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Page 80
His beard was evidence of a longish spell on the trail; and the weakness
that permitted of his catching his breath in a childlike sob--that was
due, perhaps, to solitude and the peculiar strain of his present
business on the trail, as well as to the great love he felt for the
hound he had thought lost to him for ever.
"How d'ye do, Devil! How d'ye do! We were just hurryin' on for your
place. Will ye take a drop o' rye? I'm boss here. That's only my
chore-boy you're slobberin' over, Mister Devil. Eh, but it's hunky down
to Coney Island, ain't it?"
These remarks came in a jerky sort of torrent from the second man, one
of whose peculiarities was that his arms above the elbow were lashed
with leather thongs to his body. There were leather hobbles about his
ankles, and on the ground near by him lay a pair of unlocked handcuffs,
carefully swathed in soft-tanned deerskin.
Sergeant Dick Vaughan's companion may possibly have accentuated the
solitude in which he traveled; such a companion could hardly have
mitigated it as a source of nervous strain, for he was mad as a March
hare. But there was nothing else harelike about him, for he was
homicidally mad, and had killed two men and half killed a third before
Sergeant Vaughan laid hands upon him. And his was not the only madness
the sergeant had had to contend with on this particular trip.
A strong and overtried man's weakness is not a thing that any one cares
to enlarge upon, but without offense it may perhaps be stated that tears
fell on the iron-gray hair of Jan's muzzle as he stood there with his
soft flews pressed hard against Dick Vaughan's thigh. It seemed he
wanted to bore right into the person of his sovereign lord; he who had
never asked for any man's caress through all the long months of
wandering, toil, and hardship that divided him from the Regina barracks.
His nose burrowed lovingly under Dick's coat with never a thought of
fear or of a trap, although, for many months now, his first instinct had
been to keep his head free, vision clear, and feet to the ground,
whatever befell.
"My old Jan! My dear old Jan!"
Dick Vaughan paid no sort of heed to the jerky maunderings of his poor
demented charge. But Jan did. Without stirring his head, Jan edged his
body away at right angles from the madman, and the hair bristled over
his shoulder-blades when the man spoke.
Jan did not know much about human ailments, perhaps, but he had seen a
husky go mad, and had narrowly escaped being bitten by the beast before
Jim Willis had shot it. He did not think it out in any way, but he was
intuitively conscious that this man was abnormal, irresponsible, unlike
other men. The homicidal devil was the force uppermost in this
particular man, and that naturally left no room for emanations of the
milk of human kindness and goodness. Jan was instantly aware of the
lack. In effect he knew this man was killing-mad.
But remarkable, nay unique, in his experience as the contact was, Jan
spared no thought for it. His hackles rose a little and he edged away
from the madman, because instinct in him enforced so much. For his mind
and his heart they were filled to overflowing; they were afloat on the
flood-tide of his consciousness of his sovereign's physical presence,
the touch of his body.
The night was far spent when Dick Vaughan proceeded to tether his
prisoner as comfortably as might be and to stretch himself in his
blankets for sleep. Jan may have slept a little that night, but his eyes
were never completely closed for more than a minute at a stretch; and
his muzzle, resting on his paws, was never more than three feet from
Dick's head. It was to be noted, too, that he chose to lie between Dick
and the madman, although the proximity of the latter was more than a
little painful to Jan.
Toward morning, when the fire was practically out, the husky bitch came
timidly nosing about Jan's neighborhood, and Jan breathed through his
nose at her in quite friendly fashion. But when she happened to place
one foot across the direct line in which the hound watched his
sovereign's face--then Jan growled, so low and softly as not to waken
Dick, and yet with a significance which the husky instantly comprehended
and acted on.
"Anywhere else you like, but not between my lord and me, for he is mine,
and I am his; not to be divided."
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