On summer vacations our Volsung sometimes went up into New Hampshire with one or both of us. He especially rejoiced in our cottage life on Twin Lake, where Sigurd renewed his youth, pursuing
"the swallows o'er the meads
With scarce a slower flight."
Here he learned to scratch up his own bed in the pine needles and to wash his stick at the edge of the lake after a game, though we never quite succeeded, on account of his masculine prejudices, in teaching him to wash his dinner-plate. There were drawbacks, however, about these summer travels with Sigurd. His first concern, on arriving at a new place, was to go the rounds of the neighborhood and knock over all the dogs. Having thus established our popularity, he proceeded to make himself at home, welcoming most affably the dog-owners who called to complain of his exploits.
One summer he was with Joy-of-Life up in Franconia, where they loved to climb the scenery, Sigurd taking immense satisfaction in his duties as guide. "Find the path, boy," she would bid, and very proudly he would run at a little distance before her, nosing out the way. It was on one of these excursions that he came upon a scattered flock of sheep and—hey presto!—was instantly transformed into a dog that we had never known. Uttering a curious "Yep, yep, yep!" unlike any sound he had ever been heard to make before, he sped away toward those astonished sheep, rounded them up and drove them, much too fast for their comfort, to the furthest limit of their sloping pasture, where Joy-of-Life found him, panting in tremendous excitement, holding the sheep, a woolly huddle, penned into an angle of the deep stone walls. The next morning he was off before daybreak and, after an arduous search, she found him again playing stern guardian to that same embarrassed flock. If only the Lady of Cedar Hill had offered him the lordship of a sheepfold instead of a cattle-barn, Sigurd would have been Njal to the end of his days. But Joy-of-Life, afraid that the ancestral Scotch conscience so suddenly awakened in him might not be to the liking of the Franconia farmers, decided on an immediate return to the Scarab.
Sigurd always detested train travel, and this time he barely escaped a tragedy. The baggage car was so full that to him could be allotted only a space the size of his body. Into that narrow cavity he was confined by walls of trunks that towered on every side. Within an hour of Boston an abrupt jolt threw the passengers forward in their seats. Beyond a few bumps and bruises no harm was done and Joy-of-Life speedily made her way forward through the disordered train, which had come to a standstill, to the baggage-car. Here she found a scene of disastrous confusion, trunks and valises pitched madly about, one baggageman groaning with a broken arm, on which a doctor was already busy, and the other bleeding from a cut across his forehead. For very shame she could not speak of a collie until, under the doctor's directions, she had washed and bound up that cut. It was her patient who mentioned Sigurd first.
"By George, your dog!" he said. "He's down under that tumble of trunks over there. Not a yelp from him. I'm afraid he hadn't a chance."
Brakemen had pushed in, by this time, and with ready sympathy undertook to clear a way to the corner where Sigurd had been imprisoned. A monster crate had fallen in such a way as to roof him over and, when this was dragged aside, there crouched Sigurd, showing no physical injury but utterly motionless, staring with blank eyes at his rescuers.
"Back broken," suggested one of the men.
But Joy-of-Life gave, though from pale lips, the glad, out-of-door trill that Sigurd knew so well. He quivered and, with one tremendous bound, cleared the intervening heap of baggage and reached her. She sat on a portmanteau, with her arms about him, till they arrived at Boston, and then led him down the platform and took him with her into a cab. All the time Sigurd was strange, remote, moving like a body without a spirit, unresponsive to all her attempts at comfort and cheer. But during the long wait for her missing trunk, Sigurd suddenly brightened up and tried to scrabble out of the window into the cab drawn up alongside. It was occupied by a plump, elderly couple, who gleefully pulled him in, and to them Sigurd at once began to tell, in eager whines and pitiful whimpers, that hardly needed Joy-of-Life's commentary, the story of his peril.