Bruce

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Bruce by Albert Payson Terhune

TO MY TEN BEST FRIENDS:

Who are far wiser in their way and far better in every way, than
I; and yet who have not the wisdom to know it

Who do not merely think I am perfect, but who are calmly and
permanently convinced of my perfection;--and this in spite of
fifty disillusions a day

Who are frantically happy at my coming and bitterly woebegone in
my absence

Who never bore me and never are bored by me

Who never talk about themselves and who always listen with
rapturous interest to anything I may say

Who, having no conventional standards, have no respectability;
and who, having no conventional consciences, have no sins

Who teach me finer lessons in loyalty, in patience, in true
courtesy, in unselfishness, in divine forgiveness, in pluck and
in abiding good spirits than do all the books I have ever read
and all the other models I have studied

Who have not deigned to waste time and eyesight in reading a word
of mine and who will not bother to read this verbose tribute to
themselves

In short, to the most gloriously satisfactory chums who ever
appealed to human vanity and to human desire for companionship

TO OUR TEN SUNNYBANK COLLIES MY STORY IS GRATEFULLY AND
AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED

BRUCE by Albert Payson Terhune

CHAPTER I. The Coming Of Bruce

She was beautiful. And she had a heart and a soul--which were a
curse. For without such a heart and soul, she might have found
the tough life-battle less bitterly hard to fight.

But the world does queer things--damnable things--to hearts that
are so tenderly all-loving and to souls that are so trustfully
and forgivingly friendly as hers.

Her "pedigree name" was Rothsay Lass. She was a collie--daintily
fragile of build, sensitive of nostril, furrily tawny of coat.
Her ancestry was as flawless as any in Burke's Peerage.

If God had sent her into the world with a pair of tulip ears and
with a shade less width of brain-space she might have been
cherished and coddled as a potential bench-show winner, and in
time might even have won immortality by the title of "CHAMPION
Rothsay Lass."

But her ears pricked rebelliously upward, like those of her
earliest ancestors, the wolves. Nor could manipulation lure their
stiff cartilages into drooping as bench-show fashion demands. The
average show-collie's ears have a tendency to prick. By weights
and plasters, and often by torture, this tendency is overcome.
But never when the cartilage is as unyielding as was Lass's.

Her graceful head harked back in shape to the days when collies
had to do much independent thinking, as sheep-guards, and when
they needed more brainroom than is afforded by the borzoi skull
sought after by modern bench-show experts.

Wherefore, Lass had no hope whatever of winning laurels in the
show-ring or of attracting a high price from some rich fancier.
She was tabulated, from babyhood, as a "second"--in other words,
as a faulty specimen in a litter that should have been faultless.

These "seconds" are as good to look at, from a layman's view, as
is any international champion. And their offspring are sometimes
as perfect as are those of the finest specimens. But, lacking the
arbitrary "points" demanded by show-judges, the "seconds" are
condemned to obscurity, and to sell as pets.

If Lass had been a male dog, her beauty and sense and lovableness
would have found a ready purchaser for her. For nine pet collies
out of ten are "seconds"; and splendid pets they make for the
most part.

But Lass, at the very start, had committed the unforgivable sin
of being born a female. Therefore, no pet-seeker wanted to buy
her. Even when she was offered for sale at half the sum asked for
her less handsome brothers, no one wanted her.

A mare--or the female of nearly any species except the canine--
brings as high and as ready a price as does the male. But never
the female dog. Except for breeding, she is not wanted.

This prejudice had its start in Crusader days, some thousand
years ago. Up to that time, all through the civilized world, a
female dog had been more popular as a pet than a male. The
Mohammedans (to whom, by creed, all dogs are unclean) gave their
European foes the first hint that a female dog was the lowest
thing on earth.

The Saracens despised her, as the potential mother of future
dogs. And they loathed her accordingly. Back to Europe came the
Crusaders, bearing only three lasting memorials of their contact
with the Moslems. One of the three was a sneering contempt for
all female dogs.

There is no other pet as loving, as quick of wit, as loyal, as
staunchly brave and as companionable as the female collie. She
has all the male's best traits and none of his worst. She has
more in common, too, with the highest type of woman than has any
other animal alive. (This, with all due respect to womanhood.)

Prejudice has robbed countless dog-lovers of the joy of owning
such a pal. In England the female pet dog has at last begun to
come into her own. Here she has not. The loss is ours.

And so back to Lass.

When would-be purchasers were conducted to the puppy-run at the
Rothsay kennels, Lass and her six brethren and sisters were wont
to come galloping to the gate to welcome the strangers. For the
pups were only three months old--an age when every event is
thrillingly interesting, and everybody is a friend. Three times
out of five, the buyer's eye would single Lass from the
rollicking and fluffy mass of puppyhood.

