At midday he pounced on an animal like a muskrat that tried to cross the track--a tough thing to kill, a tougher to eat. At dusk he drew near a farmhouse, where a man was chopping wood. The man picked up a stick, ordered him away, then went on chopping. He made no more overtures after this, but many a farmer thought a fox had been among his chickens. Habits of civilization had given way perforce to habits of outlawry. Only as he galloped north day after day his eyes still shone with the eager light of the bird dog's craving for human companionship and love. The number of tracks that branched out from the city whose environs he skirted bewildered him for a minute; then he took the one that pointed due north. All the days he travelled, part of the nights. Sometimes at first he had wondered why he did not reach home, at last to travel always north had become a habit, and he wondered no more. But the time came when he could not keep on going as fast and as long as formerly. There were days when he found hardly anything at all to eat. The endless ties passing under him began to make him dizzy and faint. His long hair was matted; his ribs showed; his eyes grew haggard. It was a wonder the young man knew him for what he was. He had come into the freight yards of a town at nightfall, in a cold, driving rain, a bedraggled, forlorn figure, a stray dog. A passenger train had just passed him, stopped at the station ahead, then pulled out. A light glistened down wet rails into his hungry eyes and blinded him. Rows of silent dripping box cars hid the man crossing the track at the street. Frank almost ran into him. Both stopped. The man was buttoned up to his neck in an overcoat and carried a satchel. "Hello!" he said. Frank started to slink back under a box car. "Come here!" He stooped down and looked into the dog's eyes. "Where did you drop from?" he said. "You come with me! Let's talk it over." In a warm, firelit cottage room a young woman ran to meet the man--then for the first time she saw the dog. "Why, John!" she cried. "Where did you get him?" "He got me," laughed the man, "on the way home from the station. He's starving. Get him something to eat. Then I'll tell you about it." She glanced at a cradle, whose covers were being suddenly and violently agitated. "I'll answer for this old fellow," assured the man. "He's seen better days. I think I've seen him before." Out in the bright little kitchen, where they scraped together all the scraps they could find, he went on: "Of course I may be mistaken. But at a little station where I sell goods sometimes, I used to see a big red Irish setter following a tall man and a little boy. I think they lived out in the country from there. The kind of folks and the kind of dog you don't forget. If it wasn't so far--hang it, I believe it's the dog, anyhow! Well, we'll take good care of him, and next week when I go through I'll find out."