It was the muzzle—now his first fatigue had slackened—that galled him worst. Its torture was beginning to do queer things to his nerves and brain. Even a stolid, nerveless dog hates a muzzle. More than one sensitive dog has been driven crazy by it.
Thirst—intolerable thirst—was torturing Lad. He could not drink at the pools and brooks he crossed. So tight-jammed was the steel jaw-hinge now that he could not even open his mouth to pant, which is the cruelest deprivation a dog can suffer.
Out of the shadows of a ramshackle hovel's front yard dived a monstrous shape that hurled itself ferociously on the passing collie.
A mongrel watchdog—part mastiff, part hound, part anything you choose—had been dozing on his squatter-owner's doorstep when the pad-pad-pad of Lad's wearily-jogging feet had sounded on the road.
Other dogs, more than one of them, during the journey had run out to yap or growl at the wanderer, but as Lad had been big and had followed an unhesitant course they had not gone to the length of actual attack.
This mongrel, however, was less prudent. Or, perhaps, dog-fashion, he realized that the muzzle rendered Lad powerless and therefore saw every prospect of a safe and easy victory. At all events, he gave no warning bark or growl as he shot forward to the attack.
Lad—his eyes dim with fatigue and road dust, his ears dulled by water and by noise—did not hear nor see the foe. His first notice of the attack was a flying weight of seventy-odd pounds that crashed against his flank. A double set of fangs in the same instant, sank into his shoulder.
Under the onslaught Lad fell sprawlingly into the road on his left side, his enemy upon him.
As Lad went down the mongrel deftly shifted his unprofitable shoulder grip to a far more promisingly murderous hold on his fallen victim's throat.
A cat has five sets of deadly weapons—its four feet and its jaws. So has every animal on earth—human and otherwise—except a dog. A dog is terrible by reason of its teeth. Encase the mouth in a muzzle and a dog is as helpless for offensive warfare as is a newborn baby.