THE WHITE DOGS OF ARRAN
For a long hour, on that November afternoon, my brother Ted had been standing at the gate below the ranch house, waiting and waiting, while the twilight filled the round hollow of the valley as water slowly fills a cup. At last the figure of a rider, silhouetted against the rose-colored sky, came into view along the crest of the rocky ridge. The little cow pony was loping as swiftly as the rough trail would permit, but to Ted’s impatient eyes it seemed to crawl as slowly as a fly on a window pane. Although the horseman looked like a cow puncher, at that distance, with his slouch hat and big saddle, the eager boy knew that it was the district doctor making his far rounds over the range. A swift epidemic had been sweeping over Montana, passing from one ranch to another and leaving much illness and suffering behind. Ted’s uncle and the cousin who was his own age had both been stricken two days before and it seemed that the doctor would never come.
“I’m glad you are here,” he said as the doctor’s pony, covered with foam and quivering with fatigue, passed through the open gate. “We have two patients for you.”
The man nodded.
“Fever, I suppose,” he commented, “and aching bones, and don’t know what to make of themselves because they have never been sick before? I have seen a hundred such cases in the last few days. It is bad at all the ranches, but the sheep herders, off in their cabins by themselves, are hit particularly hard.”
He slipped from the saddle and strode into the house, leaving Ted to take the tired pony around to the stables. It was very dark now and growing cold, but he felt warmed and comforted, somehow, since the doctor had come. He heard running feet behind him and felt a dog’s nose, cold and wet, thrust into his hand. It was Pedro, the giant, six months’ old wolf hound puppy, long legged and shaggy haired, the pride of Ted’s life and the best beloved of all his possessions. The big dog followed his master into the stable and sat down, blinking solemnly in the circle of lantern light, while the boy was caring for the doctor’s horse and bedding it down.
Ted’s thoughts were very busy, now with his anxieties about his uncle, now racing out over the range to wonder how those in the stricken ranch houses and lonely cabins might be faring. There was the ranch on Arran Creek—people there were numerous enough to care for each other. It might be worse at Thompson’s Crossing, and, oh how would it be with those shepherds who lived in tiny cottages here and there along the Big Basin, so far from neighbors that often for months they saw no other faces than the woolly vacant ones of their thousands of sheep.
There was one, a big, grizzled Irishman, whom Ted had seen only a few times. Nevertheless, he was one of his closest friends. They had met on a night when the boy was hunting, and he could remember still how they had lain together by the tiny camp fire, with the coyotes yelping in the distance, with the great plain stretching out into the dark, with the slender curl of smoke rising straight upward and the big stars seeming almost within reach of his hand in the thin air. The lonely Irishman had opened his heart to his new friend and had told him much of his own country, so unlike this big bare one, a dear green land where the tumbledown cottages and little fields were crowded together in such comforting comradeship.
“You could open your window of a summer night and give a call to the neighbors,” he sighed, “and you needn’t to have the voice of the giant Finn McCoul to make them hear. In this place a man could fall sick and die alone and no one be the wiser.”
His reminiscences had wandered farther and farther until he began to tell the tales and legends familiar in his own countryside, stories of the “Little People” and of Ireland in ancient times. Of them all Ted remembered most clearly the story of the white greyhounds of the King of Connemara, upon which his friend had dwelt long, showing that in spite of its being a thousand years old, it was his favorite tale.