She was so pretty, so wistfully appealing, so free from fear (and
from bumptiousness as well) and carried herself so daintily, that
one's heart warmed to her. The visitor would point her out. The
kennel-man would reply, flatteringly--

"Yes, she sure is one fine pup!"

The purchaser never waited to hear the end of the sentence,
before turning to some other puppy. The pronoun, "she," had
killed forever his dawning fancy for the little beauty.

The four males of the litter were soon sold; for there is a brisk
and a steady market for good collie pups. One of the two other
females died. Lass's remaining sister began to "shape up" with
show-possibilities, and was bought by the owner of another
kennel. Thus, by the time she was five months old, Lass was left
alone in the puppy-run.

She mourned her playmates. It was cold, at night, with no other
cuddly little fur-ball to snuggle down to. It was stupid, with no
one to help her work off her five-months spirits in a romp. And
Lass missed the dozens of visitors that of old had come to the
run.

The kennel-men felt not the slightest interest in her. Lass meant
nothing to them, except the work of feeding her and of keeping an
extra run in order. She was a liability, a nuisance.

Lass used to watch with pitiful eagerness for the attendants'
duty-visits to the run. She would gallop joyously up to them,
begging for a word or a caress, trying to tempt them into a romp,
bringing them peaceofferings in the shape of treasured bones she
had buried for her own future use. But all this gained her
nothing.

A careless word at best--a grunt or a shove at worst were her
only rewards. For the most part, the men with the feed-trough or
the water-pail ignored her bounding and wrigglingly eager welcome
as completely as though she were a part of the kennel
furnishings. Her short daily "exercise scamper" in the open was
her nearest approach to a good time.

Then came a day when again a visitor stopped in front of Lass's
run. He was not much of a visitor, being a pallid and rather
shabbily dressed lad of twelve, with a brand-new chain and collar
in his hand.

"You see," he was confiding to the bored kennel-man who had been
detailed by the foreman to take him around the kennels, "when I
got the check from Uncle Dick this morning, I made up my mind,
first thing, to buy a dog with it, even if it took every cent.
But then I got to thinking I'd need something to fasten him with,
so he wouldn't run away before he learned to like me and want to
stay with me. So when I got the check cashed at the store, I got
this collar and chain."

"Are you a friend of the boss?" asked the kennel-man.

"The boss?" echoed the boy. "You mean the man who owns this
place? No, sir. But when I've walked past, on the road, I've seen
his 'Collies for Sale' sign, lots of times. Once I saw some of
them being exercised. They were the wonderfulest dogs I ever saw.
So the minute I got the money for the check, I came here. I told
the man in the front yard I wanted to buy a dog. He's the one who
turned me over to you. I wish--OH!" he broke off in rapture,
coming to a halt in front of Lass's run. "Look! Isn't he a
dandy?"

Lass had trotted hospitably forward to greet the guest. Now she
was standing on her hind legs, her front paws alternately
supporting her fragile weight on the wire of the fence and waving
welcomingly toward the boy. Unknowingly, she was bidding for a
master. And her wistful friendliness struck a note of response in
the little fellow's heart. For he, too, was lonesome, much of the
time, as is the fate of a sickly only child in an overbusy home.
And he had the true craving of the lonely for dog comradeship.

He thrust his none-too-clean hand through the wire mesh and
patted the puppy's silky head. Lass wiggled ecstatically under
the unfamiliar caress. All at once, in the boy's eyes, she became
quite the most wonderful animal and the very most desirable pet
on earth.

"He's great!" sighed the youngster in admiration; adding na�vely:
"Is he Champion Rothsay Chief--the one whose picture was in The
Bulletin last Sunday?"

The kennel-man laughed noisily. Then he checked his mirth, for
professional reasons, as he remembered the nature of the boy's
quest and foresaw a bare possibility of getting rid of the
unwelcome Lass.

"Nope," he said. "This isn't Chief. If it was, I guess your Uncle
Dick's check would have to have four figures in it before you
could make a deal. But this is one of Chief's daughters. This is
Rothsay Lass. A grand little girl, ain't she? Say,"--in a
confidential whisper,--"since you've took a fancy for her, maybe
I could coax the old man into lettin' you have her at an easy
price. He was plannin' to sell her for a hundred or so. But he
goes pretty much by what I say. He might let her go for--How much
of a check did you say your uncle sent you?"

