“You got ter begin on the pup. It ain’t her fault; it’s yours. She’s full up o’ the right stuff, but she got no show to larn! Dawgs is all different, good an’ bad—just like men: some larns quick; some’ll never larn. But thar ain’t any too plucky!”
He tossed a chip of green wood into the heart of the fire and watched it spurtle and smoke, and after quite a long pause, added:
“Thar’s times when a dawg’s got to see it through an’ be killed. It’s his dooty—same as a man’s. I seen it done!”
The last words were added with a narrowing of his eyes and a curious softening of voice—as of personal affection or regret. Others noticed it too; and in reply to a question as to how it had happened Rocky explained in a few words that a wounded buffalo had waylaid and tossed the man over its back, and as it turned again to gore him the dog rushed in between, fighting it off for a time and eventually fastening on to the nose when the buffalo still pushed on. The check enabled the man to reach his gun and shoot the buffalo; but the dog was trampled to death.
“Were you...?” some one began—and then at the look in Rocky’s face, hesitated. Rocky, staring into the fire, answered:
“It was my dawg!”
Long after the other men were asleep I lay in my blankets watching the tricks of light and shadow played by the fire, as fitfully it flamed or died away. It showed the long prostrate figures of the others as they slept full stretch on their backs, wrapped in dark blankets; the waggons, touched with unwonted colours by the flames, and softened to ghostly shadows when they died; the oxen, sleeping contentedly at their yokes; Rocky’s two donkeys, black and grey, tethered under a thorn-tree—now and then a long ear moving slowly to some distant sound and dropping back again satisfied. I could not sleep; but Rocky was sleeping like a babe. He, gaunt and spare—6 foot 2 he must have stood—weather-beaten and old, with the long solitary trip before him and sixty odd years of life behind, he slept when he laid his head down, and was wide awake and rested when he raised it. He, who had been through it all, slept; but I, who had only listened, was haunted, bewitched, possessed, by racing thoughts; and all on account of four words, and the way he said them, “It was my dawg.”
It was still dark, with a faint promise of saffron in the East, when I felt a hand on my shoulder and heard Rocky’s voice saying, “Comin’ along, Sonny?”