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Page 21
"Pah!" he sniffed. "I--"
She hurried on
"If humanity can't be helped without cutting live dogs and
kittens to shreds, in slow agony--then so much the worse for
humanity! If you vivisectors would be content to practice on one
another--or on condemned murderers,--instead of on friendly and
innocent dogs, there'd be no complaint from any one. But leave
our pets alone. Let go of my puppy!"
By way of response the Doctor grunted in lofty contempt. At the
same time he tucked the wriggling dog under his right arm,
holding him thus momentarily safe, and pressed the self-starter
button.
There was a subdued whir. A move of Halding's foot and a release
of the brake, and the car started forward.
"Stand clear!" he ordered. "I'm going."
The jolt of the sudden start was too much for the Mistress's
balance on the running-board. Back she toppled. Only by luck did
she land on her feet instead of her head, upon the greasy
pavement of the street.
But she sprang forward again, with a little cry of indignant
dismay, and reached desperately into the moving car for Bruce,
calling him eagerly by name.
Dr. Halding was steering with his left hand, while his viselike
right arm still encircled the protesting collie. As the Mistress
ran alongside and grasped frantically for her doomed pet, he let
go of Bruce for an instant, to fend off her hand--or perhaps to
thrust her away from the peril of the fast-moving mud-guards. At
the Mistress's cry--and at the brief letup of pressure caused by
the Doctor's menacing gesture toward the unhappy woman--Bruce's
long-sleeping soul awoke. He answered the cry and the man's blow
at his deity in the immemorial fashion of all dogs whose human
gods are threatened.
There was a snarling wild-beast growl, the first that ever had
come from the clownlike puppy's throat,--and Bruce flung his
unwieldy young body straight for the vivisector's throat.
Halding, with a vicious fist-lunge, sent the pup to the floor of
the car in a crumpled heap, but not before the curving white
eyeteeth had slashed the side of the man's throat in an ugly
flesh-wound that drove its way dangerously close to the jugular.
Half stunned by the blow, and with the breath knocked out of him,
Bruce none the less gathered himself together with lightning
speed and launched his bulk once more for Halding's throat.
This time he missed his mark--for several things happened all at
once.
At the dog's first onslaught, Halding's foot had swung forward,
along with his fist, in an instinctive kick. The kick did not
reach Bruce. But it landed, full and effectively, on the
accelerator.
The powerful car responded to the touch with a bound. And it did
so at the very moment that the flash of white teeth at his throat
made Halding snatch his own left hand instinctively from the
steering-wheel, in order to guard the threatened spot.
A second later the runabout crashed at full speed into the wall
of a house on the narrow street's opposite side.
The rest was chaos.
When a crowd of idlers and a policeman at last righted the
wrecked car, two bodies were found huddled inertly amid a junk-
heap of splintered glass and shivered wood and twisted metal. The
local ambulance carried away one of these limp bodies. The
Place's car rushed the smash-up's other senseless victim to the
office of the nearest veterinary. Dr. Halding, with a shattered
shoulder-blade and a fractured nose and jaw and a mild case of
brain-concussion,--was received as a guest of honor at the
village hospital.
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