"Twelve dollars," answered the boy,--"one for each year. Because
I'm named for him. It's my birthday, you know. But--but a dollar
of it went for the chain and the collar. How much do you suppose
the gentleman would want for Rothsay Lass?"

The kennel-man considered for a moment. Then he went back to the
house, leaving the lad alone at the gate of the run. Eleven
dollars, for a high-pedigreed collie pup, was a joke price. But
no one else wanted Lass, and her feed was costing more every day.
According to Rothsay standards, the list of brood-females was
already complete. Even as a gift, the kennels would be making
money by getting rid of the prick-eared "second." Wherefore he
went to consult with the foreman.

Left alone with Lass, the boy opened the gate and went into the
run. A little to his surprise Lass neither shrank from him nor
attacked him. She danced about his legs in delight, varying this
by jumping up and trying to lick his excited face. Then she
thrust her cold nose into the cup of his hand as a plea to be
petted.

When the kennel-man came back, the boy was sitting on the dusty
ground of the run, and Lass was curled up rapturously in his lap,
learning how to shake hands at his order.

"You can have her, the boss says," vouchsafed the kennel-man.
"Where's the eleven dollars?"

By this graceless speech Dick Hazen received the key to the
Seventh Paradise, and a life-membership in the world-wide Order
of Dog-Lovers.

The homeward walk, for Lass and her new master, was no walk at
all, but a form of spiritual levitation. The half-mile pilgrimage
consumed a full hour of time. Not that Lass hung back or rebelled
at her first taste of collar and chain! These petty annoyances
went unfelt in the wild joy of a real walk, and in the infinitely
deeper happiness of knowing her friendship-famine was appeased at
last.

The walk was long for various reasons--partly because, in her
frisking gyrations, Lass was forever tangling the new chain
around Dick's thin ankles; partly because he stopped, every block
or so, to pat her or to give her further lessons in the art of
shaking hands. Also there were admiring boy-acquaintances along
the way, to whom the wonderful pet must be exhibited.

At last Dick turned in at the gate of a cheap bungalow on a cheap
street--a bungalow with a discouraged geranium plot in its
pocket-handkerchief front yard, and with a double line of drying
clothes in the no larger space behind the house.

As Dick and his chum rounded the house, a woman emerged from
between the two lines of flapping sheets, whose hanging she had
been superintending. She stopped at sight of her son and the dog.

"Oh!" she commented with no enthusiasm at all. "Well, you did it,
hey? I was hoping you'd have better sense, and spend your check
on a nice new suit or something. He's kind of pretty, though,"
she went on, the puppy's friendliness and beauty wringing the
word of grudging praise from her. "What kind of a dog is he? And
you're sure he isn't savage, aren't you?"

"Collie," answered Dick proudly. "Pedigreed collie! You bet she
isn't savage, either. Why, she's an angel. She minds me already.
See--shake hands, Lass!" "Lass!" ejaculated Mrs. Hazen. "'SHE!'
Dick, you don't mean to tell me you've gone and bought yourself
a--a FEMALE dog?"

The woman spoke in the tone of horrified contempt that might well
have been hers had she found a rattlesnake and a brace of toads
in her son's pocket. And she lowered her voice, as is the manner
of her kind when forced to speak of the unspeakable. She moved
back from the puppy's politely out-thrust forepaw as from the
passing of a garbage cart.

"A female dog!" she reiterated. "Well, of all the chuckle-heads!
A nasty FEMALE dog, with your birthday money!"

"She's not one bit nasty!" flamed Dick, burying the grubby
fingers of his right hand protectively in the fluffy mass of the
puppy's half-grown ruff. "She's the dandiest dog ever! She--"

"Don't talk back to me!" snapped Mrs. Hazen. "Here! Turn right
around and take her to the cheats who sold her to you. Tell them
to keep her and give you the good money you paid for her. Take
her out of my yard this minute! Quick!"

A hot mist of tears sprang into the boy's eyes. Lass, with the
queer intuition that tells a female collie when her master is
unhappy, whined softly and licked his clenched hand.

"I--aw, PLEASE, Ma!" he begged chokingly. "PLEASE! It's--it's my
birthday, and everything. Please let me keep her. I--I love her
better than 'most anything there is. Can't I please keep her?
Please!"

"You heard what I said," returned his mother curtly.

The washerwoman, who one day a week lightened Mrs. Hazen's
household labors, waddled into view from behind the billows of
wind-swirled clothes. She was an excellent person, and was built
for endurance rather than for speed. At sight of Lass she paused
in real interest.

"My!" she exclaimed with flattering approval. "So you got your
dog, did you? You didn't waste no time. And he's sure a handsome
little critter. Whatcher goin' to call him?"

