pictures of your dogs! I declare! Men would still be savages if women hadn't been around to civilize 'em!"
"Yes," I said drily, "the earth would probably be overrun with uncivilized men if there'd never been any women." But the little cold fingers were still plucking at my spine, and I didn't want her to notice it. I, a professional trainer of retrievers, was frightened because I had another one to train! "Why don't you come around once in a while? Buck's been lying on the ground with his head between his paws, moaning to himself since you left yesterday afternoon. And, if it's any satisfaction to you, he refused his dinner last night"
"Oh, poor Buck!"
"She's like that, loves to pretend that she's tougher than a baby-killer most of the time. But the minute anything suffers, or she thinks it's suffering, she melts all over the place. She scooted out the back door, threaded her way among dog crates, and stopped in front of Buck's run. He had been lying under his kennel on the ground. But the minute she came in sight he jumped out, started leaping in the air and yelling his fool head off. I stayed on the porch a minute to enjoy the sight.
I have thirty-seven dogs. Five belong to me, and Buck's one of them. He's a big, black Labrador with a sleek, shiny coat, and muscled like a lion, and is the best retriever I ever saw. I'm grooming him for the National field trials, and will win them as soon as I can correct a few minor faults. He, too, adores Sally, and when I got to the run he was pushing his nose through the wire so she would scratch it. Sally looked at me.
"Clint Roberts!" she scolded. "Let this poor dog out of that dinky little pen!"
It isn't a dinky little pen. it's twenty by twenty, but I let Buck out and made him sit. He obeyed, looking at Sally instead of me. It's she he loves best, and I guess he'd do anything in the world for her. Sally picked up a stick and threw it.
"Fetch!" she said.
Buck unleashed all the power in his mighty body, and flew after the stick as though he'd been shot from a gun. At the edge of the mud hole he paused, leaped a quarter of the way across it, struggled through the mucky slime, climbed out on the other side, and got the stick. He jumped right back into the mud, crossed it, and put the stick in Sally's hand. His coat wasn't black any more, but mud-colored.
"Fine thing," I said, "making my dog swim across the mud!"
She tickled Buck's ears. "Oh, Buck can take it. Why don't you fill that awful place in, anyway?"
"I've dumped two hundred tons of ashes and gravel into it."
The mud hole was on the place when I got it. It's a pit, I think an old quarry hole, and I don't know how deep it is because I've never been able to sound the bottom. It's fed by subterranean springs that carry a lot of gooey mud from somewhere. On top it's soupy stuff, but the mud get thicker the farther down you go. About all a man can do is push a fifteen-foot pole down into it—any deeper than that the mud's so thick you can't push.
We wandered down to the lake, and I watched Sally put Buck through his paces. He jumped in, and swimming so
