The animal's body was lean to emaciation. The head was swollen—though, apparently, the swelling had begun to recede. The fur, from spine to toe, from nose to tail-tip, was one solid and shapeless mass of caked mud.
The Master sat down very suddenly on the veranda floor beside the dirt-encrusted brute, and caught it in his arms, sputtering disjointedly:
"Lad!—Laddie!—Old friend! You're alive again! You're—you're—alive!"
Yes, Lad had known enough to creep away to the woods to die. But, thanks to the wolf-strain in his collie blood, he had also known how to do something far wiser than die.
Three days of self-burial, to the very nostrils, in the mysteriously healing ooze of the marshes, behind the forest, had done for him what such mud-baths have done for a million wild creatures. It had drawn out the viper-poison and had left him whole again—thin, shaky on the legs, slightly swollen of head—but whole.
"He's—he's awfully dirty, though! Isn't he?" commented the guest, when an idiotic triumph-yell from the Master had summoned the whole family, in sketchy attire, to the veranda. "Awfully dirty and——"
"Yes," curtly assented the Master, Lad's head between his caressing hands. "'Awfully dirty.' That's why he's still alive."