Frank of Freedom Hill

Excerpt

THE DESTINY OF DAN VI

The baggageman slid open the side door of the car. With a rattle of his chain Dan sprang to his feet. A big red Irish setter was Dan, of his breed sixth, and most superb, his colour wavy-bronze, his head erect and noble, his eyes eloquent with that upward-looking appeal of hunting dog to hunting man.

Cold, pine-laden air deluged the heated car and chilled his quivering nose and swelled his heaving chest. Beyond the baggageman he saw through the open door, as on a moving-picture screen, sunlit fields and sunlit woods whirling past. He began to bark at them eagerly, his eyes hungry, his tail beating against the taut chain an excited tattoo. The baggageman turned with a grin.

"Birds?" he said.

At the word the dog reared straight up like a maddened horse. Full-throated angry barks, interspersed with sharp, querulous yaps, filled his roaring, swaying prison. How long since he had got so much as a whiff of untainted air, or a glimpse of wild fields and woods! Out there oceans of such air filled all the space between the gliding earth and the sky. Out there miles on miles of freedom were rushing forever out of his life. He began to rage, to froth at the mouth. The baggageman closed the door.

"Hard, old scout!" The baggageman shook his head.

Resignedly the dog sank on his belly, his long body throbbing, his nose between his paws. A deep sigh puffed a little cloud of dust from the slatted floor.

Three years before he had opened his amazed puppy eyes on this man (and woman) ruled planet. An agreeable place of abode he had found it as long as he was owned by a man. The Jersey kennels of George Devant had bred him; Devant had himself overlooked his first season's training, had hunted him a few times. At Devant's untimely death, Mrs. Devant had sold the place, the kennels, the mounts. But when, followed by a group of purchasing sportsmen, the widow came to the kennel where he waited at the end of his chain, she had clasped her hands together and cried out:

"I won't sell this one!"

Lancaster, bachelor friend of the late Devant, spoke up:

"Why, I had my eyes on him."

"You won't get him," she laughed. "He'll live with me—won't you, beauty?"

"He's not a lap dog," Lancaster had reminded her.

"Don't you suppose I understand him?" she demanded.

Understand him? What did the woman know of a bird dog's soul? The most intolerable of burdens is kindness where no understanding is. To Mrs. Devant it never occurred, even remotely, that her Riverside Drive apartment was a prison. She never dreamed why it was that on their afternoon walks the dog, straining at his leash, kept his hungry eyes fastened always on the cliffs across the Hudson. When they returned, as she pulled off her wraps, she would look down at him.

"I know," she would say; "you are trying to tell me you love me!"

Courteously he would wag his tail. Futilely, out of upraised, gently brave eyes he would plead for freedom—from a woman who did not know, and could not understand.

Then Lancaster, a frequent caller at the apartment of Mrs....