“Now which way was it?” he queried. “From over there, if I’m not mistaken.” And he set off [Pg 239]farther into the wood. “It’s an animal in a trap,” he said, “a beastly trap. Curse the things!”
Many a time in his wanderings Peter had put a dumb creature out of its misery. And if you have ever heard a hare cry, and seen its soft eyes gazing at you till you’d vow it was an imprisoned human soul looking through its windows, you’d know the fury of rage against some of mankind that had possessed Peter more than once, and which possessed him now. He peered right and left among the undergrowth, his eyes and ears alert, yet seeing nothing, hearing nothing.
He stopped and whistled softly.
“Where are you, you poor little atom of life?” he cried.
And then, not a yard ahead of him, from a great bramble clump, came the tiniest, most pitiful cry, but with a little note of hope in it.
“Oh!” cried Peter, and the next instant he was on his knees, the steel jaws were pulled asunder, and a baby mongrel of a puppy was dragging itself feebly towards him, trying to lick his hand. “Oh, you poor little beggar!” said Peter, as he wrenched the trap from the ground and flung it into the middle of the bramble-bush. Then he lifted the [Pg 240]small bundle of rough, dirty white hair tenderly and carried it back to the beech-tree.
There he sat himself down and began to examine the wounded leg; it was terribly torn but mercifully not broken. Peter washed the wound with some water from his flask, and bound the leg with some strips he tore from his handkerchief, the small creature ecstatically licking his hand the while.
“You know,” remonstrated Peter, “a thing of your size should not be wandering about alone. It’s not correct. You might have known you’d get into difficulties.”
The puppy paused in its licking to look into his face with brown speaking eyes. They might have told Peter a good deal—a sad little story of being hunted, hounded from place to place on account of his ugly little body, of a last frantic, terrified rush from a distant village, of presently trotting along a dusty road, of a turning into a wood which smelled pleasantly of rabbits and other things dear to a doggy nose, and of a final excruciating imprisonment, which had lasted through Heaven knows how long of torment, till a big human being in the shape of Peter had come to his [Pg 241]rescue. All this those eyes might have said. At all events, Peter read a bit of the story.
“I suppose, you poor atom,” he said whimsically, “that no one wanted you, so you set out to forage on your own account. Well, we’re both in the same boat. Shall we pull it together?”