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Page 11
The car was dark and cold and smelly. Lass hated it. She ran to
its door. Here she found a gleam of hope for escape and for
return to the home where every one that day had been so kind to
her. Hazen had shut the door with such vehemence that it had
rebounded. The hasp was down, and so the catch had not done its
duty. The door had slid open a few inches from the impetus of
Hazen's shove.
It was not wide enough open to let Lass jump out, but it was wide
enough for her to push her nose through. And by vigorous
thrusting, with her triangular head as a wedge, she was able to
widen the aperture, inch by inch. In less than three minutes she
had broadened it far enough for her to wriggle out of the car and
leap to the side of the track. There she stood bewildered.
A spring snow was drifting down from the sulky sky. The air was
damp and penetrating. By reason of the new snow the scent of
Hazen's departing footsteps was blotted out. Hazen himself was no
longer in sight. As Lass had made the journey from house to
tracks with her head tucked confidingly under her kidnaper's arm,
she had not noted the direction. She was lost.
A little way down the track the station lights were shining with
misty warmth through the snow. Toward these lights the puppy
trotted.
Under the station eaves, and waiting to be taken aboard the
almost-due eleven-forty express, several crates and parcels were
grouped. One crate was the scene of much the same sort of escape-
drama that Lass had just enacted.
The crate was big and comfortable, bedded down with soft sacking
and with "insets" at either side containing food and water. But
commodious as was the box, the unwonted confinement did not at
all please its occupant--a temperamental and highly bred young
collie in process of shipment from the Rothsay Kennels to a
purchaser forty miles up the line.
This collie, wearying of the delay and the loneliness and the
strange quarters, had begun to plunge from one side of the crate
to the other in an effort to break out. A carelessly nailed slat
gave away under the impact. The dog scrambled through the gap and
proceeded to gallop homeward through the snow.
Ten seconds later, Lass, drawn by the lights and by the scent of
the other dog, came to the crate. She looked in. There, made to
order for her, was a nice bed. There, too, were food and drink to
appease the ever-present appetite of a puppy. Lass writhed her
way in through the gap as easily as the former occupant had
crawled out.
After doing due justice to the broken puppy biscuits in the
inset-trough, she curled herself up for a nap.
The clangor and glare of the oncoming express awakened her. She
cowered in one corner of the crate. Just then two station-hands
began to move the express packages out to the edge of the
platform. One of them noticed the displaced board of the crate.
He drove home its loosened nails with two sharp taps from a
monkey-wrench, glanced inside to make certain the dog had not
gotten out, and presently hoisted the crate aboard the express-
car.
Two hours later the crate was unloaded at a waystation. At seven
in the morning an expressman drove two miles with it to a
country-home, a mile or so from the village where Lass had been
disembarked from the train.
An eager knot of people--the Mistress, the Master and two
gardeners--crowded expectantly around the crate as it was set
down on the lawn in front of The Place's veranda. The latch was
unfastened, and the crate's top was lifted back on its hinges.
Out stepped Lass,--tired, confused, a little frightened, but
eagerly willing to make friends with a world which she still
insisted on believing was friendly. It is hard to shake a collie
pup's inborn faith in the friendliness of mankind, but once
shaken, it is more than shaken. It is shattered beyond hope of
complete mending.
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