Link Ferris was a fighter. Not by nature, nor by choice, but to keep alive.
His battleground covered an area of forty acres--broken, scrubby, uncertain side-hill acres, at that. In brief, a worked-out farm among the mountain slopes of the North Jersey hinterland; six miles from the nearest railroad.
The farm was Ferris's, by right of sole heritage from his father, a Civil-War veteran, who had taken up the wilderness land in 1865and who, for thirty years thereafter, had wrought to make it pay.
At best the elder Ferris had wrenched only a meager living from the light and rock-infested soil.
The first-growth timber on the west woodlot for some time had staved off the need of a mortgage; its veteran oaks and hickories grimly giving up their lives, in hundreds, to keep the wolf from the door of their owner. When the last of the salable timber was gone Old Man Ferris tried his hand at truck farming, and sold his wares from a wagon to the denizens of Craigswold, the new colony of rich folk, four miles to northward.
But to raise such vegetables and fruits as would tempt the eyes and the purses of Craigswold people it was necessary to have more than mere zeal and industry. Sour ground will not readily yield sweet abundance, be the toiler ever so industrious. Moreover, there was large and growing competition, in the form of other huckster routes.
And presently the old veteran wearied of the eternal uphill struggle. He mortgaged the farm, dying soon afterward. And Link, his son, was left to carry on the thankless task.
Link Ferris was as much a part of the Ferris farm as was the giant bowlder in the south mowing. He had been born in the paintless shack which his father had built with his own rheumatic hands. He had worked for more than a quarter century, in and out of the hill fields and the ramshackle barns. From babyhood he had toiled there. Scant had been the chances for schooling, and more scant had been the opportunities for outside influence.
Wherefore, Link had grown to a wirily weedy and slouching manhood, almost as ignorant of the world beyond his mountain walls as were any of his own "critters." His life was bounded by fruitless labor, varied only by such sleep and food as might fit him to labor the harder.
He ate and slept, that he might be able to work. And he worked, that he might be able to eat and sleep. Beyond that, his life was as barren as a rainy sea.
If he dreamed of other and wider things, the workaday grind speedily set such dreams to rout. When the gnawing of lonely unrest was too acute for bovine endurance--and when he could spare the time or the money--he was wont to go to the mile-off hamlet of Hampton and there get as nearly drunk as his funds would permit.
It was his only surcease. And as a rule, it was a poor one. For seldom did he have enough ready money to buy wholesale forgetfulness. More often he was able to purchase only enough hard cider or fuseloil whisky to make him dull and vaguely miserable.
It was on his way home one Saturday night from such a rudimentary debauch at Hampton that his Adventure had its small beginning.
For a half mile or so of Link's homeward pilgrimage--before he turned off into the grass-grown, rutted hill trail which led to his farm--his way led along a spur of the state road which linked New York City with the Ramapo hill country.
And here, as Link swung glumly along through the springtide dusk, his ears were assailed by a sound that was something between a sigh and a sob--a sound as of one who tries valiantly to stifle a whimper of sharp pain.
Ferris halted, uncertain, at the road edge; and peered about him.
Again he heard the sound. And this time he located it in the long grass of the wayside ditch. The grass was stirring spasmodically, too, as with the half-restrained writhings of something lying close to earth there.
Link struck a match. Shielding the flame, he pushed the tangle of grass to one side with his foot.
There, exposed in the narrow space thus cleared and by the narrower radius of match flare, crouched a dog.
The brute was huddled in a crumpled heap, with one foreleg stuck awkwardly out in front of him at an impossible angle. His tawny mass of coat was mired and oil streaked. In his deep-set brown eyes burned the fires of agony.
Yet, as he looked up at the man who bent above him, the dog's gaze was neither fierce nor cringing. It held rather such an expression as, Dumas tells us, the wounded Athos turned to D'Artagnan--the aspect of one in sore need of aid, and too proud to plead for it.
Link Ferris had never heard of Dumas, nor of the immortal musketeer. None the less, he could read that look. And it appealed to him, as no howl of anguish could have appealed. He knelt beside the suffering dog and fell to examining his hurts.
The dog was a collie--beautiful of head, sweepingly graceful of line, powerful and heavy coated. The mud on his expanse of snowy chest frill and the grease on his dark brown back were easy to account for, even to Link Ferris's none-too-keen imagination.
Link, in his own occasional trudges along this bit of state road, had often seen costly dogs in the tonneaus of passing cars. He had seen several of them scramble frantically to maintain their footing on the slippery seats of such cars; when chauffeurs took the sharp curve, just ahead, at too high speed. He had even seen one Airedale flung bodily from a car's rear seat at that curve, and out into the roadway; where a close-following motor had run over and killed it.
This collie, doubtless, had had such a fall; and, unseen by the front seat's occupants, had struck ground with terrific force--a force that had sent him whirling through mud and grease into the ditch, with a broken front leg.
How long the beast had lain there Link had no way of guessing.
But the dog was in mortal agony. And the kindest thing to do was to put him out of his pain.
Ferris groped around through the gloom until, in the ditch, his fingers closed over a ten-pound stone. One smashing blow on the head, with this missile, would bring a swift and merciful end to the sufferer's troubles.
