rorke’s chair, scorning to beg, but eagerly receptive of such food bits as were tossed to him. At night the dog slept outside Rorke’s door, a keenly alert sentinel over his master’s rest.
Once, down on Main Street, a Rorke fan swatted the fighter applaudingly on the back. In practically the same instant the swatter was on his own back in the street, with Jeff’s teeth menacing him. The collie had misunderstood the motive of the blow, and, after the manner of his kind, had sprung to his demigod’s defence.
This sealed once and forever Rorke’s love for Jeff. The dog had risked dire punishment to ward off a fancied danger from him. It was wonderful—tremendous! Dan told of it, for the next six weeks, whenever he could find anyone to listen to his marvellous yarn. And he added so many unconscious details in the repeated telling that late comers in the succession of listeners were left with a vague impression that Jeff had beaten off fully a dozen armed men who had assailed the fighter.
Keegan used to groan in spirit whenever Dan pointed out Jeff to some chance caller and began the oft-told saga. One dog man earned Rorke’s lifelong hatred and the many-adjectived appellation of liar by his tactlessness in saying:
“Why, most any good purp will do as much as that; if he thinks someone’s trying to hurt the feller that owns him.”
Dan Rorke was calmly certain that no other dog on earth would have had the pluck and the loyalty to do it. And gradually Jeff became to him a sort of fetish for everything that was noblest. Which perhaps was quite as natural as that a high-bred collie should deem Dan Rorke worthy of adoration.
On a slippery and slushy morning in early spring, some six months after dog and man formed their lifepartnership, Dan started through a corner of Pitvale for his daily hike. He had just won a foul-incrusted battle and had not yet signed up for another. In the interval before hard training should set in, he was keeping in shape by means of these daily tramps and by a little gym work.
He and Jeff came abreast of Vining’s livery stable, and were about to swing past it when out through the open doorway flashed something tawny and big and ponderous. In other words, Vining’s vile-tempered old mongrel English mastiff had caught scent of the approaching collie and had dashed forth to do battle with the stranger.
That was a cute trick of Vining’s dog. He was a terror in the neighbourhood; this huge mastiff with the quarter streak of St. Bernard and the temper of a sick wildcat. And for years he had maintained his repute as local bully.
Even now, when age and weight were beginning to slow him down, he still revelled in the prospect of springing out upon some unwary and less warlike dog as it passed the stable; and doing his industrious best to kill it.