The Heart of a Dog

by Albert Payson Terhune

Evolution changed the successive generations of Mackellars not at all, except to rub smoother their Highland burr and to make them serve America as ardently as ever their forefathers had served Scotland. But not one of them lost his hereditary love for the dog of the moors.

Which brings us by degrees to Jamie Mackellar, grandson of the emigrating Angus. Jamie was twenty-eight. His tough little body was so meagrely spare that his big heart and bigger soul were almost indecently exposed. For the rest, his speech still held an occasional word or two of handed-down ancestral dialect. In moments of excitement these inherited phrases came thicker; and with them a tang of Scots accent.

Jamie lived in the cheapest suburb of Midwestburg, and in one of the suburb’s cheapest houses. But the house had a yard. And the yard harboured a glorious old collie, a rare prize winner in his day. The house in front of the yard, by the way, harboured Jamie’s Yorkshire wife and their two children, Elspeth and Donald.

Jamie divided his home time between the house and the open. So—after true Highland fashion—did the collie.

There were long rambles in the forests and the wild half-cleared land beyond the suburb; walks that meant as much to Jamie as to the dog, after the Scot had been driving a contractor’s truck six days of the week for a monthly wage of seventy-five dollars.

Now, on seventy-five dollars a month many a family lives in comfort. But the sum leaves scant margin for the less practical luxuries of life. And in a sheepless and law-abiding region a high-quality collie is a nonpractical luxury. Yet Jamie would almost as soon have thought of selling one of his thick-legged children as of accepting any of the several good offers made him for the beautiful dog which had been his chum for so many years, the dog whose prize ribbons and cups from a score of local shows made gay the trophy corner of the Mackellar kitchen-parlour.

Then, on a late afternoon,—when the grand old collie was galloping delightedly across the street to meet his home-returning master,—a delivery motor car, driven by a speed-drunk boy, whizzed around the corner on the wrong side of the way.

The big dog died as he had lived—gallantly and without a whine. Gathering himself up from the muck of the road he walked steadfastly forward to meet the fast-running Mackellar. As Jamie bent down to search the mired body for injuries, the collie licked his master’s dear hand, shivered slightly and fell limp across the man’s feet.

When the magistrate next morning heard that a mouth-foaming little Scot had sprung upon the running board of a delivery car and had hauled therefrom a youth of twice his size and had hammered the said youth into 100 per cent. eligibility for a hospital cot, he listened gravely to the other side of the story and merely fined Jamie one dollar.

The released prisoner returned with bent head and barked knuckles to a house which all at once had been left unto him desolate. For the first time in centuries a Mackellar was without a collie.