“Clever,” repeated King Harry, “she was a marvel. She once followed a trail that was thirty hours cold.”
“Whose trail was that?”
“A poor, crazy, coloured woman. She had set fire to her house, tried to kill her husband, and then ran like a fox to a swamp. Grandmother followed her from seven o’clock one evening till two the next morning, and the poor creature was found more dead than alive, and put in a hospital where she subsequently recovered.”
“I have heard that bloodhounds are very fierce in disposition, but I don’t find you so,” I said.
“Some of them used to be made so,” said King Harry, “but they are really just like other dogs. Treat them kindly, and they will treat you kindly, and a bloodhound can be trained not to lay hold of a fugitive.”
“I say, King Harry,” I remarked, “dogs are wonderful creatures. It’s a pity men don’t understand better how to utilise them.”
“What gets me most of all,” said the dog in his melancholy voice, “is the unappreciated devotion of dogs. I heard your master telling the other day of a friend of his who was in Belgium during the late war. He said that no human beings were more faithful than dogs; that the red-cross animals were simply magnificent, and even the poor house-dogs who were left in the Belgian villages, when their owners fled for their lives, were so devoted that they sat by their kennels till they dropped dead. Even when food was offered them, they turned their heads away. The poor starving brutes thought it was right for them to stay by their ruined homes, and not to take food from strangers.”
“Don’t talk about that war,” I cried, “don’t talk about that awful war—I’m trying to forget it. Come on down to the village. There’s to be a feast in Neighbourhood Hall.”
Good King Harry pricked his drooping ears, and ran along with me. This Neighbourhood Hall was one of the grandest institutions I ever heard of, but I will tell of it later on, for I want to give an account now of something King Harry did to help along the work master and Mr. Bonstone were engaged in.