He lay on a rug before the fire. He had won this license, for opposite his name on the kennel books were more field-trials won than by any other dog in Alabama. And now he dozed and dreamed of them again, with many twitchings of feet, and cocked, quivering ears, and rigid tail, as if once more frozen to the covey in the tall sedge-grass of the old field, with the smell of frost-bitten Lespedeza, wet with dew, beneath his feet.
Travis stooped and petted the old dog. It was the one thing of his household he loved most.
“Man or dog—'tis all the same,” he mused as he watched the dreaming dog—“it is old age's privilege to dream of what has been done—it is youth's to do.”
He stretched himself in his big mahogany chair and glanced down his muscular limbs, and drew his arms together with a snap of quick strength.
Everything at The Gaffs was an open diary of the master's life. It is so in all homes—that which we gather around us, from our books to our bed-clothes, is what we are.
And so the setter on the rug meant that Richard Travis was the best wing-shot in the Tennessee Valley, and that his kennel of Gladstone setters had won more field trials than any other kennel in the South. No man has really hunted who has never shot quail in Alabama over a well-broken setter. All other hunting is butchery compared to the scientific sweetness of this sport.
There was a good-night, martial, daring crow, ringing from the Hoss-apple tree at the dining-room window. Travis smiled and called out:
“Lights waked you up, eh, Dick? You're a gay Lothario—go back to sleep.”
Richard Travis had the original stock—the Irish Greys—which his doughty old grandsire, General Jeremiah Travis, developed to championship honors, and in a memorable main with his friend, General Andrew Jackson, ten years after the New Orleans campaign, he had cleared up the Tennesseans, cock and pocket. It was a big main in which Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama were pitted against each other, and in which the Travis cocks of the Emerald Isle strain, as Old Hickory expressed it, “stood the steel like a stuck she-b'ar, fightin' for her cubs.”
General Travis had been an expert at heeling a cock; and it is said that his skill on that occasion was worth more than the blood of his Greys; for by a peculiar turn of the gaffs,—so slight as to escape the notice of any but an expert—his champion cock had struck the blow which ended the battle. With the money won, he had added four thousand acres to his estate, and afterwards called it The Gaffs.