"There it goes. An' I ain't sayin' I'm tickled at wastin' such good stuff. But--somehow I guess we've come to a showdown, Chum;you an' me. If I stick to booze, I'm li'ble to see you looking at me that queer way an' sidlin' away from me all the time; till maybe at last you'd get plumb sick of me for keeps, an' light out. An'--I'd rather have YOU than the booze, since I can't have both of you. Bein' only a dawg and never havin' tasted good red liquor, you can't know what a big bouquet I'm a-throwin' at you when I say that, neither. I--Oh, let's call it a day and go to sleep."Next morning, in the course of nature, Link Ferris worked with a splitting headache. He carried it and a bad taste in his mouth, for the best part of the day.
But it was the last drink headache which marred his labor, all that long and happy summer. His work showed the results of the change. So did the meager hill farm. So did Link's system and his pocketbook.
As he was a real, live human and not a temperance tract hero, there were times when he girded bitterly at his self-enforced abstinence. Where were times, too--when he had a touch of malaria and again when the cutworms slaughtered two rows of his early tomatoes--when he yearned unspeakably for the solace of an evening at the Hampton tavern.
He had never been a natural drinker. Like many a better man he had drunk less for what he sought to get than for what he sought to forget. And with the departure of loneliness and the new interest in his home, he felt less the need for wet conviviality and for drugging his fits of melancholy.
The memory of Chum's grieving repulsion somehow stuck in Ferris's mind. And it served as a brake, more than once, to his tavernward impulses. Two or three times, also, when Link's babyish gusts of destructive bad temper boiled to the surface at some setback or annoyance, much the same wonderingly distressed look would creep into the collie's glance--a look as of one who is revolted by a dear friend's failure to play up to form. And to his own amused surprise, Ferris found himself trying to curb these outbursts.
To the average human, a dog is only a dog. To Ferris, this collie of his was the one intimate friend of his life. Unversed in the ways of dogs, he overestimated Chum, of course, and valued his society and his good opinion far more highly than the average man would have done. Thus, perhaps, his desire to stand well in the dog's esteem had in it more that was commendable than ludicrous.
Or perhaps not.
If the strange association did much for Link, it did infinitely more for Chum. He had found a master who had no social interests in life beyond his dog, and who could and did devote all his scant leisure hours to association with that dog. Chum's sagacity and individuality blossomed under such intensive tutelage, as might that of a clever child who is the sole pupil of its teacher.
Link did not seek to make a trick dog of his pet. He taught Chum to shake hands, to lie down, to "speak" and one or two more simple accomplishments. It was by talking constantly to the collie, as to a fellow human, that he broadened the dog's intelligence. Chum grew to know and to interpret every inflection of Ferris's voice, every simple word he spoke and every gesture of his.
Apart from mere good fellowship the dog was proving of great use on the farm. Morning and night, Chum drove the sheep and the cattle to their respective pastures and then back to the barnyard at night. At the entrances to the pastures, now, Ferris had rigged up rude gates with "bar catch" fastenings--simple contrivances which closed by gravity and whose bars the dog was readily taught to shove upward with his nose.
It was thus a matter of only a few days to teach Chum to open or close the light gates. This trick has been taught to countless collies, of course, in Great Britain, and to many here. But Link did not know that. He felt like another Columbus or Edison, at his own genius in devising such a scheme; and he felt an inordinate pride in Chum for learning the simple exploit so quickly.
Of old, Link had fretted at the waste of time in taking out the sheep and cows and in going for them at night. This dual duty was now a thing of the past. Chum did the work for him, and reveled in the excitement of it. Chum also--from watching Link perform the task twice--had learned to drive the chickens out of the garden patches whenever any of them chanced to stray thither, and to scurry into the cornfield with harrowing barks of ejection when a flock of crows hovered hungrily above the newly-planted crops.
All of which was continual amusement to Chum, and a tremendous help to his owner.
Link, getting over his initial wonder at the dog's progress, began to take these accomplishments as a matter of course.
Indeed, he was sometimes perplexed at the otherwise sagacious dog's limitations of brain.
For example, Chum loved the fire on the chilly evenings such as creep over the mountain region even in midsummer. He would watch Link replenish the blaze with fresh sticks whenever it sank low.
Yet, left to himself, he would let the fire go out, and he never knew enough to pick up a stick in his mouth and lay it on the embers. This lack of reasoning powers in his pet perplexed Ferris.
Link could not understand why the same wit which sent Chum half a mile, of his own accord, in search of one missing sheep out of the entire flock, should not tell him that a fire is kept alive by the putting of wood on it.
In search of some better authority on dog intelligence, Link paid his first visit to Hampton's little public library. There, shamefacedly, he asked the boy in charge for some books about dogs. The youth looked idly for a few minutes in a crossindex file. Then he brought forth a tome called "The Double Garden,"written by someone who was evidently an Eyetalian or Polack or other foreigner, because he bore the grievously un-American name of "Maeterlinck".
"This is all I can find about dogs," explained the boy, passing the linen-jacketed little volume across the counter to Link.