"It's not a him, Irene," contradicted Mrs. Hazen, with another
modest lowering of her strong voice. "It's a HER. And I'm sending
Dick back with her, to where she came from. I've got my opinion
of people who will take advantage of a child's ignorance, by
palming off a horrid female dog on him, too. Take her away, Dick.
I won't have her here another minute. You hear me?"

"Please, Ma!" stammered Dick, battling with his desire to cry.
"Aw, PLEASE! I--I--"

"Your ma's right, Dick," chimed in the washerwoman, her first
interested glance at the puppy changing to one of refined and
lofty scorn. "Take her back. You don't want any female dogs
around. No nice folks do."

"Why not?" demanded the boy in sudden hopeless anger as he
pressed lovingly the nose Lass thrust so comfortingly into his
hand. "WHY don't we want a female dog around? Folks have female
cats around them, and female women. Why isn't a female dog--"

"That will do, Dick!" broke in his shocked mother. "Take her
away."

"I won't," said the boy, speaking very slowly, and with no
excitement at all.

A slap on the side of his head, from his mother's punitive palm,
made him stagger a little. Her hand was upraised for a second
installment of rebellion-quelling--when a slender little body
flashed through the air and landed heavily against her chest. A
set of white puppy-teeth all but grazed her wrathful red face.

Lass, who never before had known the impulse to attack, had
jumped to the rescue of the beaten youngster whom she had adopted
as her god. The woman screeched in terror. Dick flung an arm
about the furry whirlwind that was seeking to avenge his
punishment, and pulled the dog back to his side.

Mrs. Hazen's shriek, and the obbligato accompaniment of the
washerwoman, made an approaching man quicken his steps as he
strolled around the side of the house. The newcomer was Dick's
father, superintendent of the local bottling works. On his way
home to lunch, he walked in on a scene of hysteria.

"Kill her, sir!" bawled the washerwoman, at sight of him. "Kill
her! She's a mad dog. She just tried to kill Miz' Hazen!"

"She didn't do anything of the kind!" wailed Dick. "She was
pertecting me. Ma hit me; and Lass--"

"Ed!" tearily proclaimed Mrs. Hazen, "if you don't send for a
policeman to shoot that filthy beast, I'll--"

"Hold on!" interrupted the man, at a loss to catch the drift of
these appeals, by reason of their all being spoken in a
succession so rapid as to make a single blurred sentence. "Hold
on! What's wrong? And where did the pup come from? He's a looker,
all right a cute little cuss. What's the row?"

With the plangently useless iterations of a Greek chorus, the
tale was flung at him, piecemeal and in chunks, and in a triple
key. When presently he understood, Hazen looked down for a moment
at the puppy--which was making sundry advances of a shy but
friendly nature toward him. Then he looked at the boy, and noted
Dick's hero-effort to choke back the onrush of babyish sobs. And
then, with a roughly tolerant gesture, he silenced the two
raucous women, who were beginning the tale over again for the
third time.

"I see," he said. "I see. I see how it is. Needn't din it at me
any more, folks. And I see Dicky's side of it, too. Yes, and I
see the pup's side of it. I know a lot about dogs. That pup isn't
vicious. She knows she belongs to Dick. You lammed into him, and
she took up and defended him. That's all there is to the 'mad-
dog' part of it."

"But Ed--" sputtered his wife.

"Now, you let ME do the talking, Sade!" he insisted, half-
grinning, yet more than half grimly. "I'm the boss here. If I'm
not, then it's safe to listen to me till the boss gets here. And
we're goin' to do whatever I say we are--without any back-talk or
sulks, either. It's this way: Your brother gave the boy a
birthday check. We promised he could spend it any way he had a
mind to. He said he wanted a dog, didn't he? And I said, 'Go to
it!' didn't I? Well, he got the dog. Just because it happens to
be a she, that's no reason why he oughtn't to be allowed to keep
it. And he can. That goes."

"Oh, Dad!" squealed Dick in grateful heroworship. "You're a
brick! I'm not ever going to forget this, so long as I live. Say,
watch her shake hands, Dad! I've taught her, already, to--"

"Ed Hazen!" loudly protested his wife. "Of all the softies! You
haven't backbone enough for a prune. And if my orders to my own
son are going to be--"

"That'll be all, Sade!" interposed the man stiffly--adding: "By
the way, I got a queer piece of news to tell you. Come into the
kitchen a minute."

Grumbling, rebellious, scowling,--yet unable to resist the lure
of a "queer piece of news," Mrs. Hazen followed her husband
indoors, leaving Dick and his pet to gambol deliriously around
the clothes-festooned yard in celebration of their victory.

