“Wolf! I’ll give it to Wolf!”
I don’t know what the other spectators thought of this outburst. But I know the effect it had on Treve.
In a flash the great dog was alert and tense; his tulip ears up, his whole body at attention, the look of eagles in his eyes as he scanned the ringside for a glimpse of his friend, Wolf.
Judge Cooper took one long look at him. Then, without so much as laying a hand on the magnificently-showing Treve, he awarded him the blue ribbon in his class.
I had sense enough to take the dog into one corner and to keep him there, quieting and steadying him until the Winners’ Class was called. As I led him into the ring, then, to compete with the other classes’ blue ribboners, Robert called once more to the absent Wolf. Again the trick served. The collie moved and stood as if galvanised into sparkling life.
Cooper handed me the Winners’ rosette; the rosette whose acquisition made Treve a Champion of Record!
It was only about a year ago. In that little handful of time, the judge who made him a champion—the new-made champion himself—the dog whose name roused him from his apathy in the ring—all three are dead. I don’t think a white sportsman like Cooper would mind my linking his name with two such supreme collies, in this word of necrology. Cooper—Treve—Wolf!
(There’s lots of room in this old earth of ours for the digging of graves, isn’t there?)
Home we came with our champion—Champion Sunnybank Sigurd—who displayed so little championship dignity that, an hour after our return to the Place, he lifted my brand new Panama hat daintily from the hall-table, carried it forth from the house with a loving tenderness; laid it to rest in a patch of lakeside mud; and then rolled on it.
I was too elated over our triumph to scold him for the costly sacrilege. I am glad now that I didn’t. For a scolding or a single harsh word ever reduced him to utter heartbreak.