“Don’t be a fool!” the boss cried sharply.
Peck faced him, his lips twitching.
“I may do more’n shoot a bitch, Steve,” he said, and his voice was calm now.
“You don’t mean that, Peck.” The range boss continued to advance, his eyes on the troubled eyes of the blacksmith. “Shee-la and little Oscar have always been friends. Didn’t she pull him out of the creek only last week? She couldn’t have smashed his arm on purpose. You can’t blame a dog for an accident.”
The blacksmith cursed Shiela to the eightieth generation; but O’Donnell smiled and tapped the barrel of the gun with his forefinger. There would be no shooting of man or dog now, he knew.
“Put it away, Peck. We’ll forget all about it. I’ll ride over to Deadeye and bring the doctor myself.”
The blacksmith wavered and obeyed.
Little Oscar was soon able to toddle about, with his arm in a cast and a sling. But Peck’s dislike for the hound grew to hate. In the short winter days and long winter nights he watched and brooded, waiting for an opportunity to make her suffer. His hostility to the soft-eyed, affectionate Shiela took the form of an intense nervous sensibility to her every movement--one sees precisely the same symptoms in persons who are unhappily cooped up for any length of time. Soon the bigness of the animal grated on his nerves, so that whatever she did excited in him childish spleen. Even when Shiela ate, Peck could not look at her magnificent satisfaction without falling into a paroxysm of loathing.
Once he spread pieces of meat cunningly about the saddle-shed where she was wont to loll while the child slept in the afternoons. Shiela espied and swallowed these tidbits with much relish, and stalked away to get a drink, feeling unaccountably thirsty. There was no water in the trough; and that saved her life. Soon a tremor came upon the wolfhound, so that she swayed uncertainly, her nose close to the ground, froth slathering her muzzle.
At this moment Oscar rocketed from the bunkhouse at his usual ungainly gallop. The boy knew exactly what to do. Had he not endured agony, too? There was only one sure remedy for belly-pains, and it stood on a shelf in the kitchen--he never passed the shelf without a certain creeping of the flesh. How he forced castor oil upon the dog is one of those modern miracles that are wrought for babes and the inebriated. At any rate, with only one arm free, he administered a glorious dose, and, feeling full of pity for the tortures of which she mumbled so weakly, he followed it with generous hunks of greasy bacon purloined from the big brown crockery jar in the pantry. Shiela became violently ill and Oscar feared for her life.