"Listen here, old girl!" began Hazen the moment the kitchen door
was shut behind them. "Use some sense, can't you? I gave you the
wink, and you wouldn't catch on. So I had to make the grandstand
play. I'm no more stuck on having a measly she-dog around here
than you are. And we're not going to have her, either. But--"

"Then why did you say you were going to? Why did you make a fool
of me before Irene and everything?" she demanded, wrathful yet
bewildered.

"It's the boy's birthday, isn't it?" urged Hazen. "And I'd
promised him, hadn't I? And, last time he had one of those
'turns,' didn't Doc Colfax say we mustn't let him fret and worry
any more'n we could help? Well, if he had to take that dog back
to-day, it'd have broke his heart. He'd have felt like we were
his enemies, and he'd never have felt the same to us again. And
it might have hurt his health too--the shock and all. So--"

"But I tell you," she persisted, "I won't have a dirty little
female--"

"We aren't going to," he assured her. "Keep your hair on, till
I've finished. Tonight, after Dick's asleep, I'm going to get rid
of her. He'll wake up in the morning and find she's gone; and the
door'll be open. He'll think she's run away. He'll go looking for
her, and he'll keep on hoping to find her. So that'll ease the
shock, you see, by letting him down bit by bit, instead of
snatching his pet away from him violent-like. And he won't hold
it up against US, either, as he would the other way. I can offer
a reward for her, too."

There was a long and thought-crammed pause. The woman plunged
deep into the silences as her fat brain wrought over the
suggestion. Then--

"Maybe you HAVE got just a few grains of sense, after all, Ed,"
grudgingly vouchsafed Mrs. Hazen. "It isn't a bad idea. Only
he'll grieve a lot for her."

"He'll be hoping, though," said her husband. "He'll be hoping all
the while. That always takes the razor-edge off of grieving.
Leave it to me."

That was the happiest day Dick Hazen had ever known. And it was
the first actively happy day in all Lass's five months of life.

Boy and dog spent hours in a ramble through the woods. They began
Lass's education--which was planned to include more intricate
tricks than a performing elephant and a troupe of circus dogs
could hope to learn in a lifetime. They became sworn chums. Dick
talked to Lass as if she were human. She amazed the enraptured
boy by her cleverness and spirits. His initiation to the dog-
masters' guild was joyous and complete.

It was a tired and ravenous pair of friends who scampered home at
dinner-time that evening. The pallor was gone from Dick's face.
His cheeks were glowing, and his eyes shone. He ate greedily. His
parents looked covertly at each other. And the self-complacency
lines around Hazen's mouth blurred.

Boy and dog went to bed early, being blissfully sleepy and full
of food--also because another and longer woodland ramble was
scheduled for the morrow.

Timidly Dick asked leave to have Lass sleep on the foot of his
cot-bed. After a second telegraphing of glances, his parents
consented. Half an hour later the playmates were sound asleep,
the puppy snuggling deep in the hollow of her master's arm, her
furry head across his thin chest.

It was in this pose that Hazen found them when, late in the
evening, he tiptoed into Dick's cubby-hole room. He gazed down at
the slumberous pair for a space, while he fought and conquered an
impulse toward fair play. Then he stooped to pick up the dog.

Lass, waking at the slight creak of a floorboard, lifted her
head. At sight of the figure leaning above her adored master, the
lip curled back from her white teeth. Far down in her throat a
growl was born. Then she recognized the intruder as the man who
had petted her and fed her that evening. The growl died in her
throat, giving place to a welcoming thump or two of her bushy
tail. Dick stirred uneasily.

Patting the puppy lightly on her upraised head, Hazen picked up
Lass in his arms and tiptoed out of the room with her. Mistaking
this move for a form of caress, she tried to lick his face. The
man winced.

Downstairs and out into the street Hazen bore his trustful little
burden, halting only to put on his hat, and for a whispered word
with his wife. For nearly a mile he carried the dog. Lass greatly
enjoyed the ride. She was pleasantly tired, and it was nice to be
carried thus, by some one who was so considerate as to save her
the bother of walking.

At the edge of the town, Hazen set her on the ground and at once
began to walk rapidly away in the direction of home. He had gone
perhaps fifty yards when Lass was gamboling merrily around his
feet. A kick sent the dismayed and agonized puppy flying through
the air like a whimpering catapult, and landed her against a bank
with every atom of breath knocked out of her. Before she had
fairly struck ground,--before she could look about her,--Hazen
had doubled around a corner and had vanished.

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