Lad: A Dog

by Albert Payson Terhune

Lad trotted dejectedly back to the house as Glure's car chugged away up the drive. Lad was glumly unhappy. He had had no trouble at all in catching the scent of the man he had treed. He had followed the crashingly made trail through undergrowth and woodland until it had emerged into the highroad.

And there, perforce, Lad had paused. For, taught from puppyhood, he knew the boundaries of The Place as well as did the Mistress or the Master, and he knew equally well that his own jurisdiction ended at those boundaries. Beyond them he might not chase even the most loathed intruder. The highroad was sanctuary.

Wherefore at the road edge he stopped and turned slowly back. His pursuit was ended, but not his anger, nor his memory of the marauder's scent. The man had trespassed slyly on The Place. He had gotten away unpunished. These things rankled in the big dog's mind....

It was a pretty little cattle show and staged in a pretty setting withal—at Glure Towers, two weeks later. The big sunken meadow on the verge of the Ramapo River was lined on two sides with impromptu sheds. The third side was blocked by something between a grand stand and a marquee. The tree-hung river bordered the fourth side. In the field's center was the roped-off judging inclosure into which the cattle, class by class, were to be led.

Above the pastoral scene brooded the architectural crime, known as The Towers—homestead and stronghold of Hamilcar Q. Glure, Esquire.

Glure had made much money in Wall Street—a crooked little street that begins with a graveyard and ends in a river. Having waxed indecently rich, he had erected for himself a hideously expensive estate among the Ramapo Mountains and had settled down to the task of patronizing his rural neighbors. There he elected to be known as the "Wall Street Farmer," a title that delighted not only himself but everyone else in the region.

There was, in this hinterland stretch, a friendly and constant rivalry among the natives and other old residents in the matter of stock raising. Horses, cattle, pigs, chickens, even a very few sheep were bred for generations along lines which their divers owners had laid out—lines which those owners fervently believed must some day produce perfection.

Each owner or group of owners had his own special ideas as to the best way to produce this super-stock result. The local stock shows formed the only means of proving or disproving the excellence of the varied theories. Hence these shows were looked upon as barnyard supreme courts.

Mr. Glure had begun his career in the neighborhood with a laudable aim of excelling everybody else in everything. He had gone, heart and soul, into stock producing and as he had no breeding theories of his own he proceeded to acquire a set. As it would necessarily take years to work out these beliefs, he bridged the gap neatly by purchasing and importing prize livestock and by entering it against the home-raised products of his neighbors.

Strangely enough, this did not add to the popularity which he did not possess. Still more strangely, it did not add materially to his prestige as an exhibitor, for the judges had an exasperating way of handing him a second or third prize ribbon and then of awarding the coveted blue rosette to the owner and breeder of some local exhibit.