“It’s Lochinvar Bobby, all right!” the wondering Jamie was saying to his son in intervals of lavishing kindly talk and pats on the luckless dog. "The collar and tag prove that. But if it wasn’t for them, I’d swear it couldn’t be the same. It’s—it’s enough to take a body’s breath away, Donald! I’ve followed the dog game from the time I was born, but I never set eyes on such a collie in all my days. Just run your hand through that coat! Was there ever another like it? And did you ever see such bone and head? He’s—Lord, to think how he looked when that Frayne crook sawed him off on me! It’s a miracle he lived through the first winter. I never heard of but one other case like it. And that happened up in Toronto, if I remember right.
“Now, listen, sonny: I’m not honing to be sued for damages by every farmer in the county. So let’ em keep on looking for their wolf. This is a dog I bought last year. He’s been away in the country till now. That’s the truth. And the rest is nobody’s business. But—but if it keeps me speiring for a week, to figger it out, I’m going to hit on some way to let Mr. Lucius Frayne, Esquire, see he hasn’t stung me so hard as he thought he did!”
For two days Bobby refused to eat or drink. In the stout inclosure built for him in Mackellar’s back yard he stood, head and tail a-droop, every now and then shivering as if with ague. Then, little by little, Jamie’s skilled attentions did their work. The wondrous lure of human fellowship, the joy of cooked food, and the sense of security against harm, and, above all, a collie’s ancestral love for the one man he chooses for his god—these wrought their work.
In less than a fortnight Bobby was once more a collie. The spirit of the wild beast had departed from him; and he took his rightful place as the chum of the soft-voiced little Scot he was learning to worship. Yes, and he was happy,—happier than ever before;—happy with a new and strangely sweet contentment. He had come into a collie’s eternal heritage.
The Westminster Kennel Club’s annual dog show at Madison Square Garden, in New York, is the foremost canine classic of America and, in late years, of the whole world.
A month before that year’s Westminster Show, Lucius Frayne received a letter which made the wontedly saturnine sportsman laugh till the tears spattered down his nose. The joke was too good to keep to himself. So he shouted for Roke, and bade the kennel man share the fun of it with him.
He read aloud, cacklingly, to the listening Roke:
Mr. Lucius Frayne,
My dear Sir:
Last year, out to the Midwestburg show, here, you sold me a fine puppy of your Ch. Lochinvar King. And as soon as I could raise the price you sent him on here to me. I would of written to you when I got him, to thank you and to say how pleased I was with him and how all my friends praised him. But I figured you’re a busy man and you haven’t got any waste time to spend in reading letters about how good your dogs are. Because you know it already. And so I didn’t write to you. But I am writing to you now. Because this is business.