“I did it, square, Jeff. I did it, square! You—you saw me do it, square.”
THE GRUDGE
THIS is the strange yarn of three dogs. If the dogs had been humans, the story would have been on stage and screen long ago.
Frayne’s Farms is the alliterative name for the hundred-acre tract of rich bottom land; in the shadow of the Ramapo Mountains,—a range that splits North Jersey’s farm country for some twenty odd miles.
Back in these mountains are queer folk; whose exploits sometimes serve as a page story for some Sunday newspaper. Within forty miles of New York City as the crow flits, the handful of mountaineers are well-nigh as primitive as any South Sea Islanders. They are as a race apart; and with their own barbarous codes and customs.
Down from the mountains in the starvingly barren winter time, every few years, a band of huge black mongrel dogs used to swoop upon the Valley, harrying it from end to end in search of food; and leaving a trail of ravaged henroosts and sheepfolds in their wake.
These plunderers were the half-wild black dogs of the mountaineers;—dogs blended originally from a tangle of diverse breeds; hound predominating; and with a splash of wolf-blood in their rangy carcases.
When famine and cold gripped the folk of the mountains, the dogs were deprived of even such scanty crusts and bones as were their summer portion. And, under the goad of hunger, the black brutes banded for a raid on the richer pickings of the Valley.